Why Government Censorship of US Media is Unnecessary (2 stories)

The merger of journalists and government officials
By Glenn Greenwald

In this week's New Yorker, Peter Maass -- who was in Iraq covering the war at the time -- examines the iconic, manufactured toppling of the Saddam statue in Baghdad's Firdos Square, an event the American media relentlessly exploited in April, 2003, to propagandize citizens into believing that Iraqis were gleeful over the U.S. invasion and that the war was a smashing success.  Acknowledging that the episode demonstrated that American troops had taken over the center of Baghdad, Maas nonetheless explains that "everything else the toppling was said to represent during repeated replays on television -- victory for America, the end of the war, joy throughout Iraq -- was a disservice to the truth."

Working jointly with ProPublica on this investigation, Maass describes the hidden, indispensable role the U.S. military played in that event -- which has long been known -- though he convincingly argues that the primary culprit in this propaganda effort was the Americans media.  That is who did more than anyone to wildly distort this event.  As usual, the Watchdog Press not only happily ingests and trumpets pro-government propaganda, but does so even more enthusiastically and uncritically than government spokespeople themselves.
The reason there's so little government censorship of the press in America is because it's totally unnecessary; why would the government even want to censor a media this compliant and subservient?  Recall the derision heaped upon the media even by Bush's own former Press Secretary, Scott McClellan, for being "too deferential" to administration propaganda.  As soon as an entity emerges that provides genuinely adversarial coverage of the U.S. Government -- such as WikiLeaks, whistleblowers, or isolated articles exposing its malfeasance -- the repressive measures come fast and furious.  But in general, it's no more necessary for the U.S. Government to censor the American media than it would be for Barack Obama to try to silence Robert Gibbs.

In describing the military-subservient mentality that dominated how most American establishment reporters covered the Saddam-statue incident, Maass includes these highly revealing anecdotes, including one about The New York Times' lead war correspondent, John Burns:

The media have been criticized for accepting the Bush Administration’s claims, in the run-up to the invasion, that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. The W.M.D. myth, and the media’s embrace of it, encouraged public support for war. The media also failed at Firdos Square, but in this case it was the media, rather than the government, that created the victory myth.

One of the first TV reporters to broadcast from Firdos was David Chater, a correspondent for Sky News, the British satellite channel whose feed from Baghdad was carried by Fox News. (Both channels are owned by News Corp.) Before the marines arrived, Chater had believed, as many journalists did, that his life was at risk from American shells, Iraqi thugs, and looting mobs.

"That’s an amazing sight, isn’t it?" Chater said as the tanks rolled in. "A great relief, a great sight for all the journalists here. . . . The Americans waving to us now -- fantastic, fantastic to see they’re here at last.” Moments later, outside the Palestine, Chater smiled broadly and told one marine, “Bloody good to see you.” Noticing an American flag in another marine’s hands, Chater cheerily said, "Get that flag going!"
Another correspondent, John Burns, of the Times, had similar feelings.

Representing the most prominent American publication, Burns had a particularly hard time with the security thugs who had menaced many journalists at the Palestine. His gratitude toward the marines was explicit. "They were my liberators, too," he later wrote. "They seemed like ministering angels to me."

The happy relief felt by some journalists on the ground was compounded by editors and anchors back home. Primed for triumph, they were ready to latch onto a symbol of what they believed would be a joyous finale to the war.

It's not surprising that war journalists who feel endangered would be grateful to the U.S. military for protecting them.  Indeed, that's the whole premise of the embed program:  having American journalists dependent upon U.S. forces for everything -- from their safety to their sustenance -- will render them grateful and will cause them to identify not as independent journalists but as members (and dependents) of the invading force.  However understandable that might be, seeing the invading American army as "ministering angels" and "my liberators, too" cannot but shape and distort one's "reporting" on the war.

