I often remind my students of the ancient curse, may you be born in interesting times.  Well if any times can be considered interesting these can.  We, the great unwashed (mental note need a shower today), in each historic epoch look to the heralds, the troubadours,  the minstrels, of the time, the fourth estate, in short the media to guide and inform us.  Legends in my lifetime like Neil Sheehan, Tom Wolfe, Seymour Hirsch, Woodward and Bernstein, Edward R. Murrow and more too numerous to mention have illuminated the dark underbelly of our society in an effort to help us understand ourselves and our world.  Understanding precedes correcting.  We rely on these heralds to tell us what is happening.  If they are silent then we are ignorant.  If they are biased we are misinformed.  If they are stupid we are in deep do-do.  These three are not mutually exclusive.  The greatest crisis facing our society and our planet today is that most ‘journalists’ are all three.  They are often silent because to report would challenge the underlying  ’truths’ of the ideology they are sworn to uphold.  And they are often too stupid to see their own bias.  To see it they would have to examine themselves and ask some very difficult questions and we live in a world that discourages analysis and critical thinking as dangerous. 

Bias in the media is not necessarily, although it can be in a small number of individual cases, a conscious behaviour.  Most journalists believe they report in an objective and unbiased manner, always sure to verify their information with ‘official sources’ and ‘recognized experts’.  What they don’t see is that these ‘official’ and ‘recognized’ people are just that, official and recognized, but by whom.  The ideology of liberalism has been accepted in our society today as natural.  It is the ideology that is not ideological.  In some ways this is true of every society in every epoch.  We believe that the way we live is the correct, most natural, most rational form of living.  Our thoughts and understanding become the hard truths by which everything is measured.  But how is this conditioned reached?  In other words, who made up these norms and enforces them, to different degrees punishing any who might think or act a little differently.  In Western society in the early 21st century the truth is a liberal truth, having firmly grasped European and most particularly American society in the 17th and 18th centuries, rising though the 19th to cult status and vanquishing its greatest challenger in the industrialized world with the fall of communism and the discrediting of socialism in general.  What is has displaced, vanquished and rejected is not necessarily wrong because it has lost a battle.  If losing a battle were all that were necessary to discredit an adversary then we should reinstitute trial by combat for all disputes for clearly might makes right.  I wish that those who so fondly recall John Kennedy’s remarks in his inaugural speech, Ask not what your country can do for you, ask rather what you can do for your country,would actually read the rest of the speech and see the suffering and pain Kennedy expected the American people to endure just to defeat, not the Soviet Union, but just the idea of communism/socialism.  This is the objectivity that journalists are trained to see.  Liberal perspective becomes truth.  Official sources are trusted and left unchallenged.  As John Pilger remarked, speaking at a conference about his new book, ‘Freedom Next Time’,  the bits of true investagative and reflective journalism that find their way into the pages of major papers or onto mainstream networks both radio and television, are honourable exceptions rather than the rule of modern journalism.  Can we blame the journalist for seeing the world as those around them see it?  Can we blame the journalism program at university and college for putting out people that will blindly follow those who preceded them in the industry?  The question is a little unfair, I admit.  What I am really asking is can ordinary people be blamed for being ordinary?  How can we expect journalists to all be great people?  People of high conscience, principle, and great courage.  For it takes great courage to go through life uncertain of every thought you hold.  For the great person knows she/he  may be proven wrong at any moment.  Even when forcefully and vigorously asserting a position or argument, a little voice, like the slave in the chariot during a Roman triumph, constantly whispers ‘remember, you are only human’.  That is a lot to ask of anyone, to go through life in uncertainty.  But that is the human condition.  It doesn’t mean that you must always relinquish the field to your opponent or preface every remark with ‘I could be wrong but’.  You still forcefully assert your arguments because you believe them to be provably correct.  And you believe this because you have questioned them in the first place.  Accepting that we all have an inculcated perspective based on our lifetime experience means digging deeper and challenging that perspective constantly so that when we opine we do so with the confidence that that opinion will stand up to scrutiny.   That is the mark of great character and that is what I demand of journalists.  To do otherwise would be to condemn myself and you to purgatory of totalitarianism.  Such character is not encouraged by our education system or our social institutions as a whole.  The password for smoothly sailing through life is acceptance.  Accept the world as presented.  Don’t rock the boat.  But while courage won’t make you popular, it will make you honourable.   The choice is always up to the individual  So I implore those who proceed into journalism, if you don’t have the intestinal fortitude to ask the hard questions and examine your own failing then at least become a sports reporter where even basic intelligence is optional. 

