Media - From Versailles to Washington
    By Paul Cauchon
    Devoir

    Monday 21 August 2006

    Kristina Borjesson takes pleasure turning the knife in the wound. Three years ago, this American journalist published Black List, a book that enjoyed a certain success and that described why certain journalistic investigations remain a dead letter in the United States.

    She's back at it again with an even stronger work, Media Control (published in French this summer by Éditions des Arènes), a passionate analysis of the relations between the Bush administration and the American media.

    The book is based on a series of interviews with various journalists who belong to the elite, who are not particularly leftist, and who describe the way the Bush administration operates, while trying to understand how it dragged its country into a war against Iraq and Saddam Hussein.

    The result: 300 devastating pages on the media's errors, omissions, and sins, as well as politicians' manipulations.

    The first to sound the charge is John MacArthur, president and director of Harper's Magazine (he also collaborates with other media, including Le Devoir). The way the American media behaved before the start of the war is "contemptible," he immediately declares.

    MacArthur, but also all the others who were interviewed, show how it was possible to refute the arguments brandished by the Bush administration to justify the war and how the journalists who did so were trivialized by their colleagues or by media management. MacArthur does not believe that several media's lack of critical sense is linked to concentration in the great media empires. Rather, he says, it's a matter of herd instinct. "No one wants to feel socially excluded. Everyone wants to live at Versailles. And Washington is Versailles. All journalists want to have the closest access to the Sun-King."

    "They want to be part of the power structure."

    This argument is echoed by others who highlight how journalists are themselves part of the establishment and don't want to hurt their highly placed sources so they can continue to do their jobs.

    John Walcott, who manages the Washington bureau of the Knight Ridder Group, expresses it differently. "Unlike our competitors, who address the clutches that send people off to war, we write for those who go to die there, for their families and friends."

    Kristina Borjesson recalls that Knight Ridder is the second largest press group in the United States. The newspapers in this group have published the articles most critical of the Bush administration. But these articles don't have the following of other media. Why? Because the group, which publishes important newspapers in cities like Philadelphia, Detroit and Kansas City, has no paper in Washington or New York, where one finds the newspapers that set the tone and where television reigns supreme.

    When one has good information, then one's paper must know how to highlight it. Walter Pincus, the Washington Post's national security expert, explains how one of his famous articles, which proved how the president was manipulating the facts about the threat Saddam Hussein represented, found itself on page 17 of the newspaper rather than making the front page.

    One anecdote illustrates another key idea that one rediscovers everywhere in the book: most media owners, John MacArthur explains, "are ultra-reactionary personalities, who are part of the establishment and want to please the people they socialize with."

    As for Pincus, he also maintains that the new generation of journalists is more and more ignorant and conformist. "Reporters who cover the news change all the time; they don't know anything about history and context and don't have the time to learn to get to know the institutions."

    Add to that the attitude of the Bush administration itself, which has known how to manipulate the media with a remarkable cynicism. For Ron Suskind, who wrote for the Wall Street Journal for a long time and who is the author of significant books about President Bush, the Bush administration considers the press to be just another pressure group. "For them, the press serves only to ratify what they've decided."

    There are many more testimonies, but I'll cite that of Chris Hedges, a war correspondent for 20 years. During the runup to the war, he explains, the media increased their articles on American firepower and the value of the American Army. "They titillated the most intense feelings of American society," he says, by exalting "the myth of glory, heroism, power."

    But never, he adds, "do they show a disemboweled kid with his legs torn off who agonizes for 20 minutes on the sand." He's seen that kind of image. And when he was invited to give university lectures to talk about what he had witnessed, do you believe he was applauded? On several occasions, he had to engage body guards to protect him from a hostile public that booed his lack of patriotism.

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