The New Rules for the New Millennium
Gary Webb
When the newspaper I worked for in Kentucky
in the 1970s, The Kentucky Post, took the plunge and hiked its
street price from 20 cents to a quarter, the executive editor,
Vance Trimble, instructed our political cartoonist to design a
series of full-page house ads justifying the price increase. One
of those ads still hangs on my wall. It depicts an outraged tycoon,
replete with vest and felt hat, brandishing a copy of our newspaper
and shouting at a harried editor: "Kill that story, Mr. Editor...or
else!"
We were worth a quarter, the ad argued,
because we weren't some "soft, flabby, spineless" newspaper. We'd
tell that fat cat to take a long walk off a short pier.
"Our readers would be shocked if any kind
of threat swayed the editor," the ad declared. "If it happens,
we print it. Kill a story? Never! There are no fetters on our
reporters. Nor must they bow to sacred cows. On every story, the
editor says: 'Get the facts. And let the fur fly!' Our reporters
appreciate that. They are proud they can be square-shooters."
The newspaper for the most part held to that
creed. When the executive editor was arrested for drunk driving,
a photographer was dispatched to the city jail and the next day
the paper carried a picture of our disheveled boss sitting forlornly
in a holding cell. The newspaper had done the same thing to many
other prominent citizens, he reminded the stunned staff after
his release. Why should he be treated any differently?
How quaint that all sounds 20 years later.
And how distant that post-Watergate era seems. Today, we see corporate
news executives boasting not of the hardness of their asses, but
of the value of their assets. We witness them groveling for public
forgiveness because something their reporters wrote offended powerful
interests, or raised uncomfortable questions about the past. Stories
that meet every traditional standard of objective journalism are
retracted or renounced, not because they are false-but because
they are true.
The depth of this depravity (so far) was
reached the day New York attorney Floyd Abrams decided CNN/Time
Warner should retract its explosive report on a covert CIA operation
known as Tailwind, which was alleged to have involved the use
of nerve gas against American deserters in Southeast Asia in the
1970s. I saw Abrams on a talk show afterwards arguing that the
ultimate truth of the Tailwind story was irrelevant to CNN's retraction
of it.
"It doesn't necessarily mean that the story
isn't true," Abrams insisted. "Who knows? Someday we might find
other information. And, you know, maybe someday I'll be back here
again, having done another report saying that, ‘You know what?
It was all true.’”
Stop and savor that for a moment. Let its
logic worm its way through your brain, because it is the pure,
unadulterated essence of what's wrong with corporate journalism
today. Could anyone honestly have dreamed that one day a major
news organization would retract and apologize for a story that
even it acknowledges could well be true?
For that matter, who could have envisioned
the day when a veteran investigative reporter would be convicted
of a felony for printing the voicemail messages of executives
of a corporation that was allegedly looting, pillaging, and bribing
its way through Central America? Yet, like CNN producers April
Oliver and Jack Smith, Cincinnati Enquirer reporter Mike Gallagher
was fired, his work "renounced" as his editors ludicrously wrote
in a front-page apology, and he has been uniformly reviled in
the mass media as a fabricator for his devastating exposé of Chiquita
Brands International. So far, however, no one has shown that his
stories contain a single, solitary inaccuracy. Again, the truth
seems irrelevant, a sideshow not worthy of serious discussion.
this article copyright 1999 Gary Webb
You Are Being Lied To copyright 2001
The Disinformation Company, Ltd.