Maass details that deliberately propagandistic pro-war "reporting" around this event infected every precinct of The Liberal Media.  As but one example, NPR's Baghdad reporter Anne Garrels expressly told her editors that they were getting the statue story wrong, but she recounted how NPR "editors requested . . . that she emphasize the celebratory angle."  The article described numerous examples of editors similarly distorting the statue-toppling coverage, as well as TV journalists gushing falsehood-based awe which -- even seven years later -- makes one cringe with embarrassment and disgust.  For instance, CNN's Bill Hemmer intoned:  "You think about seminal moments in a nation's history . . . indelible moments like the fall of the Berlin Wall, and that’s what we’re seeing right now"; Wolf Blitzer described the toppling as "the image that sums up the day and, in many ways, the war itself"; Brit Hume on Fox News said: "This transcends anything I've ever seen. . . . This speaks volumes, and with power that no words can really match."  And on and on and on.

But, though Maass doesn't say so, it was Burns' dutiful pro-U.S. agitprop in The New York Times on behalf of the war fought by America's "ministering angels" -- "his liberators, too" -- that played a major role in shaping how this story was ultimately perceived.  On April 20, Burns wrote:

In the late afternoon of Wednesday, April 9, Marine Corps tanks entered eastern Baghdad from the south and took control of the district by the river that encompasses the Palestine and Sheraton hotels. Within three hours, after attempts by Iraqi men with sledgehammers and ropes had failed, the marines brought up an M-80 recovery tank with a long boom to assist in hauling down a 30-foot cast-iron statue of Mr. Hussein in Firdos Square, behind the hotels.

If any one moment marked the end of Mr. Hussein's rule, it was the sight of the statue's legs cracking, its torso tumbling, and the severed head and body being pelted with garbage and shoes -- the ultimate Arab insult -- by the hundreds of Iraqis who had gathered to celebrate their freedom.

To be in the square at that moment was to know, beyond doubt, that Iraqis in their millions hated Mr. Hussein, that the truth about Iraq was the diametric opposite of all that he and his acolytes had maintained, and that all else that was said about him in the years that went before was the product of relentless terror.

"Good, good, Bush!" the crowds chanted. "Down, down, Saddam!" Men and women wept, and reached out to shake the hands of the marines, or simply touch their uniforms. "Thank you, mister!" they cried, again and again. Hours later, the crowds still milled about the fallen idol, spitting and mocking. 

That is the most revered and most decorated war reporter in America's Liberal Media.
The Washington Post's Richard Cohen today has an uncharacteristically insightful column arguing that reverence for the U.S. military is sustained by the fact that most Americans have  no experience serving in it and thus idealize its actions and those who lead it.  That's certainly true, but it's journalists -- especially the ones who cover the Pentagon and its wars -- who succumb to that worship dynamic far more than any other class of people.  In October,  John Parker -- the former military reporter and fellow of the University of Maryland Knight Center for Specialized Journalism-Military Reporting -- mocked Pentagon reporters for uncritically spouting the military's line about WikiLeaks (he singled out NPR's Tom Gjelten) and explained the key dynamic as follows:

The career trend of too many Pentagon journalists typically arrives at the same vanishing point: Over time they are co-opted by a combination of awe -- interacting so closely with the most powerfully romanticized force of violence in the history of humanity -- and the admirable and seductive allure of the sharp, amazingly focused demeanor of highly trained military minds. Top military officers have their s*** together and it's personally humbling for reporters who've never served to witness that kind of impeccable competence. These unspoken factors, not to mention the inner pull of reporters' innate patriotism, have lured otherwise smart journalists to abandon -- justifiably in their minds -- their professional obligation to treat all sources equally and skeptically.
Too many military reporters in the online/broadcast field have simply given up their watchdog role for the illusion of being a part of power.

This dynamic infects most establishment journalism:  political reporters come to revere the most successful political operatives (and thus worship in Jay Rosen's "Church of the Savvy"),  
economic reporters come to admire the most powerful financial officials, etc.  But for so many reasons, including the ones Parker describes, this psychological capture -- blindly gushing over the subjects one covers -- is most severe when it comes to reporting on military leaders.

