Friday, February 04, 2005

Secrecy Culture

The Center for Public Integrity is a phenomenon, pure and simple. A nonpartisan, nonprofit organisation dedicated to investigative journalism that "broke the Clinton White House "Lincoln Bedroom" fundraising scandal, first revealed that Enron was George W. Bush's top career patron and years later disclosed that Vice President Dick Cheney's former company, Halliburton, is by far the Bush administration's favorite contractor in Iraq. For these impertinent affronts to officialdom, the Center's reports have received 28 awards from respected journalism organizations since 1996."

So when the Center says something, it's always worth listening.

Today, founder and 15 year executive director Charles Lewis made public his opinions on the state of investigative journalism in America today. This is what he has to say:

At a time in America's history when discerning the truth is more elusive-and more essential-than ever, the mainstream news media seem increasingly incapable of playing their traditional watchdog role and digging out lies and inaccuracies.

The world of journalism is in a crisis that goes well beyond the spate of recent, highly-publicized scandals involving fraudulent or poorly reported stories. The country has witnessed Sumner Redstone, the chief executive officer of Viacom, home of CBS News and its hallowed legacy of journalistic excellence dating back to Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow, publicly endorse an incumbent President on the eve of a national election-something once considered unimaginable. Over the years CBS and many news organizations have become hollow shells of their former selves, letting go of hundreds of newsroom people and positions in order to achieve ever higher profits and corporate consolidation. The result? Less investigative reporting, reduced scrutiny of those in power and, ultimately, a more easily bamboozled populace.


Lewis says the mainstream media have failed to make politicians and businesses of all descriptions accountable because they are too busy cosying up to them.

Nor do the American people get "all the news that's fit to print" when it comes to the political activities of the media corporations themselves. The Center for Public Integrity has been exposing their coziness with our national leaders. News companies claim to objectively cover the President, his administration and Congress, but lavish hundreds of millions of dollars on lobbying and political donations in the hopes of greater deregulation and other favors from them. That included taking Federal Communications Commission officials on 2,500 all-expense-paid trips over an eight-year period.

As my colleague shamanic said at Simianbrain the other day, we bloggers mainly rely on the mainstream media for the "raw stuff" of our blogging. If that raw stuff is tainted then so is what we write. So much for the purity and integrity of the blogosphere much vaunted by some pundits. At such times, we should be glad that places like the Center for Public Integrity exist.

2 comments:

Harkonnendog said...

Great post. But I think this problem will be solved by the net, much in the same way the MSM's leftist bias (HAHAHAH I know, I know, but just pretend you believe it was true for a minute for the sake of argument)created a vacuum that was filled by Drudge, Freerepublic and various blogs.

I think in a few years the world will be full of 'independent' journalists, creating raw news that independent editors like Glenn Reynolds on the right, and possibly Newshog on the left, will sift and present to the public. I don't know how, or if, money will flow back to the reporters, but I imagine it somehow will.

The Diplomad's posts about the UN's uselessness just after the tsunami in Indonesia were a great example of this kind of reporting, I think.

Cernig said...

Hi Hark,

Thanks.
You know, I honestly don't think the MSM has either a left or right bias. I think individual corps. or newspapers do, but there are as many on the right (The News International empire springs to mind) as there are on the left - and some still trying to see sense wherever it comes from.

The tsunami in Asia was, however, possibly a paradigm shifting event. Not because of people like Diplomad or Kos, but because lots of really small bloggers were there, on the spot, and feeding information that even the MSM was only too happy to recieve.

I hate to make predictions about society on the basis of technology - that's Charlie Stross' job and one he does very well. My own thought is that society has a certain inertia to it that over-rides utopian or distopian predictions. Maybe one day everyone will be reporter for his locality and editor for everyone else's reporting, all without pay in a great big creative-commons multi-media blogosphere. Who knows?

Regards, Cernig