The News is Dead
by David Essex

On a rainy afternoon a few years ago, I was looking for something to do with a friend. She suggested we go see the exhibit of Pulitzer photographs at the old Newseum in Arlington. It turned out to be a somber sort of date. Many of the Pulitzer pictures are grizzly and haunting, but none more so that Kevin Carter's famous shot of the Sudanese child dying of starvation in the desert, a vulture waiting a few yards away for its own meal. Two months after he received the Pulitzer for this shot, Carter himself became news, briefly; he committed suicide, overloaded apparently on the horrors his work had acquainted him with.

Now there is to be a new Newseum in Washington, just off the Mall. The present site of the new Newseum might serve, like Carter's shot, as what Michael Herr called a "condensed symbol." It's at the intersection of Pennsylvania and Constitution, just north of the National Gallery of Art and east of the Capitol Grille, a pricey hangout for expensive lobbyists, the superannuated frat boys of Capitol Hill, and the girls who find their banal power alluring. Right now the site looks like the old B. Kliban cartoon-concept, "The Nixon Memorial," just a huge concrete-lined orifice in the ground. But it could easily be a mausoleum for news as a viable entity in our society.

The whole concept of a "Newseum," a museum of the news, seems a bit oxymoronic. Isn't news by nature ephemeral, and even a bit trivial, in the broad perspective of history? Sure, some objets de news do take on a sort of iconic significance that rewards contemplation in a quiet, hallowing contemplative setting. But for the most part, the news, insofar as it has significance beyond today or this week, should be enshrined in historical texts, reduced to its information (or deconstruction).

Those expressive modes that the gods mean to kill, they first put in a museum. There are now pompous shrines to rock n' roll in Cleveland and Seattle, but rock is arguably going the way of the sonnet. And news as we have known it is circling the drain too.

Consider, as evidence that news is dead, this exercise in compare and contrast: On Nov. 3, 1986, the Lebanese magazine Al-Shiraa reported that the Reagan administration had been selling missiles to the same Iranian regime that had truck-bombed 241 American marines in Beruit. A scandal ensued. President Reagan felt the need to go on TV and deny the reports, but as the media put the evidence before the public, soon had to retract his denial. Hearings were held, a special prosecutor was appointed and he obtained felony convictions of key members of what he called Reagan's "shadow government." There was abundant evidence of high crimes by both Reagan and George H. W. Bush, but because Reagan was on his way out, and Congress had no stomach for another Watergate, motions for impeachment languished. The system had worked, albeit imperfectly, through the operation of a free press.

By contrast: On May 1, 2005, The Times of London, one of the most prestigious papers in the English-speaking world published a leaked memo. It contained the minutes from a July 2002 meeting of Tony Blair's cabinet, wherein the head of British intelligence spoke about the doings of his counterparts in America. In July 2002, the memo reported that the Bush administration had already decided to attack Iraq, and planned to "fix the facts and intelligence" to support that foregone conclusion.

Ironically, the following January Bush would use famously "sexed-up" British intelligence to announce that "the British have learned" about Saddam's nefarious (and wholly mythical) nuclear capabilities. But for now, only the Brits seem likely to learn about smoking-gun evidence that President Bush and his cronies predicated the half-trillion dollar Iraq war on numerous orchestrated lies. The British authorities do not deny the authenticity of the report, so there will be no "Memogate" defense mounted by the bloggers of Powerline, as in the alleged forgeries supporting the unrefuted claim that W went AWOL from the Champagne Squadron.

Indeed, a former "high-level official" in the Bush administration (almost certainly Richard C. Clarke) has confirmed the precise accuracy of the minutes. The memo is known around the world thanks to the Web and bloggers, but the major American organs of the news are very slow to pick up the story. The Washington Post ignored it until May 13, and then buried it on A-18. The New York Times woke up on May 20, leading with a mealy-mouthed dismissal:

More than two weeks after its publication in London, a previously secret British government memorandum that reported in July 2002 that President Bush had decided to "remove Saddam, through military action" is still creating a stir among administration critics. They are portraying it as evidence that Mr. Bush was intent on war with Iraq earlier than the White House has acknowledged...