Recall how Burns -- when attacking Michael Hastings on The Hugh Hewitt Show for the crime of making Gen. Stanley McChystal look bad -- boasted, as though he himself is a combatant, of the "long, informal periods traveling on helicopters over hostile territory with the generals chatting over their headset, bunking down for the night side by side on a piece of rough-hewn concrete" and how this "builds up a kind of trust" that should shape what the public learns and does not learn about these officials.  Or recall the embarrassingly glowing paean to McChrystal Burns penned upon the General's firing, or the even more gushing McChrystal profile published by his fellow NYT reporters upon his hiring.  Or Lara Logan's snide, lapdog-like defense of The General ("Michael Hastings has never served his country the way McChrystal has").  When it comes to how they speak and think of the military officials they cover, they sound like giddy teenage fan club Presidents rather than critical, independent reporters.  Could anyone imagine David Halberstam describing American generals in Vietnam as "ministering angels" and "his liberators, too"?

Maass has written a very good article, but the one bothersome aspect of retrospectives like this one is that some perceive that the failings they describe are confined to a discrete historical event or matters of the past.  It's vital when discussing the American media's failings during the Iraq War to remember that -- aside from Judy Miller -- most of them believe they and their industry did nothing wrong (Richard Wolffe:  "the press here does a fantastic job of adhering to journalistic standards and covering politics in general"; David Gregory:  "there are a lot of critics who think that . . . we didn't do our job. I respectfully disagree. It's not our role"; Charlie Gibson:  rejecting criticisms of the American media on the ground that "there was a lot of skepticism raised" by journalists about Bush's case for war; see also: Brian Williams righteously defending the honor of the retired Generals in the Bush Pentagon's propaganda program).

They haven't changed in the slightest since the Saddam statue incident because they don't think they did anything wrong, don't believe there are any lessons to learn.   Maas' article isn't about what the American media did.  It's about what the American media is.

The merger of journalists and government officials

CNN

The video of the CNN debate I did last night about WikiLeaks with former Bush Homeland Security Adviser (and CNN contributor) Fran Townsend and CNN anchor Jessica Yellin is posted below. The way it proceeded was quite instructive to me and I want to make four observations about the discussion:

(1) Over the last month, I've done many television and radio segments about WikiLeaks and what always strikes me is how indistinguishable -- identical -- are the political figures and the journalists.  There's just no difference in how they think, what their values and priorities are, how completely they've ingested and how eagerly they recite the same anti-WikiLeaks, "Assange = Saddam" script.  So absolute is the WikiLeaks-is-Evil bipartisan orthodoxy among the Beltway political and media class (forever cemented by the joint Biden/McConnell decree that Assange is a "high-tech Terrorist,") that you're viewed as being from another planet if you don't spout it.  It's the equivalent of questioning Saddam's WMD stockpile in early 2003.

It's not news that establishment journalists identify with, are merged into, serve as spokespeople for, the political class:  that's what makes them establishment journalists.  But even knowing that, it's just amazing, to me at least, how so many of these "debates" I've done involving one anti-WikiLeaks political figure and one ostensibly "neutral" journalist -- on MSNBC with The Washington Post's Jonathan Capehart and former GOP Congresswoman Susan Molinari, on NPR with The New York Times' John Burns and former Clinton State Department official James Rubin, and last night on CNN with Yellin and Townsend -- entail no daylight at all between the "journalists" and the political figures.  They don't even bother any longer with the pretense that they're distinct or play different assigned roles.  I'm not complaining here -- Yellin was perfectly fair and gave me ample time -- but merely observing how inseparable are most American journalists from the political officials they "cover."


(2) From the start of the WikiLeaks controversy, the most striking aspect for me has been that the ones who are leading the crusade against the transparency brought about by WikiLeaks -- the ones most enraged about the leaks and the subversion of government secrecy -- have been . . . America's intrepid Watchdog journalists.  What illustrates how warped our political and media culture is as potently as that?  It just never seems to dawn on them -- even when you explain it -- that the transparency and undermining of the secrecy regime against which they are angrily railing is supposed to be . . . what they do.

