[Accuracy no longer matters. Witnessing no longer matters.
Conformity matters. ]
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THE HISTORIC COLLAPSE OF JOURNALISM  
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Patrick Lawrence
September 6, 2022
Consortium News
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_ Accuracy no longer matters. Witnessing no longer matters.
Conformity matters. _

,

 

I have never gotten over a story _The New York Times _ran in
its Sunday magazine
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in May 2016. Maybe you will remember the occasion. It was a lengthy
profile of Ben Rhodes, the Obama administration’s chief adviser for
“strategic communications.” It was written by a reporter named
David Samuels.

These two made a striking pair — fitting, I would say. Rhodes was an
aspiring fiction writer living in Brooklyn when, by the unlikeliest of
turns, he found his way into the inner circle of the Obama White
House. Samuels, a freelancer who usually covered popular culture
celebrities, had long earlier succumbed to that unfortunately clever
style commonly affected by those writing about rock stars and others
of greater or lesser frivolity.

Rhodes’ job was to spin “some larger restructuring of the American
narrative,” as Samuels put it. “Rhodes is a storyteller who uses a
writer’s tools to advance an agenda that is packaged as politics.”
A professional flack straight out of Edward Bernays, in plain English.
A teller of tales trafficking in manipulable facts and happy endings.
“Packaged as politics:” a nice touch conveying the commodification
of our public discourse.

Rhodes and Ned Price, his deputy, were social-media acrobats. Price, a
former C.I.A. analyst and now the State Department’s spokesman,
recounted without inhibition how they fed White House correspondents,
columnists, and others in positions to influence public opinion as
a _fois gras _farmer feeds his geese.

Here is Price on the day-to-day of the exercise:

“There are sort of these force multipliers. We have
our _compadres_. I will reach out to a couple of people, and, you
know, I wouldn’t want to name them…. And I’ll give them some
color, and the next thing I know, lots of these guys are in the
dot-com publishing space and have huge followings, and they’ll be
putting out this message on their own.”

Rhodes gave Samuels a more structured analysis of this arrangement:

“All the newspapers used to have foreign bureaus. Now they don’t.
They call us to explain to them what is happening in Moscow or Cairo.
Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The
average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting
experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a
sea change. They literally know nothing.”

I wrote at length about the _Times _piece in _Salon_, where I was
foreign affairs columnist at the time. There was so much to unpack in
Samuels’s report I hardly knew where to begin. In Price we had
a complete failure to understand the role of properly functioning
media and the nature of public space altogether.

Price live blogging at the White House, Aug. 2014. (Kori
Schulman/Obama Archives)

Rhodes described a White House press corps comprised of
post-adolescents thoroughly dependent on the geese-feeding
arrangement, especially when they reported on national security
questions: “They literally know nothing.”

Rhodes and Price were describing some qualitative turn in the
media’s relations with power. I do not mean to suggest these
relations were ever in living memory very good, but at some point
there had been a swoon, a giving way from bad to worse. “When you
read routine press reports in the _Times _or any of the other major
dailies,” I wrote of the Rhodes profile, “you are looking at what
the clerks we still call reporters post on government bulletin boards,
which we still call newspapers.”

When did this come about? Why had this come about? Was there yet worse
to come? How did we get here, in other words, and where are we going?
These were my questions. They are still my questions. I am moved to
consider them again by the coverage of mainstream correspondents
working in Ukraine. Among the many things we may want to call them,
they are geese.

_THE NEW YORKER_ ONCE UPON A TIME

My first inkling that something was changing in the way the American
press looked out at the world and reported what its correspondents saw
was close to home, a small-bore case — small bore, something large
to think about in the telling of it. I was living in Japan at the
time, the late 1980s through the mid–1990s. Apart from my duties for
the _International Herald Tribune_, I was writing “Letter from
Tokyo” for _The New Yorker_.

There was a long and honored tradition of “Letters from” at the
time: Janet Flanner from Paris, Jane Kramer from all over Europe,
Mollie Panter–Downes from London. Bob Shaplen, whose gave his career
to Asia, was long _The New Yorker_’s “Far East correspondent”
and wrote Letters from more or less every Asian capital. It was
Shaplen, late in his career and his life, who handed off to me.

What distinguished _The New Yorker_’s foreign coverage, including
all the Letters from, was the way it was produced. Those who wrote it
were not only there: They had been there a long time, typically, and
knew their various theres thoroughly, even intimately. They wrote not
from the outside looking in, noses pressed against glass, but from
within the places and among the people they were covering. You got the
inside dope, as they used to say, when you read their pieces—the
whispers in the palace, the chatter on the street. The stuff ran far
deeper than anything you could read in the dailies.

