My favorite line about objectivity came from from Alex Cockburn paroding McNeil or was it Lehrer? It went something like "today the issue we will be discussing is child molestation. Mr. Doe, your a known child molestor what... Now let's hear from little Johnny, who was molested by Mr. Doe..."
Here's what a couple mainstream journalists had to say about objectivity and the war in Iraq.
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Interesting stuff here by Morley Safer. Anyone tell him that he IS the news? I'm getting tired of hearing mea culpas from reporters after the fact. "We didn't do our jobs very well," they say, as if it's some post-game analysis, and not serious complicity in a huge crime that has cost thousands of lives. And then they go on and continue to not do their jobs!
Mark my words, they'll have these little apology fests again and again. Why don't they take the simple lesson -- assume governments always lie? Make them prove their case, and just ignore their pronouncements if they don't.
I love the stuff about WMD. Safer defends journalists by saying that there was no way for journalists to disprove Bush's claim that Hussein had enormous stockpiles of WMD. How about simply asking Bush to provide evidence? If Bush was so certain where the WMD were, why not give that information to inspectors? Right there, we have the most brazen lie and what did the press do? They didn't act like liberals or conservatives -- they served power. Just like Vietnam for the first 20 years of our involvement there -- just like Nicaragua, El Salvador, Cuba, Haiti, Grenada, Panama, Libya, Lebanon, and oh yeah, remember the Soviet Union?
Paul Gilmore
Paul,
This is why we are in big trouble from a progressive social change perspective. The current system has two huge advantages over its more authoritarian predecessors. 1) Capitalism, at least in the first world, gives the illusion (with just enough anecdotal evidence)of infinite opportunity and upward mobility which makes believers of even the loliest plebe. 2) Mea culpas come fast and furious in this place. Yeah Vietnam was bad but that was in the past. Sure we occupied the Philipines for decades and still have bases there but that was in the past.....
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