An excellent rumination on the role academics might play in filling the widening gaps in journalism’s function as a gatekeeper for “truth”.

By Charles Lewis, American University

More then ever, we are awash in information. With the advent of the internet, search engines and now more than two billion people wired users globally, information “has become the modern era’s defining quality, the blood, the fuel, the vital principle of our world”, writes author James Gleick:

We are all patrons of the Library of Babel now, and we are the librarians, too.

The problem, of course, is that the quality of information varies widely. Much of it is utterly useless, woefully incomplete or worse, wilfully misleading. As a citizen and reporter watching those in power for more than 30 years, I am accustomed to being lied to. But it seems to have got noticeably worse in recent years.

In the United States, consider how Democratic and Republican presidents have repeatedly delayed and distorted the political truth. In 1964, president Lyndon Johnson was secretly girding for a major war in Vietnam while publicly promising not to send more soldiers. In 1972, president Richard Nixon secretly authorised a political “dirty tricks” operation inside the White House that, among many other things, effectively derailed the campaign of his most formidable Democratic foe, Senator Edmund Muskie. Both incumbent presidents breezed to their election victories in those years.

In the case of the Vietnam War (1962-1975), in which hundreds of thousands of lives were lost, the public learned over a period of years – with astonishing revelations still trickling out four decades later – that the rationale for direct US involvement there actually was a monstrous lie.

Instead of being attacked in a remote part of the world known as the “Gulf of Tonkin” by the North Vietnamese, as Johnson had announced, the United States government had in fact been engaged for months in various top secret intelligence gathering activities in flagrant violation of North Vietnam’s sovereign land, air space and territorial waters, including aggressive military provocations against that country.

Many of these and other lies and distortions were officially documented in the Pentagon Papers – the Department of Defense’s secret, voluminous history of the Vietnam War – which were leaked to reporters and courageously published by The New York Times, The Washington Post and other newspapers in June 1971.

The publishing of the Pentagon Papers and the media’s coverage of the Nixon Watergate scandal still represent a high-water mark in the struggle between raw political power and democratic values. But even with those emblematic moments, important information about those in power took years to become known to the public.

As the then-executive editor of The Washington Post, Benjamin Bradlee, mused two decades later: “what might have happened had the truth emerged in 1963 instead of 1971?”

At a public lecture at Harvard University in 1991, Bradlee said:

It seems to me that lying has reached such epidemic proportions in our culture and among our institutions in recent years that we’ve all become immunised to it. What the hell ever happened to righteous indignation, anyway?

In March 2003, almost four decades after the Johnson administration escalated the war in Vietnam under false pretences, the Bush administration led the US and several of its allies to war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq on the basis of erroneous information about “weapons of mass destruction”.

In the two years following September 11, 2001, president George W. Bush and seven of his administration’s top officials made at least 935 false statements about the national security threat posed by Iraq, as my researchers and I reported in 2008. The number of these statements spiked upwards at politically strategic moments – specifically before the October 2002 congressional vote on the war, and between January and March 2003, from Secretary of State Colin Powell’s presentation to the United Nations to the invasion itself.

The New York Times newspaper has brought to light many hidden truths – such as the Pentagon Papers in its history. cliff1066

The carefully orchestrated campaign about Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction led the nation to war under decidedly false pretences. The cumulative effect of these incorrect, bellicose statements – amplified by thousands of uncritical news stories and broadcasts – was massive. Worse, much of the saturation media coverage provided additional, “independent” validation of the Bush administration’s misstatements about Iraq.

Five years after the invasion of Iraq, reporter David Barstow of the New York Times exposed how the Pentagon had quietly recruited 75 retired military officers to be “independent”, paid consultant, radio and television analysts. In numerous meetings and thousands of emails, they were secretly coached about precisely how to make the public case for war in Iraq on the air. Many of these military experts also had significant, undisclosed financial ties to defence companies that were benefiting from the policies they were “analysing”.

The broadcast news media essentially ignored these stunning revelations, neither acknowledging their own dubious use of such compromised “talking heads” nor apologising to the public for their irresponsible propagation of the government’s propaganda.

Unfortunately, most national reporters and their news organisations were figuratively embedded in the almost impenetrable din of official disinformation. But to paraphrase Bradlee’s excellent question about Vietnam, what might have happened if the public had discovered the truth about the actual threat posed by Iraq in 2002 instead of years later? Two distant quagmires, 20 years of massive bloodshed in wars in Vietnam and Iraq, might have been avoided, and trillions of taxpayer dollars saved, if the American people had been better informed with real-time truth about the specious official statements.

But the largest cumulative loss of life resulting from propaganda and deception in the last century was actually not from Adolf Hitler and his Third Reich or any other genocidal despot. It was from monstrously duplicitous industries that manufacture deadly products. And no industry has been more deceitful or caused more human carnage than the tobacco companies.

In the 20th century, 100 million people around the world died from smoking-related illnesses, according to the World Health Organization. And that number is expected to soar to an estimated one billion smoking-related deaths in this century.

In 2006, a US federal judge ruled that they had violated the federal racketeering laws, and while:

…selling a highly addictive product which causes diseases that lead to a staggering number of deaths per year…for at least 50 years or more…they have consistently, repeatedly, and with enormous skill and sophistication, denied these facts to the public, to the government, and to the public health community.

But, of course, deliberately blowing smoke about their deadly products has hardly been limited to the cigarette manufacturers. The asbestos, coal, chemical, lead paint, pharmaceutical and many other industries have profited from the same modus operandi. Sometimes the specific subterfuge has been independently exposed by tenacious journalists, but too often years after the fact and, tragically, sometimes decades so.