My _New Yorker _was Bob Gottlieb’s _New Yorker_, Gottlieb having
succeeded the famous William Shawn in the editor’s chair. Bob wanted
to give the magazine an update while preserving its special character.
Then Bob was ousted in favor of Tina Brown, who was obsessed with
flash-and-dash and “buzz.” Everything had to have buzz. David
Samuels could have profiled Tina: She was that sort. She ruined the
magazine. She is long gone now, but _The New Yorker _has never
recovered from Tina.

Tina’s editors accepted the Letters from Tokyo I filed after she
took over, but none ever ran. In my next and last dealing with _The
New Yorker_, a few years later, I proposed a profile of Shintaro
Ishihara, the governor of Tokyo Prefecture, an accomplished sailor,
and a fire-breathing nationalist full of anti–American bile. I liked
Ishihara precisely for his bile, though when you interviewed him he
stopped just short of pistol-whipping you.

Tina Brown, April 2012. Financial Times/Wikimedia Commons

_The New Yorker _took no interest in the proposed piece. A few months
later it ran a profile of none other than Shintaro Ishihara written by
a reporter sent out from New York who, it was clear from his report,
had but superficial knowledge of his topic or anything else to do with
Japan.

My experience was soon evident in _The New Yorker_’s foreign
coverage altogether. It no longer looked to correspondents who were
long and well dug in overseas, but to people sent out for a story and
then brought back. I describe a subtle turn, but it had profound
implications. A magazine noted for its coverage of foreign places
“from the inside out”—my phrase for it—decided it wanted
reportage that put the American sensibility first. The outside in
would more than do. I read this now as an early indication of a shift
in America’s way of seeing others—or not.

AS SEEN FROM WASHINGTON

In 1995, as my final files to _The New Yorker _were going
unpublished, Tom Friedman took over “Foreign Affairs,” a column
with a long, I will not say hallowed history at _The New York Times_.
Friedman’s arrival, with his bluster, his beer-belly prose, and his
liberal jingoism, was another sign of the times. Big Tom writing in
that space twice a week made it very clear that the practices of 
correspondents and commentators were changing—which, I can see now
as I could not then, marked a change in the American consciousness.

I never much liked the Foreign Affairs column. Its relationship to
power always seemed to me ethically questionable. It began in the late
1930s as “In Europe” and was ever after among the most sensitive
assignments at the paper. C.L. Sulzberger, scion of the owners and a
C.I.A.. collaborator during the Cold War, captured that patrician
certainty the U.S. possessed during the first few postwar decades.

When she took over the column in the 1980s, Flora Lewis described a
Continent restless within NATO’s confines and the American embrace.
Here and there in the archives you can find columns that test the
limits of the franchise. But you will never find one in which the
limits are made visible.

Rereading such people, I am struck by certain things nonetheless. They
had an appreciation for complexity and diversity — not just out in
the wild dark beyond the Western alliance, but within it, too. However
bad the work — and Cy Sulzberger’s columns collected clichés like
barnacles on a sailboat’s bow — it derived from living and working
abroad for many years. They display the confidence Americans felt amid
the American Century. But rarely, if ever, were they triumphant or
righteous. They didn’t have anything to prove.

Thomas Friedman in 2005. Charles Haynes/Wikimedia Commons

The first thing Friedman did when he inherited the Foreign Affairs
space on the opinion page was move the column to Washington — no
more living among others. The second thing he did was stop listening
to others apart from a few friends and acquaintances. In _The Lexus
and the Olive Tree_, his execrable hymn to neoliberal globalization as
led by the U.S., he described himself as a “tourist with
attitude.” Tom had it in one. As he explained in that 1999 book, his
favorite sources were bond traders and hedge fund managers.

“In today’s global village, people know there is another way to
live, they know about the American lifestyle, and many of them want as
big a slice of it as they can get—with all the toppings. Some go to
Disney World to get it, and some go to Kentucky Fried in northern
Malaysia.” This was Big Tom in the Foreign Affairs chair. This is
the degeneration of American comment on the world beyond our
shores—in “real time,” let’s say.

The Foreign Affairs column is now gone altogether, I should add.
The _Times _killed it years ago. Why would anyone want to read a
column with a name like that, after all?

If my topic is a gradual lapse in the professional practices of
American journalists, a gradual indifference to “being there,” we
cannot think about this on its own. Their delinquencies are to be
understood as symptoms of a larger indifference among us toward the
world that has taken hold since, I will say, Germans dismantled the
Berlin Wall and the U.S. entered its memorably awful decades of
triumphalism. Gradually since then, it has mattered less and less what
other people think or do or what their aspirations might be. The only
way to see things is the American way.

