The Narrow Separation of Press and State
By Norman Solomon
It was a remarkable comment that passed without notice. After interviewing
the new White House chief of staff, a network anchor bade him farewell. "All
right, Andy Card," said CNN's Judy Woodruff, "we look forward to working with
you, to covering your administration." If major news outlets were committed
to independent journalism, Woodruff's statement on national television Jan.19
would have caused quite a media stir -- as a sign of undue coziness with
power brokers in Washington. But it was far from conspicuous. Woodruff's
remark was matter-of-fact. Warm collaboration is routine. Many reporters work
closely with each new crew of top government officials. Leading journalists
and spinners in high places are accustomed to mutual reliance. That's good
for professional advancement. But the public's right to know is another
matter. "The first fact of American journalism is its overwhelming dependence
on sources, mostly official, usually powerful," Walter Karp pointed out in
Harper's Magazine a dozen years ago. Since then, the problem has grown even
more acute. A multitude of journalists advance their careers by (in
Woodruff's words) "working with" movers and shakers in government. Reporters
with outsized reputations for investigative vigor -- Bob Woodward, for
example -- may be the most compromised. Behind the scenes, the tacitly
understood tradeoffs amount to quid pro quos. Officials dispense leaks to
reporters with track records of proven willingness to stay within bounds. "It
is a bitter irony of source journalism," Karp observed, "that the most
esteemed journalists are precisely the most servile. For it is by making
themselves useful to the powerful that they gain access to the 'best'
sources." While some fine journalism, assertive and carefully researched,
gets into print and onto airwaves every day, the islands of such reporting
are drowned in oceans of glorified leaks and institutional handouts. But
democracy is only served when journalists keep searching for information that
officials hide. On the surface, concerns about scant separation of press and
state might seem to be misplaced. After all, don't we see network
correspondents firing tough questions at politicians? Isn't the press filled
with criticism of policymakers? Well, kind of. We're encouraged to confuse
partisan wrangles with ample debate, or -- in the case of certain TV shows --
high decibels with wide diversity. To a great extent, mainstream media
outlets provide big megaphones for those who already have plenty of clout.
That suits wealthy owners and large advertisers. But what about democratic
discourse? In general, news coverage of political issues is about as varied
as the array of views propounded by the hierarchies of the Democratic and
Republican parties. When there's bipartisan agreement on particular topics --
such as the wisdom of keeping 2 million Americans behind bars or the value of
corporate globalization -- the media space for debate tends to be very
limited. Consensus among major-party leaders has a way of circumscribing the
mass-media arena. With huge conglomerates more enmeshed in media ownership
and advertising than ever, news operations are under heightened pressure to
promote corporate outlooks, dovetailing with rightward trends in governance.
It's true that business has always dominated government policymaking. But in
recent times, mitigating interests -- often known in mediaspeak as "special
interests" -- have been increasingly expunged from serious consideration.
"What is new about the situation today is that a seemingly irreversible
mutation in the American system has occurred," syndicated columnist William
Pfaff wrote in mid-January. "At some point, quantitative change does become
qualitative change. The point when that change took place was probably 1976,
when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that money spent in support of a political
candidate is a form of constitutionally protected free speech. Moneyed
interests now finance not only the winners of national elections but also
most of the losers." Pfaff's column appears most prominently in the
International Herald Tribune. Based in Paris, he has a clear-eyed view of big
money's leverage over U.S. politics: "This is part of the enlarging
domination of American life by business corporations and their values, which
are those of material aggrandizement, a phenomenon accompanied and promoted
by the circuses and gladiatorial contests provided by the most important U.S.
industry of all, entertainment, which now showcases elections and even wars
as entertainments." We need wide-ranging news media. And that's unlikely as
long as most "journalism" resembles stenography for the powerful -- and very
few eyebrows get raised when a network anchor tells a key official of an
incoming administration that "we look forward to working with you."