The story then, according to the Grey Lady, is the peculiar, fortnight-long agitation of certain "critics" over the misdating of the President's subjective states. It doesn't occur to the writer that the memo indicts President Bush, Tony Blair, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, et al, as co-conspirators in a heinously cynical, deadly and catastrophic deception of the British and American people. Still, striving for Fox-style balance, the piece does quote the blasé dismissal of the story by Tony Blair's mouthpiece, "A spokesman for Mr. Blair has said that the memorandum does not add significantly to previous accounts of decision making before the war." It's old news apparently, maybe even history.

Predictably enough, CNN, still embedded with the Cakewalk Brigade, led with a similar dismissal by Bush's Chief Revisionist:

Claims in a recently uncovered British memo that intelligence was "being fixed" to support the Iraq war as early as mid-2002 are "flat out wrong," White House press secretary Scott McClellan said Monday.

McClellan insisted the process leading up to the decision to go to war was "very public" — and that the decision to invade in March 2003 was taken only after Iraq refused to comply with its "international obligations."

"The president of the United States, in a very public way, reached out to people across the world, went to the United Nations and tried to resolve this in a diplomatic manner," McClellan said.

"Saddam Hussein was the one, in the end, who chose continued defiance. And only then was the decision made, as a last resort, to go into Iraq."

McClellan can make such claims only now that American news is all but extinct. He is aware that outside the blogosphere nobody will dare call him or the president on even such blatant falsehoods as, this one, on the causes of the Iraq war, from July 14, 2003:

The larger point is, and the fundamental question is, did Saddam Hussein have a weapons program? And the answer is, absolutely. And we gave him a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn't let them in. And, therefore, after a reasonable request, we decided to remove him from power, along with other nations, so as to make sure he was not a threat to the United States and our friends and allies in the region.

It's possible that Bush, living as he admits he does, in a news-free bubble, may not have known that Hans Blix and the UN inspectors were in Iraq, accurately reporting no weapons of mass destruction, right up until the time they fled in fear of American bombers. But shouldn't the White House press corps have called bullshit on this type of thing, just as they should when Scott McClellan tries it? Salon's Joe Conason pointed out the oddity of this at the time but hardly anybody else seemed to notice.

Conason is probably used to this sort of thing. In February 2000, he published in Harpers a long expose of then-candidate George W. Bush's many failures, felonies and conflicts of interests, an article so thoroughly damning that, had it been echoed by the reporters on the campaign trail, it might have spared us the Florida fiasco and so much else. Perhaps the man in the White House in August 2001 would have turned away from the fate of the frozen extra embryos and actually read those reports about Al Qaeda's plans, and their notion of using airlines as missiles. But the reporters on Ken Lay's plane with Bush were too busy being charmed and getting fraternity nicknames to worry about their man's manifest unfitness. There's a whiff of Shakespearean comedy about it all, specifically, Henry IV:

FALSTAFF: An old lord of the council rated me the other day in the street about you, sir, but I marked him not; and yet he talked very wisely, but I regarded him not; and yet he talked wisely, and in the street too.

PRINCE HENRY: Thou didst well; for wisdom cries out in the streets, and no man regards it.

Indeed, George W. Bush, even more that the famously Tefloned Ronald Reagan, seems to be utterly wisdom-proof. Doubtless this is due in part to work begun after Vietnam and Watergate, when the Right Wingers realized that in order to get their way, they'd have to really "work the refs," that is, undercut the effectiveness of the mainstream press. If the New York Times could publish the Pentagon Papers, and the Washington Post the Nixon tapes, and thus change minds all over the country, this was going to be a real impediment to efficient corporate management of the Republic.

So a Dolchstosslegende was forged about honorable men being stabbed in the back by a "liberal media," and an old regulation of the public airwaves ("The Fairness Doctrine") was rescinded in the name of corporate streamlining.

Soon the senilescent Katherine Graham, publisher of the once- watchful Washington Post started lunching with Nancy Reagan and shrewd observers saw in this a paradigm shift. All this certainly helped Reagan operate his "shadow government" in the Office of Counter-Terrorism, and it certainly helped George H.W. Bush keep the facts about Iran-contra under wraps long enough to get elected, but the work of undoing the news wouldn't really be perfected until the 1990's brought the advent of Rush Limbaugh, G. Gordon Liddy and their ilk, and the parallel ascent of Fox News.