The cases I have described are early signs of this turn for the worse.
But if they are symptoms, they are also causes. It is possible to be
both, after all. This is the power of media when put to perverse
purpose. Many of us have become progressively indifferent to others
since the 1990s, and this is in large part because our print and
broadcast media have shown us how.

9/11’S HIT ON JOURNALISM

Speechless. (Mr. Fish)

The events of Sept. 11, 2001, changed things again—in the practices
of our media, in the _Zeitgeist _altogether. Fifteen years on from
those tragedies, Ben Rhodes and Ned Price were feeding their geese.
Six years on from that, we are getting the worst press coverage of
overseas events I can remember from the correspondents fielded in
Ukraine.

A few days after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, George W. Bush’s press secretary
arranged a conference call with America’s leading editors in
Washington. Ari Fleischer’s intent was to secure the cooperation of
newspapers and broadcasters as the administration defined and
prosecuted its new “war on terror.” He asked those on the line to
black out coverage that revealed how America would wage this war.
Fleischer was especially eager to keep from public view the operations
of the C.I.A. and the rest of the national security apparatus. All
present that day readily obliged the Bush administration in these
matters.

Some years later, Jill Abramson, _The New York Times_’s Washington
bureau chief at the time of the Fleischer call, gave us what seems the
only extant account of the exchange. “The purpose of the call was to
make an agreement with the press — this was just days after
9/11—that we not publish any stories that would go into details
about the sources and methods of our intelligence programs,”
Abramson explained in a lengthy lecture in 2014 at the Chautauqua
Institution, a convocation of well-intended self-improvers in western
New York. “It wasn’t complicated to withhold such information. And
for some years, really quite a few years, I don’t think the press,
in general, did publish any stories that upset the Bush White House or
seemed to breach that agreement.”

I marvel when I consider what we now know of “such information.”
It included C.I.A. kidnappings, which the government later termed
“extraordinary renditions” so as to obscure the truth of what it
did, along with its use of “black sites” where uncharged detainees
were subject to waterboarding and other forms of sadistic torture.
“Such information,” it later turned out, also included the
National Security Agency’s indiscriminate surveillance of Americans
and whichever non–Americans it chose.

I marvel because had the press’s most influential editors determined
to tell Ari Fleischer where to get off, just as they should have and
in just such terms, these things may not have occurred, and the
American government and American media  might have emerged from the
Sept. 11 events as more honorable institutions.

When a White House press secretary considers it proper to convene such
a gathering and ask those present to participate in the censorship of
their own publications, it is plain that media’s relationship to
power—in this case political and administrative power—was already
compromised. The editors to whom Fleischer appealed soon after
accepted the term “war on terror” with no recorded hesitation or
objection. This was another breach of professional ethics with
far-reaching consequences, given that a state of war inevitably alters
the media’s relations with power.

I count these in-unison responses as a defining moment in the decline
of American media and their coverage of foreign affairs during the
post–2001 years. To understand this, it is necessary briefly to
consider what happened to America and Americans altogether on that
late-summer morning in Lower Manhattan and in Washington.

Sept. 11 marked the uncannily abrupt end of “the American Century”
and—not to be missed—the consciousness it engendered among
Americans. I have made this point in this space and elsewhere on
previous occasions. There was, in short, a psychological collapse
vastly more consequential than the collapse of the towers, sorrowful
as the 3,000 fatalities were.

America’s policy elites assumed a defensive crouch that day. They
turned away from the world and against it all at once. The Bush
administration was openly xenophobic with all its talk of
“Islamofascism” and other such ridiculous notions. Most Americans
turned in the same way. When Jacques Chirac refused to enlist France
in Bush’s “coalition of the willing” against Iraq, the French
became “cheese-eating surrender monkeys,” a phrase I have always
liked for its hardy American jingoism. Remember “Freedom Fries?”

George W. Bush speaks with Ari Fleischer, left, and Karl Rove aboard
Air Force One Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001, during the flight from Offutt
Air Force Base in Nebraska to Andrews Air Force Base. (Eric Draper,
Courtesy of the George W. Bush Presidential Library)

FROM THE WORLD TO AGAINST IT

This hostility toward others has lurked in the American mind since the
17th century, breaking the surface all too frequently. The Irish in
the 19th century were ignorant, the Italians greasy, and the Chinese
yellow and a peril. Sept. 11 plunged America into this sewer once
again. For a time it was perfectly fine to refer to Muslims as
“ragheads.”

