On journalism’s appearance as sophisticated hogwash
Edward Wasserman, Knight Professor of Journalism Ethics at Washington & Lee University, mounted the editorial podium at The Miami Herald, under the heading “Special interests write ‘news’,” to chasten the news business for publishing so-called news articles penned by mercenary writers whose expenses and fees are paid in full or in part by special interests instead of by the publishers themselves. Those special interests may take the form of non-profit foundations set up by “plutocrats.” One never knows, said Mr. Wasserman, "what kind of influence the charismatic plutocrats or their purpose-built foundations exert on the operations they fund." Therefore he advises news businesses to suppress the expression of outside factions simply because they might have an interest in conflict with his professional opinion on journalism ethics.
Some distinguished members of the mainstream press have refused to outsource news reporting to nonprofits that have special agendas: for example, the McClatchy news organization, which has long taken pride in its independence from outside influences. Prior to his retirement as McClatchy’s Vice President of News, Howard Weaver indicated that McClatchy papers did not accept news content from “outside groups” because relationships with them would be “sufficiently unorthodox that we don’t need to do it.”
However, McClatchy was going against a trend towards orthodoxy at that time. A seasoned Miami journalist informed this writer that, although she agreed with Professor Wasserman’s opinion, the “ship has already sailed” in the other direction. Hence the subject is old news no longer worth discussing – she summarily turned her back and walked away. Anders Gyllenhaal, executive editor of The Miami Herald, which was taken over by McClatchy in 2006, was queried on the subject via email on February 1, 2010, and responded with: “We don’t accept news stories from foundations or non-profits pushing a particular point of view. There are an increasing number of investigative groups, that happen to be non-profit, that operate with traditional media standards, and we will consider running their work, with a clear explanation of how they operate. That hasn’t happened yet in Miami, but it is coming up in other places.” As for expenses, “Our policy is for staff members to pay their own way.”
Professor Wasserman referred to billionaire banker Peter G. Peterson, who indirectly funded via his foundation Fiscal Times the production of an article published December 31, 2009 in the prestigious Washington Post, entitled 'Support grows for tackling nation's debt’, an article allegedly promoting the sort of fiscal stinginess that would rob us of our Social Security and Medicare benefits. Forty national organizations protested, he reported, creating quite a “flap” over the integrity of the newspaper, but we can see that the protest should be addressed to Congress and not to the editorial policies of the Washington Post.
The Washington Post is a conservative, moderate, or liberal paper, depending on how you read it – it was once called “Pravda on the Potomac” and compared with the Daily Worker, but some departments have slid far to the right. The big "flap" was a tempest in a teapot whipped up by hypersensitive liberals inclined to abhor the slightest representation of the naturally conservative (of their own fortunes) "plutocrats", whom defamed liberals naturally despise with a vengeance. Mind you that the plutocrats would have faced a firing squad long ago if red-blooded Americans did not fervently desire to join their ranks, believing, as pragmatic philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce noted well, that every poor bloke has a chance to get rich in America, thus is revolution forestalled – a truism, but the chance is slim given the slight circulation of the classes in respect to the power elite. Peirce wound up impoverished despite his schemes, at times dependent on his friend William James for his daily bread.
Naturally everyone is a liberal to the extent that he would be liberated from something or the other, especially from the faction that opposes him. Carl Schmitt, a German expert on jurisprudence whose ideas are secretly admired by American neoconservatives although he is infamous for his theory of the Total and for condoning Hitler’s emergency suspension of governing law, defined politics as finding out who your enemies are and eliminating them. No doubt the liberals who find themselves identified by neoconservatives as liberals in the pejorative sense would like to be rid of the particular plutocrats whose wealth they would like to distribute to the needy. But what is liberty if it is not liberty for all, if it is suppressed by a faction whether that faction is a majority or a minority? So-called liberty would be tyranny to all those persons not in power. Even if the plutocrats were a sociopathic faction that deserves the death sentence, a free press should be at liberty to publish their last words some time before the mass execution.