In politics the first question that should always be asked is ‘In whose benefit?’   Who benefits from seeing things this way rather than that?  Who benefits when ideas are defined this way rather than that.  If the same people who are defining the events and ideas are the same people who benefit from those particular definitions, we need to be skeptical.  Maybe they are being honest and it is just coincidence that they also benefit but to accept that as the usual is to be stupid.  And that is the situation with the media today and for most of the past 100 years.  Accepting the views or their ‘official’ and ‘recognized’ sources is doing just that.  These sources benefit by the way they define the world and these are the only sources journalists must use. 

And how do journalists deal with their inability to really question the power brokers in our society?  Look at the questions they are asking.  Recently I was reminded of a question asked right after the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001.  I remember it being asked and at the time just shook my head in disbelief.  It has become part of the conspiracy theory industry that has grown up around that tragic day.  (The attacks have spawned several industries actually.  Only America could market tragedy like soap suds.)  The question was “Mr. President.  Where were you when you first saw pictures of the first plane hitting the towers?”  I have paraphrased as it was asked more than once directly to the president and to his media representatives.  The initial answer that he was at the school when he saw a picture of the first plane hitting which is incorrect as images of that plane hitting had not been uncovered at that point is why the conspiracy theorists are all over it.  Most likely it was the second plane hitting that he saw and the answer a result of miscommunication.  But for all the attention that the question has received because of its answer, no one has questioned the question itself.  Why would anyone, let alone someone who must by virtue of covering the White House be at an upper level of his/her profession, ask such a stupid question ?  Who the hell cares where he was when someone first showed him a picture.  What critical information is uncovered by this?  The question of when was also asked several times.  When did you know this?  When did you hear that?  When did that zit on your nose pop?  Maybe George was having a dump when his aids first showed him the pictures or told him about the collapse.  Maybe Laura wheeled a TV over to the hall and he kept the door open to watch the coverage.  If he is like me he probably got her to bring him a cup of coffee as well.  How much of this crap (pardon the pun) do we need or want to know.  Personally I have no interest in any of this.  I don’t care who told him what, when.  I would be interested in deeper questioning of his plans for dealing with the situation.  That is news! 

But news is what the heralds of these interesting times are trained to ignore.  We hear the lies repeated.  The auto industry is in trouble because it pays its workers too much.  Truth the average pay at assembly plants in the U.S. is $30 an hour.  Given the price of housing and feeding a family in America today that is not exorbitant.  But according to the heralds unless the workers stop being so greedy the Detroit 3 will collapse.  In whose interest?  The self proclaimed best political team on television asks whether President-elect Obama can move forward on health care reform in the midst of this financial crisis.  Read General Motors financial report.  You will discover that health care costs are hurting their competitiveness.  But no mention of this on CNN.  Oh! no! Wolf wouldn’t want to mention that.  In whose interest?  Victory in Iraq and in Afghanistan is necessary to secure the world (read the United States) from further terrorist attacks.  Most Americans still believe that Iraq was involved in the attacks and that the elimination of the Taliban will produce a free and democratic Afghanistan (read my earlier post Team Afghanistan for some insight into the reality).  Bringing death and destruction to those half way around the world will make them love us.  Instead every objective measure shows a more dangerous world today than before the War on Terror.  Even that phrase, war on terror is never questioned but it may tell us more than we want to know.  How can you have a war on an idea, a concept?  What would that look like?  You can’t kill an idea only the holder of the idea.  Then look at how we are proceeding in this so-called war.  In whose interest? 

In whose interest?  Over and over I ask myself that question as I watch events unfold before me.  If only journalists could find the courage to start asking those questions.  Not just of the powers that be but of themselves.  In whose interest is it that they reject information from every alternative source in favour of the ‘official’ and the ‘recognized’?  It is certainly not in mine or in the interest of society as a whole.  But it does seem to be in the interest of those who make the decision of what information the public receives.  The heralds of interesting times have much to answer for.