"All the News That's Fit to Neuter" Gives the Lie to "Balanced Journalism"

Marty Kaplan's post on the false notion that Journalism with a cap "J" must somehow present two sides on an equal footing really gives this much-maligned point a great argument:

Straight news puts the defensive blather from top executives of Moody's and Standard & Poor's on the same footing as testimony about conflict-of-interest by former officials of those firms at the hearings. Each piece of damning evidence is juxtaposed with a flack's denial. Each incriminating e-mail demonstrating the corruption of the ratings process is laid against the executives' contrary assurances of integrity and high standards. Straight news is stenography: these guys say "day"; these other guys say "night." It's up to you, dear reader, to decide whom to believe.

The trouble with this conception of journalism is that it inherently tilts the playing field in favor of liars, who are expert at gaming this system. It muzzles reporters, forbidding them from crying foul, and requiring them to treat deception with the same respect they give to truth. It equates fairness with evenhandedness, as though journalism were incompatible with judgment. "Straight news" isn't neutral. It's neutered - devoid of assessment, divorced from accountability, floating in a netherworld of pseudo-scientific objectivity that serves no one except the rascals it legitimizes.

However important facts are, no human being can be an "omniscient observer" and will definitely bias his reporting. Look no further than right-wing Fox News' trademark line: "fair and balanced". It's not gonna happen. So for honesty in journalism, one must simply state his opinion, label it as opinion separately, and present facts on both sides. You can't decide without knowing the reporter's bias, so it's only fair and balanced to give that away at the outset.

Free Speech Down One: PBS Sleeps Torture Documentary Till Bushco Walks

It's simply obvious. And predictable. This report says

Scott Horton reports today that PBS may have refused to nationally air a controversial documentary on the use of torture by the U.S. government in order to protect its funding.

You can view the documentary called "Torturing Democracy" here.

What stinks about it is that PBS is supposed to be "viewer supported" and hence above the level of government censorship and influence. But apparently not:

According to producer Sherry Jones, PBS told her that “no time slot could be found for the documentary before January 21, 2009″ — the day after George W. Bush and Dick Cheney leave office.

So what made PBS stoop so low? Did Bush-Cheney threaten them in some way? It can't be that Bushco suddenly became a huge contributor. And what does this mean for freedom of speech?

As for motives, maybe prior experience contributed to PBS's backtrack:

This spring, PBS’s distinguished Frontline series aired a mildly critical account of the lead-up to the Iraq War entitled “Bush’s War.” As the airing of the program was announced, the Bush Administration proposed to slash public funding for PBS by roughly half for 2009, by 56% for 2010 and eliminating funding entirely for 2011. Did PBS get the message? Perhaps.

So it's all about funding, eh? Well, there's some explosive material in this new documentary, more explosive, absolutely, than "Bush's War".

The show delivers impressively on a promise to “connect the dots in an investigation of interrogations of prisoners in U.S. custody that became ‘at a minimum, cruel and inhuman treatment and, at worst, torture’” (quoting Alberto Mora, who served as general counsel of the Navy under Donald Rumsfeld, and features in an interview). In one dramatic scene, former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage describes being waterboarded as part of a training program he went through before being sent to Vietnam. Did he consider waterboarding to be torture, Armitage was asked? “Absolutely. No question.” And he continued, “There is no question in my mind—there's no question in any reasonable human being, that this is torture. I'm ashamed that we're even having this discussion.”

And of course, that wouldn't help the GOP in an election year, would it? I think "wouldn't help" is, of course, a gross understatement.

No one who has seen this dramatic documentary is likely to buy into the “rotten apples” narrative any longer.

Which may help explain why PBS appears to be suffering from acute corporate indigestion over the work. The project was first offered to PBS in September 2007, with the representation that it would be available to air after May 2008. It was completed and circulated to PBS decision makers on schedule in May of this year.