The Washington Post article at issue is more fact than opinion, and does not recommend treason, which might be useful at this juncture in a history that is turning out to be a quite a mistake. Spending is reportedly burying this great nation of ours in debt, the newspaper reported, therefore 35 Democratic and Republican senators – the number is not broken down by party - have proposed the creation of a fast-track commission with broad power to ramrod spending cuts and tax reform through Congress. An 18-member task force has been advocated. Under that proposal, if 14 members of the task force agree on how to cut Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, Congress would be obliged to take immediate action, voting up or down on whatever measure was recommended. That is news to those of us who hope to survive without unaffordable health insurance until we reach entitlement to the Medicare and Social Security benefits we and our employers paid for.
Our personal reaction to the disclosure by The Washington Post is, "To hell with the greedy plutocrats and their political prostitutes!"
Professor Wasserman says that “the article described, approvingly,” the effort to create the deficit-reduction commission so dear to billionaire Peterson. We are not sophisticated enough to notice any such approval hence we beg to differ. The report, written by professional reporters, definitely points out that, "Congress has been down this path of entitlement commissions before, with nothing to show for it." Despite the belief that such a mechanism can "force a consensus among the warring political factions," critics say that the same old problems would arise to thwart its implementation. The report is relatively balanced notwithstanding its funding source. The newspaper's ombudsman declared it to be up to par in terms of professional journalism standards, yet threw a sop to the 40 national foundations that complained: the piece had "serious deficiencies," he declared. Still it was good enough. Any reader who was misled by the informative article and who changed parties or ideologies over it must be self-deceived or a blooming fool, and we should thank The Washington Post for publishing the alarming information.
In any case, our estimable ethics professor avows that it used to be fairly easy for a news business to keep its nose fairly clean and self-respecting: "You didn't accept material from outsiders apart from freelancers you knew or bona fide news agencies." But today's news media is picking up free content from foundations with special interests, and is turning to cheap freelancers. Freelancers in turn cannot make a decent living wage off the media, which he says might pay a meager $300 a week, so they are renting their souls out to the special interests in one way or another, or the special interests may be paying their expenses if not their fees –we note that there are many competent journalists out there who would be glad to have the $300 per week, and that nonprofit journalism has been a boon to the largely unemployed scribbling population. Again, Professor Wasserman would have publishers cut ties with outside special interests, and pick up the whole tab for journalists lest narrow-minded interests unduly corrupt the news. "At a minimum, the outside ties should be severed. With freelancers, the publisher must pick up the full costs of the work. That's fundamental."
Just what interest is so universal as not to be somewhat "special”? Professor Wasserman's own special interests apparently rest near the authoritarian apex of the Establishment’s power pyramid: politics, management, law, business, media censorship, and so on: He was educated in politics and economics at Yale University and London School of Economics. He served as a staff writer and business reporter for very brief periods before rising to executive editing positions at Casper Star-Tribune, Knight-Ridder’s Miami Herald, and Miami's Daily Business Review. He was CEO as well for American Lawyer Media, and he created and launched a monthly, Florida Lawyer. He served as chief editorial officer of Primedia, with 160 magazines and newsletters covering the media. He wrote a column for Knight Ridder's The Miami Herald on economics, business and public policy from 2000-2003. Now he holds the Knight Chair in journalism ethics at Washington and Lee University. That chair was established with a grant of $1.5 million from the Knight Foundation, reads the university website’s rhetoric:
"Chairholders are professional journalists who inspire excellence, collaborators who reach out and innovate, catalysts around whom universities can build expanded programs and visionaries who strive to improve American journalism." Knight Foundation’s website advertisement claims that the Foundation wants to “transform both communities and journalism, and help them reach their highest potential. We want to ensure that each community’s citizens get the information they need to thrive in a democracy…. We passionately believe things can get better. We believe nothing big happens without a big idea, nothing new without a new idea…. . Every day, we ask the question, of ourselves and our partners, ‘Is this the best there is?’ We seek out leaders who ask the same…. The five basics that all transformational projects seem to have: discovery of the facts; the vision to see what's possible; The courage to push for change; the know-how to get it done; the tenacity that gets results."
Now Professor Wasserman, while sitting on a Knight Chair, worries that special interests funding nonprofit foundations might unduly influence or somehow pollute the news business with their philanthropic focus on issues that publishers and “independent” editors have heretofore excluded as unprofitable hence not newsworthy, but may now be inclined to air if they are running out of money to pay staff for content. We urge him to report on the influence the Knight Foundation has had on the news business and on the professors who hold its chairs at universities as well as the influence its millions of dollars contributed to journalists. We suspect that a little muckraking on his part will turn up some hypocrisy in regards to catchwords such as “democracy.” “If the citizens are unaware, then democracy is in peril,” stated Alberto Ibarguen, president and CEO of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, former publisher of Knight Ridder’s Miami Herald, at a Council on Foundation conference in San Francisco, where nonprofits were urged to adopt quality journalism practices so that “professional journalism” might survive alongside the advance of “citizen journalism.”
