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USA Edition | Today Is Thursday, March 11, 2010 |
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USA Edition | Today Is Thursday, March 11, 2010 |
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Should You Trust This Man With Your Country?
We use money and fame to enslave journalists in America today. Big media does this to make news workers malleable, render journalists impotent, display anchors as lovable — all while demanding that what little news is to be covered remain as entertaining as possible.
Robert Butche
Newsroom Magazine
The worldwide financial collapse is only the most visible disaster attributable to the failure of entertainment-driven journalism. If you wonder if this is possible, ask yourself how it was no one told you the world’s bankers and tycoons were joy-riding on your savings and destroying your job.
What we do to journalists in the United States is criminal — we silence them for money. Yet few journalists who suffer the indignity of being marginalized, laid-off, or terminated speak out in protest, let alone in defense of themselves and their profession. Are American journalists somehow depowered, some have asked. Are any broadcast journalists made of stout stuff? Are any of them the equal of Anna Politkovskaya who died recently because she told her countrymen something they needed to know?
Makes one wonder about where journalist rests today in our nation. Ask yourself, whom do you know willing to take the same risk for our nation? Anyone at The Washington Post? Or the Los Angeles Times? How about Charlie Gibson, Brian Williams and Katie Couric? What credibility have they earned by the very Americans who decry journalists as opportunists, troublemakers or worse.
The failure of American journalists, both broadcast and print, to tell their own story raises many troubling questions. Why not? Why hasn’t the journalistic establishment covered it own demise? It is, after all, genuine, probative and important news. Why haven’t journalists explained why the Honorable Profession must be free of single issue management constraints if we as people and nation are to remain free? Why haven’t we told our story? Is there a Anna Politkovskaya among us today? If not, who will stand up for America and The Honorable House Of The Fourth Estate?
What Role Did Being Credible Play In Lowell Bergman's Departure From 60 Minutes?
In the freedom loving countries today, we effectively enslave journalists, make them impotent and demand that they entertain us. We terminate those who insist on being legitimate news gatherers and reporters in favor of those willing to do what’s more profitable, entertaining and damaging to our freedoms and aspirations. The democratic nations avoid overt and controversial control of news and information, but the outcome is little different that what is being done today by Hugo Chavez and others aspiring to be dictators.
Journalistic risk is a two sided coin in the sense that one side represents the risks of disclosure — the other non disclosure. The risks of disclosure threaten probative journalists today as they always have. People doing bad things don’t want it known. Where there is power to deny access, censor content, or misdirect information, journalism is damaged. But where there exists the power to wage war, or rule by secret police, journalists are not only expendable, but open to oppressive, or even fatal consequences.
The mainstream media like the Daily Telegraph profit financially from setting the news agenda with a big journalistic “scoop”, so whether or not the actual whistleblowers get paid, or whether it is only their advisors and intermediaries who get paid, is not very important if the allegations are true, as they obviously are in this MPs expenses scandal.
But journalism has changed in the last three decades in ways few ordinary citizens are aware — for in America, Canada, Britain and other western cultures long known for strong journalistic institutions, there has arisen a culture of non-disclosure. Britain’s recent go-round over the excesses of members of parliament who confused the public trough with their own private wants and aspirations remained concealed for decades until it was surfaced by the Daily Telegraph. What took so long, one might wonder? Was it political chicanery that left the matter in the dark for decades?
No, it was financial — for uncovering such stories is costly — which meant, in the case of the Telegraph, awaiting an whistle blower to come forth with story and documentation. Once that happened, the story became very mainstream, politically powerful, and immensely profitable for The London Telegraph — and all the other media that piled on. In the melee, nearly every British taxpayer was so enraged with the flagrant behavior of their MPs that they never noticed the flagrant behavior of their journalistic establishment. Britain is not alone, for nowhere is the enslavement of journalists more flagrant, or more widely tolerated that it is in the United States.
Being Credible Demands Guts, Skills and Knowledge
There still exist many great journalists in broadcasting today. They are greatly outnumbered by television stars, fading stars and dimly lit stars, but they exist. One of them is NBC News’ Richard Engel who has made himself a household word by constantly appearing in nearly every middle eastern hot spot. Engel made himself into a credible, probative and responsible journalist by perseverance and education — not by rising from the vast wasteland in local television news.
For those in the business, Richard Engel remains an anachronism for he did not come up through the ranks. We suspect that Mr. Engel was fully aware that he didn’t fit the emerging broadcast journalist model when he decisively chose an area of journalistic endeavor that offered long term employment possibilities only if he mastered both Arabic language and culture to make of himself the best prepared, best educated and most aggressive journalist in the middle east.
More About . . .
Absent support, big salary, or the promise of television stardom, Richard Engel beefed up his resume in Cairo, bought his own equipment, and finagled and bribed his way to being admitted into Iraq. What Engel knew was that substance matters, that analysis of happenings based on cultural understanding is essential to his craft, and that no translator knows how to convey nuance sufficient to enable full understanding. What’s important in Engel’s story is that he would never have survived today’s vapid broadcast news selection process — the one that favors gesticulation skills over most substantive journalistic foundations.
Engel is not alone in standing for something beyond his own personal gain — for there are others who chose to steer away from the big money television stardom approach to journalism. But what’s so unusual about Richard Engel is his apparent disavowal of the enslaving and compromising culture that pervades today’s unsteady network news divisions. What we don’t know is how well Engel the aspiring independent will be able to maintain his values after being embraced by an institution that sees its own interests overriding journalist integrity and national interest.
What goes largely unsaid in classrooms and newsrooms today is that the power to tell, reveal and report is as easily corrupted as the power to rule, decide and decree.
At his own network ( NBC News ) Engel works along side people who took the money and adjusted their values to comport with their employer’s demands. One of those people is NBC Nightly News personality Brian Williams who fronts a newscast for its profitability potential as well as furtherance of his own television stardom. We don’t know Mr. Williams personally, but we have no doubt but that he is a fundamentally good man, perfectly serious in his work, a thoughtful citizen, fun to know and an excellent parent. We take no issue with Brian Williams nor is it our intent to besmirch his personal reputation. But he’s not a legitimate journalist in the same sense as Richard Engel — which raises an embarrassing comparison.
With our nation in so much trouble, and journalism seemingly unloved and unwanted by most Americans, which of these men best serves the needs of his country and his profession? Were you to be asked, which of these men you’d most trust to tell you what you need to know to preserve your freedoms, livelihood or your country which would it be?
