Once again I feel compelled to delve into a “political” issue. This issue is potentially the most important of our time. It has potential to be bigger than Iraq, bigger than terrorism, bigger than the price of oil, global warming, judicial appointments, you name it. Recent events have definitely brought it to light, but it was the admission from Mark Felt that he was “Deep Throat” that really got me thinking on this topic.
As an aside, I’m definitely going to have to reread All the President’s Men by Woodward and Bernstein with this new knowledge and see if it changes my impressions. If you haven’t read it, or have only seen the movie, I highly recommend you read this book. It turns into more of an exploration of the dark side of the press than it does an exposé on the Watergate break-in, but in my mind that’s what makes it all the more fascinating. Another good book on this topic is Silent Coup: The Removal of a President by Colodny and Gettlin. It gets a little farfetched at times, but does present an interesting “alternate” view of the events related to Watergate. I can’t remember if Felt was one of their suspects for “Deep Throat”. I’ll have to check.
Enough preamble. On to the actual topic of this post. I think we can all agree that having a government controlled press is a bad thing. How do we know when we’re being told the truth? How do we know how things really are without a free press? Sure, even a free press can be misled, but with people like Felt and Woodward and Bernstein, or even Isakoff and Drudge, the truth (or at least glimpses of it) comes out eventually.
That’s why we need a free press, not just in America, but around the world. And that’s precisely what we no longer have in America.
Nixon thought that the press hated him and he was a victim. Perhaps so, but outside of the Watergate scandal, he was treated with kid gloves compared to how our current President is treated by the press. We have a press here that has become increasingly antagonistic to the sitting President and the Republican Party. One only need to look as far as Dan Rather, or the recent Newsweek fiasco to see this, but we also have biased polls with leading questions and ridiculous attacks on the press secretary. The “free press” because of this antagonism has become an unwitting pawn of the Democratic Party. I can no longer tell whether the Democratic talking points come from the press or if they come from the DNC. In short, we have a “free press” that is controlled by the government (even if it’s a party in minority power, it’s still the government).
What about “Fox News” and talk radio, you ask? Despite FNC’s claim to be “fair and balanced”, they obviously tilt the other direction, and sometimes antagonistically so. If a Democrat says something on FNC (unless he’s Zell Miller or perhaps Joe Liebermann) he must be lying or wrong. At least that seems to be the attitude of the hosts on the shows.
Where am I headed with all this? What’s my point? The truth. How are things really in Iraq? Is Gitmo really a “gulag” as Amnesty International says or are the detainees and their beliefs treated with the utmost respect as the government says? What’s happening at the U.N? Is the Oil-for-Food scandal just something trumped up by the U.N. haters, or is there really a cover-up going on there?
I don’t know the answers to these questions, and neither do you. And I don’t see that it’s likely that we’re going to know the answers to them any time soon. I can’t trust the government, and increasingly it appears that I can’t trust the press. And that bothers me. And it should bother you.
The only answer is a free and diversified press that’s more interested in getting to the truth than in political attacks. You can find some of that in various blogs, but most are admittedly biased (hey, at least they admit it). The mainstream media needs to investigate itself and work to correct this in themselves (perhaps it will go away when Bush is out of office…maybe they don’t hate all Republicans, but just him) if we’re going to have any hope of believing anything we read or hear in the news.
Please, no inflammatory comments. I’ve made it clear that I don’t trust anybody, not the government, not the bloggers, not FNC, not CBS, not anybody. So don’t criticize me for “picking on X, when Y did something even worse”.