In the good old days, anh aspiring writer like Theodore Dreiser could hang out at a newspaper office in his youth and beg so persistently for reporting assignments that an editor would send him out on the least desirable one just to get rid of him, and perchance he would learn, with the right editor, to be a good reporter on the job, and perhaps go on to write realistic novels or become editor himself. It was not so complicated in those days to gather information and put it in order, from the most relevant to least relevant, logically connect the dots and write up a story. But today the aspirant had better get expensive credentials if he wants to be a professional journalist. And that goes for columnists as well as reporters – columnists usually begin as reporters.
The more credulous persons among us tend to believe that the product of professional journalists who work for the major daily newspapers are the most credible and authoritative simply because their writers and editors went to journalism school and are closely associated with whatever passes for news in their newspapers. Accordingly, professional journalists have a rather high opinion of their work, and usually scoff at amateur or “citizen journalists” instead of bringing them into the fold and educating them on the tricks of the trade – a free Internet school would help. Yet it is the unpaid and even naïve citizen journalist who might get the real albeit ignored scoop and tell the truth about it simply because he or she is in fact independent of the thumb the professionals are under. Of course modern journalists at large have always had a reputation for being scoundrels who will say anything to turn a buck or win an argument, although the truth does come out now and then. The truth of the matter is that professional journalists are highly unlikely to bite the hand that feeds them if not other hand is available to hire them. And besides that they are cultivated in a kind of academic ignorance. Sadly, that ignorance as well as their arrogance has had tragic results throughout the world.
Again we ask: Just what interest is so universal as not to be somewhat "special”? Professor Wasserman did not mention in his imperial ethics decree that the gigantic media business that he subserves represents a special interest, the power elite, which is a minority faction with far too much power. The news business is the figurative spokesperson for the executive branch of the Establishment, a member of the power elite whose interest is intimately identified with the invisible forces of darkness presiding over corporate board tribalism. The higher one ascends on the power pyramid, the less relevant ethics becomes; rather, absolute power is the sole good to those who have it, hence might makes right. But that good so limited to the few is certainly an evil for the many. As Lord Acton said, "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men."
The press habitually betrays the public interest. For example, the press reported approvingly on the rush to war and the Bush Administration's fascist-like infringement of civil rights, almost down to the last publisher and editor. The McClatchy organization was the most notable American exception: In 2008, McClatchy's bureau chief in Washington, D.C., John Walcott, was the first recipient of the I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence, awarded by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism. In accepting the award, Walcott commented on McClatchy's reporting during the period preceding the Iraq War: “Why, in a nutshell, was our reporting different from so much other reporting? One important reason was that we sought out the dissidents, and we listened to them, instead of serving as stenographers to high-ranking [Bush administration] officials and Iraqi exiles.”
In any event, the truth about the pre-emptive war that destroyed the sovereign state of Iraq, that is was based on fabricated pretexts taken for granted by the jingo press, could no longer be voluntarily suppressed because that truth was eventually revealed. The jingo media did not dig up the facts about the packs of lies fed to it by the hawks and vultures; instead, they declared the opposition to be un-American and they embedded themselves in pre-emptive attacks on suspected enemies and waxed enthusiastically on “what makes America great,” i.e. war, paying scant heed to the collateral damage.
Why should media conglomerates whose special interest is in the bottom line bother to dig up dirt and rake muck when a telephone call to the authorities suffices to get the news patriotic Americans want to hear? The publishers did not listen to the traitorous independent voices and publish their presumably seditious libel pleading for peace when it was time to profit on massive violence again. Super-patriotic leaders and the citizens who voted for them were unwilling to hear from America's own independent journalists, most of whom were unemployed because they did not suit the current "market needs" of the media. The recent conduct of the mainstream media at large disgraced this great nation of ours, and everyone of sound mind knows it. But we are supposed to forgive them, now that they are exposing facts they could have helped prevent. Yes, we may forgive them now that they are taking the liars to task – they have even fired a few of their own kind for being on the government payroll. Yet despite our forbearance and forgiveness, or because of it, the U.S. press is still stuffed with self-righteous, highly paid press executives whose main interest is in maintaining the corrupted power structure and keeping up the Big Lie with catchwords such as “democracy.”.