What an astounding feat to train a nation's journalist class to despise above all else those who shine a light on what the most powerful factions do in the dark and who expose their corruption and deceit, and to have journalists -- of all people -- lead the way in calling for the head of anyone who exposes the secrets of the powerful.   Most ruling classes -- from all eras and all cultures -- could only fantasize about having a journalist class that thinks that way, but most political leaders would have to dismiss that fantasy as too extreme, too implausible, to pursue.  After all, how could you ever get journalists -- of all people -- to loathe those who bring about transparency and disclosure of secrets?  But, with a few noble exceptions, that's exactly the journalist class we have.

There will always be a soft spot in my heart for Jessica Yellin because of that time when she unwittingly (though still bravely) admitted on air that -- when she worked at MSNBC -- NBC's corporate executives constantly pressured the network's journalists to make their reporting favorable to George Bush and the Iraq War (I say "unwittingly" because she quickly walked back that confession after I and others wrote about it and a controversy ensued).  But, as Yellin herself revealed in that moment of rare TV self-exposure, that's the government-subservient corporate culture in which these journalists are trained and molded.

(3) It's extraordinary how -- even a full month into the uproar over the diplomatic cable release -- extreme misinformation still pervades these discussions, usually without challenge.  It's understandable that on the first day or in the first week of a controversy, there would be some confusion; but a full month into it, the most basic facts are still being wildly distorted.  Thus, there was Fran Townsend spouting the cannot-be-killed lie that WikiLeaks indiscriminately dumped all the cables.  And I'm absolutely certain that had I not objected, that absolute falsehood would have been unchallenged by Yellin and allowed to be transmitted to CNN viewers as Truth.  The same is true for the casual assertion -- as though it's the clearest, most obvious fact in the world -- that Assange "committed crimes" by publishing classified information or that what he's doing is so obviously different than what investigative journalists routinely do.  These are the unchallenged falsehoods transmitted over and over, day after day, to the American viewing audience.

(4) If one thinks about it, there's something quite surreal about sitting there listening to a CNN anchor and her fellow CNN employee angrily proclaim that Julian Assange is a "terrorist" and a "criminal" when the CNN employee doing that is  . . . . George W. Bush's Homeland Security and Terrorism adviser.  Fran Townsend was a high-level national security official for a President who destroyed another nation with an illegal, lie-fueled military attack that killed well over 100,000 innocent people, created a worldwide torture regime, illegally spied on his own citizens without warrants, disappeared people to CIA "black sites," and erected a due-process-free gulag where scores of knowingly innocent people were put in cages for years.  Julian Assange never did any of those things, or anything like them.  But it's Assange who is the "terrorist" and the "criminal."  

Do you think Jessica Yellin would ever dare speak as scornfully and derisively about George Bush or his top officials as she does about Assange?  Of course not.  Instead, CNN quickly hires Bush's Homeland Security Adviser who then becomes Yellin's colleague and partner in demonizing Assange as a "terrorist."  Or consider the theme that framed last night's segment:  Assange is profiting off classified information by writing a book!   Beyond the examples I gave, Bob Woodward has become a very rich man by writing book after book filled with classified information about America's wars which his sources were not authorized to give him.  Would Yellin ever in a million years dare lash out at Bob Woodward the way she did Assange?  To ask the question is to answer it (see here as CNN's legal correspondent Jeffrey Toobin is completely befuddled in the middle of his anti-WikiLeaks rant when asked by a guest, Clay Shirky, to differentiate what Woodward continuously does from what Assange is doing).

They're all petrified to speak ill of Bob Woodward because he's a revered spokesman of the royal court to which they devote their full loyalty.  Julian Assange, by contrast, is an actual adversary -- not a pretend one -- of that royal court.  And that -- and only that -- is what is driving virtually this entire discourse:



UPDATE:  At the CNN blog, Jessica Yellin responds to this post.  Standing on its own, the response is not unreasonable, but I'll leave it to others to decide if her claims are consistent with her comments and conduct during the segment.