This shift, away from the world and against it, is regrettable enough
as a matter of the national posture. But it has been especially
fateful in leading the coverage of overseas events in our major
dailies and broadcasters straight down the chute. As we have it, this
coverage has become the worst in my fairly long lifetime, but a note
of caution on this point: I have called American media’s coverage of
foreign affairs the worst in my lifetime on numerous occasions in the
past only to find its deterioration deepens inexorably and sometimes
by the day.

Why is this? Why do I settle on Sept. 11, 2001, as the point of
departure?

Jill Abramson went on to serve as _The Times_’s executive editor.
Although that interim ended when she was fired after two and a half
years, she was a journalist of very high stature, if not of high
caliber. Here is what she said when she explained to her Chautauqua
audience the reasons the American press caved so cravenly to Ari
Fleischer’s objectionable demands. “Journalists are Americans,
too. I consider myself, like I’m sure many of you do, to be a
patriot.”

These two sentences flabbergast me every time I think of them. For one
thing, they are an almost verbatim repeat of what scores of
publishers, editors, columnists, correspondents, and reporters said
after Carl Bernstein, in the Oct. 20, 1977, edition of _Rolling
Stone_, exposed more than 400 of them as C.I.A. collaborators. Joe
Alsop, columnist at the _New York Herald Tribune _and later _The
Washington Post _and a Cold Warrior _par excellence_: “I’ve done
things for them when I thought they were the right thing to do. I call
it doing my duty as a citizen.”

Does nothing ever change? Do people such as Abramson ever learn
anything?

For another, from Alsop’s time to Abramson’s and ours, it does not
seem to occur to these people that for an editor or reporter to be a
good American requires only that he or she be a good editor or
reporter. Instead, they reason that in times of crisis it is somehow
necessary that the media betray their fundamental principles — as if
these are at bottom expendable.

“WHAT HAPPENED NO LONGER MATTERED. BALANCED SOURCING NO LONGER
MATTERED. ACCURACY NO LONGER MATTERED. THE WORK OF WITNESSING NO
LONGER MATTERED. CONFORMITY MATTERED.”

Final point here: American media’s gravest error during the Cold
War, the progenitor of all others, was their willing enlistment in the
cause of the new national security state. This is what Alsop was
talking about. It was accomplished by, I would say, 1948 or 1949 at
the latest: In other words, the press and broadcasters climbed on the
Truman administration’s newly declared crusade more or less
immediately.

And this is also what Jill Abramson was talking about out in the wilds
of Chautauqua 65 years later. And that is what American media did
immediately after Sept. 11: They enlisted once again in the national
security state’s new cause.

By Abramson’s time, America had consolidated a global empire that
was merely nascent when Joe Alsop and his brother, Stewart, were
writing. The distinction is important. Long before any of this, Rudolf
Rocker, one of those true-blue anarchists the late 19th century
produced, published _Nationalism and Culture_. This book — hard to
find now and expensive when you do — reminds us: As an empire
gathers and guards its power, all institutions of culture are required
in one or another way to serve it. None that do not can survive.
Rocker used “culture” very broadly. In his meaning of the term, a
given nation’s media are cultural institutions, and the bitter truth
he articulated applies.

After Sept. 11, at first subtly and then not so, one administration
after another insisted that there is only one way to understand the
world — the American way — and there is no need to understand or
consult as to anyone else’s. I am tempted to invite readers to
finish this paragraph, but this seems impolite. So: This way of
thinking, or refusing any longer to think, is essentially defensive,
the refuge of the anxious and uncertain. And if it has not defined the
downward spiral in the quality of mainstream media’s post–2001
foreign coverage, this is a very close call.

John Pilger, the Australian–British correspondent and filmmaker,
remarked after the U.S. cultivated the 2014 coup in Kyiv, “The
suppression of the truth about Ukraine is one of the most complete
news blackouts I can remember.” Hear, hear, although I imagine John
can think of more “most complete” blackouts now, eight years on.

Those readers and viewers who confined their sources of information to
the mainstream got some impossibly black-hats, white-hats version of
events in Ukraine after the February 2104 coup — which was not a
coup but a “democratic revolution.” This was just as the policy
cliques in Washington wanted it.

The U.S. role in the putsch, the presence of neo–Nazis among the
putschists, the antidemocratic character of a duly elected
president’s overthrow, the new regime’s subsequent bombardment of
civilians in the eastern provinces — an eight-year campaign — the
wholesale discrimination since against Russian speakers and critical
media, the assassinations of opposition political figures,
Washington’s use of Ukraine in its longtime drive to subvert
Russian— all of this was left out.