"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men." Indeed.
Ironically, in the 1920s amateur press critic Adolf Schicklgruber warned against the press falling into the hands of bad men, for they would have a most pernicious influence on the most numerous and credulous class of readers whom they would educate, "those who believe everything they read...who have neither been born nor are trained to think independently.... It is of paramount interest to the state and the nation to prevent those people from falling into the hands of bad, ignorant or even vicious educators. The state, therefore, has the duty of watching over their education and preventing any mischief. It must particularly exercise strict control over the press, for its influence on these people is by far the strongest and most penetrating, since it is applied, not once in a while, but over and over again."
Schicklgruber was convinced that a liberal press controlled by the Jewish special interest had ruined Germany by ridiculing morals and ethics, belittling the military, cutting military funding, sabotaging the draft, while the state stood by bragging about the value of the press, its educational mission, its objectivity - "The bourgeois-democratic papers knew how to give an appearance of their famous objectivity, painstakingly avoided all strong words, well knowing that empty heads can judge only by externals and never have the faculty of penetrating the inner core."
And Schicklgruber complained most vehemently that the German press suppressed or ignored the truth. The real truth was radical and must be suppressed instead of printed, for if the truth were published by publishers perceived as legitimate, the most numerous party of readers, those who believe everything they read, would tend to overthrow the liars in charge. Today many vital issues and newsworthy events are never aired by the American mass media due to the biases of editors and the need for the news business to please or at least refrain from offending advertisers. It is well known that money buys and controls the news business, and the news media ultimately operates to the advantage of conservative business interests despite conservatives’ complaints about “the liberal media.” After all, the business of the news business is business. Dissenting or “liberal” voices must conform to the agenda to be heard, and the lack of radical perspectives leaves the press stagnant if not regressive, serving to keep the flock that believes in everything they read in good order, i.e. the top-down imposing order of the Establishment. Now the Internet poses a real threat to the ability of mass media to inculcate order in a docile public that is growing awfully weary of the pabulum it has been fed, wherefore the media organizations and foundations such as the Knight Foundation are scrambling to co-opt the great possible alternative to censored information in an effort to legitimize i.e. control it to the ends of Business-As-Usual.
In any case, Schicklgruber claimed that truth can only be arrived at through critical analysis by a few discerning thinkers capable of forming independent opinions, not the sort of readers the press was interested in cultivating. Of course he wanted his own truths to absolutely obliterate other opinions, including the opinion that he was in truth a jackass. Today's fast-paced, sensational news distracts readers from the careful consideration of vital issues. Indeed, there is insufficient time and space for critical analysis of the issues that are covered; the weighing of alternatives is habitually censored. The censorship and consequent stultification of the average mass reader is aggravated by the consolidation of news businesses into media conglomerates. The differences between news, analysis, and opinion are substantially ignored, although the formalities are maintained. In effect, news, analysis, and opinion, despite the stylistic formalities, often amount to advertising.
The news business is really one national propaganda paper for a single party, a party-paper we might as well call Pravda given its distance from the truth. The differences between most major daily papers are as superficial as the difference between the Democratic and Republican parties, both of which cater and answer to Big Money. Certain types of content, often advertisements posing as news articles, are displayed time and time again throughout the media as a "public service" to keep the public in line for the continued progress of the vested interests. So-called debate is generally confined to simplistic conservative vs. liberal rhetoric and appeals to partisan clichés spewed out by the Democratic and Republican parties. Thus are those apt to believe whatever they read in terms of an either/or, borderline social-psychology artificially divided and herded off to the same processing plant where the spoils of the rotating political table are divvied out, the best portions going to the invisible gods and high priests – the gods get the smoke, incensed with herbs, the priests the fat, liver, and kidneys, the warriors the lean meat, and any remaining scraps go to the beggars cringing on the fringes. The media business serves itself well, extorting huge fees from political candidates who rely on contributions from about the same major contributors that the media business relies on for advertising revenues.