This disturbing phenomenon unfortunately continues today, but now our professional ranks are fewer. Now we have a vastly reduced number of traditional truth-tellers and a growing number of well-paid poseurs who advise their clients on how to circumvent or “spin” those asking critical, independent questions, including journalists.

In the United States today, we have one-third fewer newspaper/print reporters today than we had 20 years ago. And meanwhile, according to authors John Nichols and Robert McChesney, the ratio of public relations people to working journalists has gone from nearly one to one in 1960 to now four “flacks” for every one working journalist. Not surprisingly under the circumstances, a disturbing proportion of daily newspaper stories today are based upon press releases.

British journalist Nick Davies labelled this lamentable practice “churnalism” in his 2008 book, Flat Earth News. In 2011, the non-profit organisation Media Standards Trust in the United Kingdom launched the churnalism.com website, that “lets people compare press releases with published news articles”.

The work of journalists has made a significant impact on contemporary US history. They have fearlessly exposed abuses of power, from the “red scare” demagoguery of Senator Joseph McCarthy in the early 1950s to atrocities during the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal and the various heinous excesses of corporate power over many decades. More recently, reporters have revealed the various improper uses of US power in post-9/11 America.

Since 2005, in preparation for a book, I have been conducting video/audio oral history interviews with 25 important national journalists – from Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward and Ben Bradlee to Seymour Hersh, Dana Priest and Daniel Schorr – who through their work effectively have stood up to power.

This multimedia online presentation at www.investigatingpower.org includes career and iconic “moments of truth” timelines and related reference material. It is an ongoing companion to The Future of Truth, which will be released next year, and also fodder for a multi-hour television documentary series.

I wanted to learn more about these important truth-tellers and the legions of other hearty souls like them, in part to educate future generations about the importance of this kind of reporting. In the 21st century, our finite, non-sustainable, inter-connected world is at a critical crossroads. How will our elected leaders address the most pressing issues of our time, such as climate change, the shortage of water, the growing rich-poor inequalities and related human migrations?

In the US and other democracies, any attempt at honest, effective governance, of course, is predicated upon the widespread availability of timely, accurate information. Given the profound international dimensions of what we are all facing, investigative news-gathering must necessarily widen and become more global. But even in the 21st century, most news coverage is still overwhelmingly local or national.

We must think anew about who we are, what we do, why we do it, technologically how we do it and for whom. We must identify kindred souls who also investigate the uses and abuses of power, who also have exacting professional standards and approach their subjects with an independent scepticism and distance. They should meticulously peruse secondary and primary written sources, and then interview the relevant secondary and then primary human sources.

The fact is, thousands of academics today function as de facto in-depth journalists – from the forensic accountants to the political scientists tracking political corruption, from economists to investigative historians, from public anthropologists to those who work in data-mining, statistics, and human rights, environmental and other law-related specialties.

I have formally proposed at American University a new interdisciplinary field of study that can help to broaden and redefine the practice of journalism. I am calling it “accountability studies”.

Whether or not we want to acknowledge it, many intelligent, talented young people who would like to become professional journalists but can’t find a job will increasingly join the ranks of another public-minded, “knowledge worker” profession. They may instead become researchers, writers and editors at non-government organisations (there are 1.5 million NGOs in the US alone), including policy-related, specialised subject think tanks.

This is certainly not a panacea for the drop in the number of journalists – these organisations have points of view that they advocate softly or not so softly. But, for example, who covers human rights more thoroughly: Human Rights Watch, with 280 full-time employees and offices in 16 cities around the world, or the premier newspaper in the US, UK or Australia? I’m afraid there is no comparison. Virtually all of these folks are highly educated and write careful, well-documented, scholarly and more popular articles, op-ed essays, blogs and books, all accessible and published online.

Imagine if more of these silo walls came down and social scientists and journalists in individual countries and across national borders began to communicate and collaborate more about the most important issues of our time. And there are vast resources available that are not commercial advertising, but instead philanthropic foundations and individual concerned citizens who spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year in the United States alone to enable the publication of high quality, well-written information.

In the spirit of such confluences, I note the innovation in Australia of The Conversation website, now operating also in the UK and beginning to develop in the US, which melds the grey matter and research and writing talents of energetic academics who find the op-ed gatekeepers of traditional newspapers to be too exclusionary and limited.

And it is also in that spirit of collaboration that American University and my Investigative Reporting Workshop have jointly hired a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter with The Washington Post. This is unprecedented and may be, I believe, the beginning of a new way forward for both truth-telling and new future economic strategies and models.

My modus operandi is that it is better to try and fail, than not to have tried at all.

Why? Because given the present circumstances, there is too little time and there are too many subjects and frankly just too many bastards to investigate in this intricate, imperilled world we live in. We must broaden our views about who is “worthy” to gather and publish information outside our profession; we can and we must adapt and play in the sandbox with others.

What drives me is a pressing sense of urgency, for the abuses of power in the world today far, far exceed our collective capacities to investigate and expose them. We – along with the other inquisitive, investigative professions – are society’s proverbial canaries in the mineshaft.

We must all work together to attempt to enlarge the public space for watchdog or accountability journalism, in the US and around the world.

This article was prepared for the July-August edition of the The Walkley Magazine: Inside the Media in Australia and New Zealand. Charles Lewis will be a guest of The Walkley Foundation at the Storyology: Ideas Write Now! event in Surry Hills, Sydney, August 6 to 9 – tickets at http://www.storyology.org.au.

This article was originally published at The Conversation.
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