The Post follows current American news industry practice of killing any story based on evidence from a confidential source if a government honcho privately denies it. A flat-out "we didn't do it" is enough to kill an investigation in its cradle.
With that succinct statement, Greg Palast has punctured the illusions of many a young journalist.
Like everyone, I've followed this weekend's revelations about "Deep Throat" with interest; I was too young to understand much of the Watergate hearings over the thundering of my Republican father, but at twelve I was pulled into the cinematic version (the first time I wanted to be a newspaper reporter, actually -- something I always forget, given my circuitous route since) and intrigued enough by the Holbrook shadow-figure offering clues for the cub reporters to follow. The story of the 91-year old Mark Felt, whose motivations were not the purest on the planet when he formed his bizarre partnership with Bob Woodward, trying to sell his story to Vanity Fair felt at first mostly significant for its pathos, till the right-wing offensive (thank GOD I don't have cable) reminded us of the true relevance of this story. "Treasonous," they cried, usefully echoing Rumsfeld, Shrub and Myers as they smeared Amnesty International for using the word I've done all along about the torture bases -- "gulag."
Deep Throat came out for money, but his emergence reminds us of what journalists used to do in pursuit of the truth -- and what even mainstream newspapers like the Washington Post were willing to support, in order to comfort the afflicted and afflict the powerful. Naive as I am, I'd assumed that the sloth and timidity of recent years a mix of greed and inertia. I feel like a moron to learn that skepticism of the statements of the powerful is no longer central to the profession -- it's a hazard.
George McGovern, for whom I cast my first happy (if futile) vote in 1984, yearns for a new Deep Throat to save us:
"We need someone like that who is highly placed to tell us what's really going on. We know that we were misled on Iraq," McGovern told Fox News Radio.
McGovern, a former senator, unsuccessfully ran against Richard Nixon for the White House in 1972.
Deep Throat, revealed this week as former FBI assistant director Mark Felt, acted as a source to The Washington Post newspaper, helping to bring down Nixon's presidency over the Watergate scandal in 1974.
"I wish there were somebody of the Deep Throat time in this administration who are aware of what's going on," McGovern told Fox News Radio.
"This war in Iraq, in my opinion is worse than anything Nixon did. I think Nixon deserved to be expelled from office in view of the cover-up that he carried on and the laws that he violated."
McGovern, apparently, is as unaware as I was of the shift in newsroom policies, from spunk to fear. No wonder the Downing Street Memo has barely made a splash so far; why talk of impeachment has so far raised only by the usual suspects. You can impeach a guy for sex, but not for spilling the blood of hundreds of thoussnds. If the NY Times, which is reported to be working on a story, punts (just like Woodward's new Washington Post did with Palast's evidence about the 2000 elections, we may all as well become Jeff Gsnnon and find more direct means to fellate the White House.
Why did I name this post after Joe Pulitzer? Because, as I learned nearly 2 months ago from Columbia Journalism Review editor Andie Tucher, it took 10 years before Columbia University would accept his gift of $2 million, offered in 1892, for a journalism school -- on the grounds that such an nasty, disreputable profession would sully an institution of higher learning. I guess it's time, again, to live up to that.
Time for nasty hands, for climbing gutters to beg a source to help us, for not taking a White House denial as anything but a reason to push harder and get the story out. Nowadays, of course, such an approach is downright dangerous, and can land you in prison, broke, dead (cf. Gary Webb) or stuck in tinfoil-hat territory. But no other way has any honesty. In this case, nasty hands are clean hands.
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I am such a bad member of the Progressive Blogger Union. The hard-working chair sends out a loose topic every week and sometimes I follow it, or manage to connect it to what I was going to write already. Other times I can't switch my obsessions that fast, as passionate as I may potentially be about global warming or the Minutemen (that I could write about now, of course, after the spotlight has passed). But this week's themes are just up my alley, and so I put forward the first half of my contribution to PBU23 -- with a promise of more to come tomorrow night. Then, I'll make more direct reference to the way newspapers and TV news mis-report the war every day (for now, looksee what Jorgey at MediaInTrouble has called out).
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