The constant, ubiquitous, carping about the "liberal media" has had two disastrous cumulative effects: for millions of Americans it has undermined the moral authority of the media to critique anything Republican, and it has made editors so defensive that in the name of balance they constantly self-censor, to the profound benefit of the reactionary Right. This is why an obvious phony, a blatant mental and moral pipsqueak like Bush was depicted as a macho, straight-shooter throughout the 2000 campaign, and while the Washington Post, the New York Times and the TV networks constantly echoed the Dittoheads' locker-room mockeries of Al Gore. It is also why a significant number of Americans do not know today that George Bush "won" the Florida vote only through the felonious disenfranchisement of more than 50,000 (mostly black) voters and inumerable other election "irregularities."

Once Bush was in things began to deteriorate ever more rapidly. He appointed corporate bootlicker and dutiful son, Michael Powell, as chairman of the FCC, to ensure that the administration's critics, nipple flashers and potty-mouths would be punished, while right-wing media moguls would get as much laissez-faire as the public would stand for. Still, Bush's numbers were guttering in the summer of 2001, as that portion of the people who can't be fooled all the time began to see for themselves his indelible mediocrity.

But at summer's end, of course, Sept. 11, 2001, famously "changed everything" (except the unprincipled incompetence of the president) and so for a while the major news organizations made him Saint George, utterly ignoring his gaffes, and firing anyone who suggested he'd been less than perfect in his performance. Ari Fleischer warned the citizens, "People have to watch what they say," and this had the intended chilling effect.

Then Enron imploded, leaving a $40 billion hole in the citizens' assets and suddenly the CEO presidency didn't sound so great. When Bush went on television to speak sternly about corporate corruption a few people dimly remembered his close ties with Ken Lay, and in the summer of 2002 others started bringing up his own corporate practices, including his insider sale of Harken Energy stock, which netted him over $400,000 just before word came out that the company was going down the toilet.

Howard Kurtz, of CNN and the Washington Post seemed to have appointed himself GOP spinmeister on this issue, whining pointedly, "Why is the press resurrecting, like that 7-million-year-old human skull, this 13-year-old incident, in which Bush sold some stock in his company Harken Energy?" Karl Rove understood that this (among other things) might spell trouble in the fall's mid-term elections, possibly even in Bush's bid for a second term, but he'd already decided that the administration, morally, intellectually and fiscally bankrupt as it was, could still win on national defense issues, provided nobody noticed what a crappy job they'd done defending New York and Washington, catching Osama, securing ports and chemical plants, punishing Pakistani nuke merchants, et cetera.

What was needed was the mother of all distractions, and lo, it was precisely at this time that Sir Richard Dearlove, came back from Washington with the news, as recorded by Matthew Rycroft, (here's his e-mail at the British Embassy in Sarajevo, by the way: britemba@bih.net.ba — ask him about the memo) that the Bush administration had definitely decided to start a new war. They were going to unveil it in September because, as Bush's man Andy Card said, "You don't roll a new product out in the summer." Once again, the Bush people were thinking in advertese. Truth wasn't important, just efficacy.

The Iraq fiasco is bottomless of course, as would be an account of media collaboration in selling it to the public. It sold a lot of papers, it bumped up ratings. The fiasco is largely invisible to Americans, because the country has grown too dangerous for camera crews to cover it, and it's even dangerous for editors to run the bad news that comes out. It's much safer to focus on runaway brides, pedophile pop stars, juiced athletes and metaphorical nukes on the Senate floor.

To ensure that the news stays safe for Bush journalists have been bribed to shill administration policies, PBS and NPR have been given Republican operatives for ombudsmen, a Christian homosexual prostitute who posed as a former Marine to spice his services online was welcomed to the White House so he could ask the Bush sympathetic questions, and at the president's "public" appearances the public is carefully screened lest a critical citizen ask a hard question in front of the press corps.

Michael Isikoff and the editors of Newsweek are threatened with a dire fate, having apparently caused the Muslims of the world to hate America with a questionable line about Quran abuse that can't be supported with videotape. We do have tape of a Marine shooting an unarmed wounded prisoner in a mosque, and endless photos of torture and even murder, but that seems to have been lost to the national retrograde amnesia.

The news is dead. It belongs in a museum now. I wonder if there will be an exhibit in the Newseum on Robert Novak's Valerie Plame column. That, it seems to me, is an object worth contemplating, an actual text-crime, for which some people may actually go to jail. I suspect visitors would wonder why not Novak or the actual leakers. But that's what museums are for, ideally, to make us think and wonder.

E-mail David Essex at djessex@earthlink.net.

— graphic by Derek Evernden (derek@ocellus.net)