By the time the crisis in Ukraine erupted, the war in Syria had been
on for more than two years. I am not calling this a civil war because
it wasn’t one. The U.S. tipped what began as legitimate
demonstrations against the Damascus government in late 2011 into an
armed conflict by early 2012 at the latest. It was roughly then that
Jake Sullivan, Hillary Clinton’s adviser at the time, memoed the
secretary of state: Good news, we’ve got al–Qaeda on our side in
Syria.

IMAGINE BEING THERE

A Turkish-backed Free Syrian Army fighter loads an M2 Browning during
the fighting in northern Aleppo Governor-ate, November 2016. (Mada
Media, Wikimedia Commons)

Of the barely covert coup operation, of the arming of jihadist
fanatics against the secular Assad government, of the savage murders,
kidnappings, and torture the C.I.A. effectively financed: No, of the
true nature of this war we read nothing unless we resorted to the few
independent journalists principled enough to report from Syrian soil.
Imagine that: Being there.

How the Western print media and networks reported the Syrian crisis
has seemed to me  — I keep resorting to this — among the worst
cases of dereliction in my lifetime. Western correspondents remained
in Beirut or Istanbul and got their information through sources on the
ground in Syria via telephone, Skype, or social media.

And who were these sources? Opposition figures or the Syrian staff of
Western nongovernmental organizations, by and large anti–Assad
sources to a one. But never mind that: This stuff went into the
reporting as objective. The admirable Patrick Cockburn laid all this
out years ago in a very fine piece in _The London Review of Books_,
back when the _LRB_ published such things.

And where did these correspondents turn when they needed a pithy
analytic quotation? To American scholars, think tank inhabitants, and
government officials in Washington. This practice, I should add, is in
no wise limited to the Syria coverage. With a Beirut or a Beijing
dateline, American correspondents now think nothing of quoting
Americans and then reading back to America what Americans think of
this or that foreign affairs question.

These inexcusable practices were across the board in Syria. I will
name two names because I think naming names in these kinds of cases is
important. Ben Hubbard and Ann Barnard, both of _The New York Times_,
were among the worst offenders. They led the pack as they referred
incessantly to murderous jihadists as “moderate rebels,” that
now-infamous phrase. It was in large part because these moderate
rebels would behead them were they to report from Syria that Hubbard,
Barnard _et al _rarely set foot in the country, if they ever did, to
cover the war they purported to cover.

By this time, it was very clear: What began with Ari Flesicher’s
conference call was now a consolidated process. No foreign
correspondent whose accounts of events did not match quite precisely
the Washington orthodoxy could report for mainstream media. What
happened no longer mattered. Balanced sourcing no longer mattered.
Accuracy no longer mattered. The work of witnessing no longer
mattered. Conformity mattered. Those doing principled work in the
independent press, the work of bearing witness, now as then, are
routinely vilified.

Parenthetically, I see that I have once again asserted the importance
of independent media in our time. This cannot be underscored too
often. I happen to think American media have a bright future,
miserable as its present prospects may appear. It will not be easily
or quickly won, but this future lies with independent publications
such as this one.

How far was it from the bureaus in Beirut to Ben Rhodes’ office in
the Obama White House? A hop-skip, I would say. With Rhodes as
Obama’s “communications strategist, and Ned Price his deputy
spinner in chief, the correspondents covering Syria could have done
the exact same job were they among the “compadres” Price spoke of
in 2016—Washington journalists who reported on foreign events after
he fed them like geese. This same is true of the correspondents now
covering the Ukraine crisis.

With one difference: It remains only to maintain the appearance that
one is working as a foreign correspondent — the heroic pose.
Reenactment seems to be the point now. Other than this and with a few
exceptions, they have all come home — incuriously, lethargically
home, one gets the impression with neither inspiration nor guts,
resigned to the new routine.

_Listen to Chris Hedges and Patrick Lawrence discuss this article:_

_PATRICK LAWRENCE, A CORRESPONDENT ABROAD FOR MANY YEARS, CHIEFLY FOR
THE INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE, IS A COLUMNIST, ESSAYIST, AUTHOR
AND LECTURER. HIS MOST RECENT BOOK IS TIME NO LONGER: AMERICANS AFTER
THE AMERICAN CENTURY. HIS TWITTER ACCOUNT, @THEFLOUTIST, HAS BEEN
PERMANENTLY CENSORED. HIS WEB SITE IS PATRICK LAWRENCE
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_The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not
reflect those of CONSORTIUM NEWS._

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