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Tuesday, May 25, 2004 |
Bill Moyer's speech to the Newspaper Guild/Communication Workers of America dinner on May 19, 2004 is an astute description of journalism today and how the purpose of journalism, if I can call it that, is being suffocated under the curtain of secrecy placed on it by the government and media conglomerates and moguls. It is a must read if there ever was one!
Consider this paragraph on journalism's role in freedom:
Freedom and freedom of the press were birth twins of the revolution. They grew up together, and neither has fared well without the other. At times, journalism has risen to great occasions and even made other freedoms possible. From editors who went defiantly to prison after being charged under the sedition act for circulating opinions that questioned the motives of Congress, or 'criminating' (whatever that meant) the president, to the willingness of Arthur Sulzberger and Katherine Graham to risk criminal prosecution under espionage laws if they printed the Pentagon Papers; from Lincoln Steffens and Ida Tarbell and Upton Sinclair taking on the shame of the cities, the crimes of the trusts, and the treason of the senate, to Walter Cronkite devoting an entire broadcast to Watergate; from Seymour Hersh reporting on torture to 60 Minutes II broadcasting the horror of Abu Ghraib, the greatest moments in journalism have come not when journalists made common cause with power, but when they stood fearlessly independent of it.
Consider these two paragraphs regarding secrecy of this Administration:
Partly it's because of the secrecy. The secrecy today is so thick as to be all but impenetrable. In earlier times there were padlocks for the presses and jail cells for outspoken editors and writers as our governing bodies tried to squelch journalistic freedom with blunt instruments of the law. Now, the classifier's 'top secret' stamp, used indiscriminately, is as potent a silencer as a writ of arrest. It's so bad the president and CEO of the Associated Press, Tom Curley, last week called publicly for a media advocacy center to lobby in Washington for an open government. "You don't need to have your notebook snatched by a policeman," he said, "to know that keeping an eye on government has lately gotten a lot harder."
With little public debate congress gives government agencies the right to search your home, office, telephone logs, e-mails, medical records, restaurant-receipts, even banking and credit card information-without your consent or knowledge. The president signs an executive order postponing thousands of declassified documents that are 25 years old or more. He signs another executive order sending hundreds of millions of tax dollars to religious organizations with no obligation to show us where the money's going or how it's being used. For the first time in history the vice president is given the power to decide what is classified and what is not. Behind closed doors, key environmental protections are shredded and in the middle of the night, without so much as a single fingerprint left in the margin, an anonymous hand inserts into an omnibus bill a loophole providing billions of dollars in subsidies to powerful clients. Secrecy poisons democracy and there is only one antidote. When a student asked the journalist Richard Reeves to define "real news," he answered, "It's the news we need to keep our freedom."
Moyer's hits the nail on the head with this paragraph:
Meanwhile, as secrecy grows, and media conglomerates put more and more power in fewer and fewer hands, we have witnessed the rise of a new phenomenon-a quasi-official partisan press ideologically linked to an authoritarian administration that is in turn the ally and agent of powerful financial and economic interests that consider transparencies a threat to their hegemony over public opinion. This convergence dominates the marketplace of political ideas in a phenomenon unique in our history. Stretching from the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal to Rupert Murdoch's empire to the nattering nabobs of know-nothing radio to a legion of think tanks bought and paid for by corporations circling the honey pots of government, a vast echo chamber resounds with a conformity of opinions, serving a partisan worldview cannot be proven wrong because it admits no evidence to the contrary. When you challenge them with evidence to the contrary-when you try to hold their propaganda to scrutiny-you're likely to wind up in the modern equivalent of a medieval iron maiden, between the covers, that is, of an Ann Coulter tirade, or wake up in an underground cell at FOX News, force fed leftovers from a Roger Ailes snack, and required for 24 hours a day to stare at photographs of Rupert Murdoch on the walls of the cell while listening to a piped-in Bill O'Reilly singing the Hallelujah Chorus in praise of himself.
10:26:27 PM  | |
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The fact that Bush stumbled over the pronunciation of the name Abu Ghraib last night is quite telling. Like Joan Walsh and Joe Conason, this gaffe gives the impression that Bush is simply not familiar with the name, as if he were seeing it written for the first time, as if he were saying it for the first time.
Isn't there someone in his employ up there who is supposed to coach him on how to pronounce names as important as Abu Ghraib? After all, it may be the acts captured by soldiers on film at this location that ultimately may cost him his re-election. You would think he would want to get this one right!
Joan Walsh of The War Room blog on Salon.com has an excellent commentary on this. Consider these choice paragraphs:
Given the importance of President Bush's Iraq address, it's the wrong time to be petty, but someone needs to say that his stumbling over the pronunciation of Abu Ghraib was a stunning gaffe -- and yes, I mean "gaffe" in the Washington definition of the word, as in a slip of the tongue that inadvertently reveals what the speaker really thinks -- or in this case, doesn't bother to think.
Is Bush the only American who hasn't discussed the torture scandal enough in the last month to have decided already how to pronounce the prison's name? I've come to say "Abu Ghrabe," with a long A (sounds like "hate"), which Google seems to say is the correct pronunciation. But the point is not to insist there's a clear, written-in-stone right way to pronounce it; there's no time to consult Arabic experts, and that isn't the point. I've heard knowledgeable people say "Abu Gribe," with a long I, as in "spite." Bush's mangled version sounded kind of like "Abu...Guh...rrab," as in "grab," which may be a Freudian take on it, given the groping and sexual abuse that went on there.
But the worst of it was the way Bush got stuck on the word, parsing out the syllables lamely, as though he'd never read or heard them before....
Abu Ghrabe, Abu Ghribe, Abu Ghrab, it didn't necessarily matter how Bush pronounced it, as long as he showed a weary, fed-up familiarity with the word and all it meant, and a determination to make sure this sort of scandal never happened again. But he didn't. That may have been the most important moment of Bush's speech, and the president fell on his face again, badly.
9:55:15 PM | |
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