Press Gang

One of the reasons I am what I am today is Bob Woodward.

A generation ago, Woodward teamed up with Carl Bernstein, another junior reporter at the Washington Post and started to doggedly investigate a burglary at a DC office.

What began as a minor felony became Watergate, the convoluted scandal of corruption and cover-up the brought down Richard Nixon.

Thanks to Woodward and Bernstein and All the President’s Men, I knew what kind of writer I wanted to be: one that would sweep away the smoke and mirrors to expose the crimes and abuses of the high and mighty.

Things have changed. Mainstream print and broadcast journalism is now subject to distrust and ridicule.

I guarantee few young people are eagerly considering careers in journalism as a vehicle for their political activism. They already know what it took me years to discover: to be that kind of writer you have to work outside of the mainstream media.

Even former CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite – once considered the most trusted man in America – has stepped out of retirement to denounce the sycophantic news corps that treats White House press releases as gospel.

And Bob Woodward has sunk from an investigative journalist who topples presidents to a hack writer who kisses the president’s ass. His recent books Bush At War and Plan of Attack are sad apologies for a monstrous and illegal war.

Worse, Woodward himself is now implicated in the “Plamegate” scandal.

As the Bush regime constructed a scaffold of lies and hysteria to justify war in Iraq, it became necessary to discredit a vocal critic named Joseph Wilson. This was done in part when administration members used compliant members of the press to reveal that Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA agent. Doing so was a serious crime.

Woodward has admitted that he was one of those journalists, although he refuses to identify the member of the Bush team who told him. Doing so he has destroyed his own reputation and damaged the credibility of the Washington Post, where he is a senior editor.

The whole issue of journalists keeping their sources confidential is called into question.

It is one thing for a reporter to protect the identity of someone who wants to blow the whistle on those in power – not to do so would mean that no insider would ever reveal abuses of political or corporate elites.

It is quite another thing to hide behind that principle and let those political and corporate elites feed you information in order to manipulate public opinion and destroy their critics.

Woodward’s early triumph around Watergate was as much a product of historical circumstances as his talent. He and Bernstein were riding a wave of struggle and opposition to racism and war that was becoming focused on Nixon’s weaknesses.

Now a new rising tide of activism is exposing Woodward’s weakness – he grew to enjoy having the occasional crumb tossed his way by the political and corporate ruling class. Now he has to choke on it.

The fault lies not in Woodward’s character, but in the system which treats news and information as commodities to be bought, sold and manufactured.

This aspect of the corporate media is nothing new. Anyone who thinks there was once a “golden age” of journalism should see Good Night, and Good Luck, the brilliant new film made by actor/director George Clooney.

Set in the 1950s, it portrays the struggle of CBS news reporter Edward R. Murrow to expose Senator Joe McCarthy’s increasingly wild and baseless “Red Scare”.

But Clooney is smart enough to know the real struggle at the centre of the film is that between the journalists and the corporation they work for.

We are shown how Murrow – highly respected by his peers and his audience – had to underwrite his news show by doing mindless celebrity profiles, the equivalent of today’s Entertainment Tonight.

CBS management reluctantly lets Murrow expose McCarthy, but then cancels his news show when sponsors pull out.

And Murrow is no journalistic saint. When he accuses his corporate masters of censoring the news, he leaves himself open to charges of self-censorship. He was never willing to stand up and defend the legal, democratic rights of socialists to have and expound their beliefs.

We see Murrow not just as a crusader, but as one who makes a deal with the devil to get part of the story told. That is the dilemma facing the best people working within the corporate media.

There are a tiny handful of exceptions, people like Robert Fisk who (so far) don’t back away from reporting the truth. Their work is generally published as “opinion” and dismissed by mainstream journalists as “propaganda”.

One last note on the press gang. On Saturday, December 3, I participated in a magnificent 40,000 strong demonstration in Montreal, demanding real action to halt climate change. It happened in conjunction with rallies in over 30 other countries on the same day.

The first edition of the Globe and Mail, the so-called national newspaper of record, following the biggest environmental rally in Canadian history contained no story on the event. Not a word. Not a picture.

Maybe to have done so would have constituted “propaganda”.

All the more reason why, when someone calls my work at Socialist Worker propaganda, I thank them for the compliment.