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COMMENTARY
Nationalism replaces professionalism
(Published January 10, 2005)

"Every government is run by liars and nothing they say should be believed."
—I.F. Stone

By COLMAN McCARTHY

Well into the second year of the United States invasion of Iraq, a war that sees the world’s mightiest military unable to defeat a ragtag band of street fighters, the corporate wing of the American media that heartily endorsed the war as it began is now saying it failed the public.

"We didn’t ask the right questions hard enough or long enough," says Dan Rather of CBS News. Michael Getler, the ombudsman of The Washington Post, states that "getting at this story meant banging up against what some consider to be a patriotic spirit, against a determined sitting president and a convinced constituency, against classified information, against ‘intelligence’ agencies that should know what they are talking about and, most agonizingly, against the human cost of conflict. We fell short."

Similar breast-beating has come from The New York Times and The New Republic, plus assorted scribes who, semi-flagellants, are confessing their gullibility.

How did it happen that so many highly paid reporters and editors could have been suckered into believing the Bush administration’s phony arguments for war? How could a Washington Post editorial state on Feb. 6, 2003, that it was "irrefutable" that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction? Because Colin Powell said so at the United Nations?

The failure is traceable to nationalism replacing professionalism. When George W. Bush lectured the world that you’re either with us or against us, the media got the message. They’re with. Perspective vanished, as if blown away in a desert sandstorm of hype and war-whooping. Embedded journalists – from Ted Koppel’s donning a military helmet to Brian Williams’ putting on a gas mask – could no longer be independent journalists.

News organizations currently compete to support the troops. Both CNN and CBS offer nightly tributes to U.S. soldiers killed in combat. Why no similar broadcast honors for slain Iraqi civilians? Why do U.S. newspapers that list fallen Americans not print the names of Iraqi dead, including civilians killed by American soldiers?

Perhaps the answer comes from Dan Rather: He wants to be "a patriotic journalist." Decoded, that means a one-sided, non-questioning journalist.

As sorry as the embedding was, and is, in the war zones of Iraq, the worse embedding occurs in the party zones of Washington. Media stars routinely chum around with the politicians and public officials they cover. You come to my book party and I’ll go to yours. The annual Gridiron dinner, the Alfalfa Club dinner and the White House correspondents dinner are but three of the many social events where hobnobbery journalism rules. Press mingles with power. Fraternizing precludes criticizing.

The greats of American journalism – giants of reporting like I.F. Stone and George Seldes – never sullied either themselves or their craft by getting cozy with public officials. Seldes, whose motto was "tell the truth and run," was so independent that he left the Chicago Tribune in the 1940s to start his own weekly, In Fact. At its peak in the 1940s and ’50s, it had 176,000 paid subscribers. Seldes exposed newspapers that suppressed stories that would offend advertisers. He scolded publishers who campaigned against labor unions. He attacked columnists who took gifts from special interests.

This was the journalism of ire. For Seldes, it took time to surface. He wrote from Europe in 1918: "We all more or less lied about the war. On Armistice Day, four of us took an oath on the battlefield that we would tell the truth the rest of our lives, that we would begin telling the truth in time of preparation for war, that we would do what was humanly possible to prevent the recurrence of another such vast and useless horror."

Every newsroom in America should have that plastered on the front wall.

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Colman McCarthy, a former Washington Post columnist, directs the Washington-based Center for Teaching Peace. This column was originally published in the National Catholic Reporter and is republished here with permission of the author.