The Reporter as Hero? Pull the Other One

“These aren't reporters or journalists — they are carnival workers with teeth whiteners, doin' what it takes to get you to not change that channel. They are blondes doing choreographed leg-crossing so you'll almost see all the way to Sharon Stone. They are millionaires so eager for the cash that they will do almost anything; say almost anything, show almost anything, to keep it flowing. 

Let's sing the chorus one more time: ‘These people are carnival workers.’”

—  Online observation

By Dan Hagen

Every other hero in American comic books was a reporter, once upon a time.

The idea of the “heroic journalist,” in this age of corrupt corporate media, seems like nothing but a bad joke, an embarrassment.

After all, what the American people see now is a corporate media overwhelming tilted right, and frightened of even challenging glaring Republican lies. When Rudy Giuliani lied on national television that we had NO domestic terrorist attacks under George W. Bush, ABC's “liberal” coward George Stephanopoulos was afraid even to call him on it.

The first principle of the Society of Professional Journalists’ ethical code is, “Seek Truth and Report It.”  That cannot be reconciled with letting factual lies go unchallenged, no matter how corporate media apologists twist themselves into professional pretzels.

“In media today, even among journalists who entered the field for the noblest of reasons, there is an internalized bias to simply shy away from controversial journalism that might enmesh a media firm in a battle with powerful corporations or government agencies,” wrote Bob McChesney and John Nichols in “Our Media. Not Theirs.” “True, such conflicts have always been the stuff of great journalism, but they can make for very bad business, and in the current climate business trumps journalism just about every time.

“During the 2000 presidential race, for instance, major television stations argued against what one might think would be their own self interest. In their moves to exclude Green Party candidate Ralph Nader from three presidential debates, they guaranteed that controversial issues involving corporate power-including media conglomeration-would not be raised. Yet the exclusion of Nader also guaranteed that the debates would become duller-than-dirt agreeathons in which Al Gore and George W. Bush essentially invited viewers to turn off their televisions.”

“The most common and noticeable effect of the corporate noose on journalism is that it simply allows commercial values to redirect journalism to its most profitable position. As a result, relatively vast resources are deployed for news pitched at a narrow business class, and suited to their needs and prejudices; such news has come to dominate newspapers, specialty magazines, and cable television. Likewise, news for the masses increasingly consists of stories about celebrities, royal families, athletes, natural disasters, plane crashes, and train wrecks. Political coverage is limited to regurgitating what some politician says.”

And yet subtract two street-level newspaper reporters, Woodward and Bernstein, and the notion that President Nixon was running criminal dirty-tricks operations against the Democratic Party would have been just another "conspiracy theory." Always useful to remember that the first reason that conspiracy theories exist is because conspiracies exist.

And I have known a number of reporters as heroic just as those we used to see on “Lou Grant” in the post-Watergate era. And reporters continue to be murdered around the world for trying to report the truth. But the "Survivor" ethical culture of contemporary America does not nurture any kind of heroics. The idea of standing up for the truth is laughable to the corrupt men and women who run this country.

By the way, just as an aside, the last and only terrorist to strike the U.S. with WMD was an employee of George W. Bush who used U.S. Army anthrax to kill reporters and Democrats. Funny how everybody tries so hard to push that one down the memory hole.

Many of the problems in American journalism and the nation itself can be resolved if journalists would fulfill their first ethical duty, which is not to massage their sources or their employers. It is to provide accurate, relevant, verified, credible facts to the public.