And from May to December? Well, the time slot just wasn't there. Burp! Or maybe it was... that indigestion again. Why can't we have brave journalists in corporations anymore? Should corporations' stomach ailments block the truth from coming out when it should come out - when the culprits it's exposing are still in power????

Freedom of speech isn't won by the soldiers in the war on terror - sorry, Sarah. It's won by the journalists in the battle for truth.

War against Journalism: Truth vs. Consequences

Bridgethought of the Day: If you want to know what really is going on with any particular issue, never believe the first thing that hits you - it's probably a lie. Keep looking for what destabilizes you most, if you are living a predictable life, or what hits you in the gut as most obviously true, if your life is a struggle, as it should be.

Truth is out there. You just gotta use your brain to find it.

An excerpt from tomdispatch.com on Iraq, and what true journalism should - and DID - report, way back from Day One. Journalism in the person of Patrick Cockburn. Something the American public knows nothing about.

Patrick Cockburn has been hailed by Sidney Blumenthal in Salon as "one of the
most accurate and intrepid journalists in Iraq." And that's hardly praise
enough, given what the man has done. The Middle Eastern correspondent for the
British newspaper The Independent, he's been on the spot from the moment when,
in February 2003, he secretly crossed the Tigris River into Iraq just before the
Bush administration launched its invasion.
Here, for instance, is a typical striking
passage of his, written in May 2003, just weeks after Baghdad fell. If you read
it then, you hardly needed the massive retrospective volumes like Thomas Rick's
Fiasco that took years to come out:
"[T]he civilian leadership of the
Pentagon… are uniquely reckless, arrogant and ill informed about Iraq. At the
end of last year [Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul] Wolfowitz was happily saying
that he thought the Iraqi reaction to the capture of Baghdad would be much like
the entry of the U.S. Army into Paris in 1944. He also apparently believed that
Ahmed Chalabi…, then as now one of the most unpopular men in Iraq, would be the
Iraqi Charles de Gaulle.
"These past mistakes matter because the situation
in Iraq could easily become much worse. Iraqis realize that Saddam may have gone
but that the United States does not have real control of the country. Last week,
just as a[n] emissary [from head of the U.S. occupation Paul Bremer] was telling
academics at Mustansiriyah, the ancient university in the heart of Baghdad, who
should be purged from their staff, several gunmen, never identified, drove up
and calmly shot dead the deputy dean."
How much worse it's become can be measured by the two suicide bombs that went off at the same university a month apart early in 2007, killing not a single deputy dean but more than 100 (mostly female) students.
Or it can be measured by this telling little tidbit written in October 2003: "The most amazing achievement of six months of American occupation has been that it has even provoked nostalgia in parts of Iraq for Saddam. In Baiji, protesters wereholding up his picture and chanting: ‘With our blood and with our spirit we will die for you Saddam.' Who would have believed this when his statue was toppled just six months ago?"
Or by this description, written in the same month, which offers a vivid sense of why an insurgency really took off in that country:

"US soldiers driving bulldozers, with jazz blaring from
loudspeakers, have uprooted ancient groves of date palms as well as orange and
lemon trees in central Iraq as part of a new policy of collective punishment of
farmers who do not give information about guerrillas attacking US troops… Asked
how much his lost orchard was worth, Nusayef Jassim said in a distraught voice:
'It is as if someone cut off my hands and you asked me how much my hands were
worth.'"

Or by this singular detail from June 2004 that caught the essence of the lawlessness the U.S. occupation let loose: "Kidnap is now so common [that] new words have been added to Iraqi thieves' slang. A kidnap victim is called al-tali or the sheep." Or this summary of the situation in May 2004, one year after Bush's "Mission Accomplished" speech:
"Saddam should not have been a hard act to follow. After 30 years of disastrous
wars, Iraqis wanted a quiet life. All the Americans really needed to do was to
get the relatively efficient Iraqi administration up and running again. Instead,
they let the government dissolve, and have never successfully resurrected it. It
has been one of the most extraordinary failures in history."