We believe Professor Wasserman might sympathize with some of Schicklgruber's views on the need to restore ethics to the media, if only the person speaking were not Schicklgruber back then but a currently estimable professor of journalism ethics who had couched them in more sophisticated terms today. As we have seen, the professor obviously has his special interests with their questionable purposes. He is himself a professional censor, a gate-keeping member and elite media spokesman for the power elite, whose special interest for the sake of his livelihood is in maintaining its legal power over the political economy of the United States at all costs. We suspect that his occasional appearance as a liberal professor interested in social justice is that of a wolf in sheep's clothing. Any form of social justice that would provide universal health care and housing and feed everyone by emphasizing production and a just distribution of the products instead of the accumulation of abstract money-power into a few hands, is intolerable to the power elite and the vested interests whose main purpose is to get as much as they can for nothing by buying cheap and selling dear. After all, if production were ramped up to potential capacity, or roughly ten times or more of current production, the world would be awash in goods and capitalists as organized would go broke because there would be no more profit in distributing plentiful basic goods than there is in distributing everyday air. In effect, production must be sabotaged in order to profit by it.
But Schicklgruber's "mob of the simple and credulous" must not hear of that from the mainstream press, not the one subject to editors interested in our polemical interpretation of Professor Wasserman’s journalism ethics. He has no doubt profited handsomely for upholding the Establishment, which cloaks itself in a pretense of democracy, which is a democratic republic that actually represents a particular minority, the big money interests, not the majority of the people, the less privileged whom the vested interests fear and would pacify at the least expense. He may pose as a liberal, but he obviously adheres to the Republican model, the Democratic model being too dangerous to govern effectively.
Professor Wasserman would keep the plutocrats' filthy mitts off the news business that its virtue be maintained, yet he neglects to point out in his article, perhaps due to lack of space, that the business of the news business is business, that the news business is ultimately dependent upon and beholden to the same plutocratic or Big Money interests he is wont to criticize. If that be true, then in effect he has said nothing at all, at least not to the critical reader, yet his editorial advertisement is sophisticated enough to resemble wisdom and may trap unwary students of journalism ethics into believing that nothing exists but fine arguments which might prove that bad is good and vice versa - the protean sophist can devise all sorts of conversations to win arguments, and thus enroll ambitious students for a fee. Plato suggested that the art of a Sophist "may be traced as a branch of the appropriate acquisitive family which hunts animals - living and tame animals - which hunts man, privately or for hire, taking money in exchange, having the semblance of education, and this is termed Sophistry, and is a hunt after young men of wealth and rank."
As for virtue, the chief one presumably being the Wisdom that sophists imitate, "Our friend the Sophist, where art may now be traced from the art of acquisition through exchange, trade, merchandise, to a merchandise of the soul which is concerned with speech and the knowledge of virtue." Loquacious people such as the present writer converse for the pleasure of conversation, and their conversation might not please everyone within earshot, but the "wonderful Sophist…is a money-making species of the Eristic, disputatious, controversial, pugnacious, combative, acquisitive family."
Must we war for peace? Must we fight for happiness? Shall Apollo or Zeus be our chief guide? Must journalism always be a crossing of swords, such as this one declaring that the journalism ethics of a certain esteemed professor is sophisticated hogwash? Are not the artful games at Delphi far more rewarding than the violent competition on Olympus?
The phase, “the pursuit of happiness”, was substituted for the original phrase, “The pursuit of property”, for the sake of appearances, but the materialistic spirit of the latter nevertheless prevails. The disagreeable fact of the matter is that our system has made whores of us all if we are not that by nature, and that is why, for example, that the United States Congress is the greatest whorehouse in America. How can we justly condemn prostitution when the most of us rent out not only our bodies but our souls as well to earn our daily bread? Of course our whoredom is mostly involuntary as the most of us have to work most of our lives to produce mountains of junk, trash and garbage that we may not want but must produce in order to have a bite to eat and a roof over our heads.
It finally appears that a truly virtuous journalist should not be paid at all for representing truth, and neither should publishers profit from doing the same, nor should virtuous ethics professors take a fee for preaching ethics, not to mention fees for the Savior’s salvation. Indeed, we would all be better off devoting ourselves to virtuous works, and working less for pay. Then we would all be a lot wiser, and our Establishment far more just and democratic.
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