Man Bites Dog - Democratic Underground

NanceGreggs

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Mon Feb-19-07 10:17 PM
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Man Bites Dog

Edited on Mon Feb-19-07 10:49 PM by NanceGreggs

Man Bites Dog
By Nancy Greggs

An Open Letter to TV "Newscasters":

We hear it every day, from our unenlightened relatives and neighbors, from the shopkeepers we do business with: an endless litany of misinformation being trotted out as fact.

Valerie Plame was merely a paper-pusher at the CIA, Saddam Hussein was the mastermind behind 9/11, and, of course, the war was justified years ago, when we found that massive cache of WMDs during our first days in Iraq.

This sorry state of affairs cannot be attributed to collective delusion, people simply making up and passing along the same factless stories. The population of our country is woefully misinformed and it is due to people like yourselves.

Some of you simply state unfounded ‘facts’ tailored to promote a political agenda, while others of you stand by and allow those fabrications to stand, uninvestigated and unrefuted. It is a distinction without a difference.

But of the many sins committed by the mainstream news media these days, the most grievous is the sin of omission. What gets left out of our daily newscasts would fill volumes – and indeed, on the websites we internet users now turn to for the truth, it does.

Stories like the use of mercenaries in Iraq (at an exorbitant price paid by the taxpayers), the billions of dollars gone ‘missing’ in the fog of war, the unaccountability of war profiteers like Halliburton; this, and more, is not late-breaking news. These stories have been circulating on the internet for years, based on information gathered by real journalists. But they are apparently news to you – or so it would seem – obviously relegated to the dustbin while you aired more important fare, like Britney’s latest haircut, or the trials and tribulations of a runaway bride.

Having grown up during the Cold War, I remember well the tales of how the Russian people were unaware of their government’s activities due to ‘news’ that was simply propaganda meant to mislead the masses. I remember the ads asking for contributions to Radio Free Europe, “so we can get the truth to people behind the Iron Curtain.”

Little did I know that someday I, an American citizen, would need a source of real information, because the integrity of the TV news I had grown up with – being the integrity of the Cronkites and the Murrows – would die in the wake of endless, insipid chatter, or outright lies being passed off as fact.

Little did I suspect that I would eventually share the fate of my Russian counterparts, mired in political propaganda paraded as true journalism, or my Iron Curtain friends, hoping to hear a modicum of truth coming over the airwaves.

In just the past few years, we have watched the nightly news go from being a trusted source of information to what is now known as info-tainment – and now even the last remnants of ‘info’ are gone. What we as a nation are left with is a sorry array of well-dressed, well-coiffed talking heads, spewing out mindless drivel that serves no other purpose than to misinform the public, and the consequences of that fact are more than disheartening – they are dire.

I am assuming that some of you actually chose your profession for the right reasons. You pictured yourselves as latter-day Woodwards and Bernsteins, unafraid to go wherever your investigations led you, willing to tell the truth to your fellow citizens regardless of the possible cost to your personal safety or your own careers as you blew the whistle on government corruption. I wonder about you who fall into that category most of all.

Do you wonder whether your cheerleading of the War in Iraq has contributed to the lives lost? Do you lose sleep at night thinking about how this war may never have gained enough support to be sustained, if only you had covered the stories of the true state of affairs – had you shown gutted Iraqi hospitals trying to operate without money or medicine while Halliburton racked up its millions; had you told the public of how the pensions and benefits of our troops were being gutted by this Administration while they waved their “We Support the Troops” banners and questioned the patriotism of others; had you spent as much time investigating the lies told by this president as you spent investigating Paris Hilton’s latest escapade?

I wonder if these things haunt you. I wonder if you ever consider your complicity in keeping your fellow citizens ignorant of the facts, and the real implications of where that ignorance has brought us.

More to the point, I wonder if you wonder at all – or if you just collect your paycheck and consider yourselves lucky to have one in this booming economy you keep talking about – you know, the one that doesn’t exist.

Well, you may not wonder. But we, the American people, do. We wonder why our nightly news programs have never started with a lead story about signing statements, illegal wiretapping, an executive branch overstepping the legal boundaries of its office – yet again. We wonder why instead we are treated to so-called news about celebrity divorces, or the paternity of the children of so-called celebrities.

We wonder why twenty-four hour ‘news’ networks can devote days to coverage of the death of Anna Nicole Smith, and not even five minutes to the coverage of the unconscionable plight of our returning troops.

We wonder why every news item even remotely touching upon wrongdoing by this administration or its cronies has to be presented with screeching representatives of both sides of the story, i.e. finders of fact versus presidential apologists and White House mouthpieces – as though the truth has two sides, as though the facts are not a matter of actuality, but a matter of who gets more airtime, and who can scream the loudest.

As someone who literally grew up with television, I am appalled that its potential as an up-to-the-minute source of real news has been so senselessly squandered, that its promise of being a true voice of the people, and a valid means of casting an unwavering light on our government’s activities, has dissolved into nothing more than a means to obfuscate the truth and ensure that the highest office in the land can operate in the safety of shadows.

But even in the midst of this betrayal, I am hopeful. Just as the printing press, the telegraph, radio and television have, each in their turn, served to bring the truth to the word’s populace, so the internet now flourishes. I realize that the mainstream media, desperate in its last throes to maintain its once vast audience, points to the bloggers – the true journalists of our time – and questions their credentials, their fact-finding, their ability to separate fact from fiction, reality from rhetoric.

I, for one, find it amusing that allegedly professional disseminators of news – who consistently can’t tell the difference between a presidential candidate and a known terrorist – would question the credibility of anyone.

It is just one woman’s opinion, but I think it is one that is widely shared by an ever-growing number of frustrated Americans: The current crop of so-called newscasters are not only a poor excuse for journalists. Given the damage they have done to our country and the world at large through their negligence and willingness to disseminate untruths as the real thing, they are a pathetic excuse for human beings.

“MediaWhore”; it’s a fairly new addition to our collective vocabulary. It defines those who will say anything, do anything, promote any agenda for a couple of bucks left on the bureau after they’ve willingly sold themselves, body and soul.

The inclusion of that word in our daily discourse is a sad commentary on the state of American journalism. The fact that it is applicable to so many, especially in view of the inevitable consequences, is a national tragedy.