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Now it's a truism that negatives are more newsworthy than positives; no-one wants to read a news story that starts "There hasn't been an airline crash now for more than 18 months, isn't that cool?" That's non-news; but a new crash is an event. So by their natures, reporters look at the world through anti-rose-colored-glasses, trying to find anything that's going wrong, because that's newsworthy and gives them an opportunity to play the game and maybe get noticed and promoted. It's inherent in the system, but with the success of Woodward and Bernstein in the Watergate scandal, ever since reporters have been looking for knock-it-out-of-the-park stories, their chance to get into the big leagues. I remember noticing the change in how reporters operated after Watergate, and thinking it a bad trend. I still do, and it hasn't stopped. I no longer think of most name-reporters as being unbiased; I always consider them to be doing their best to make things look as bad as possible. Any news article with a by-line is automatically slanted. News articles without bylines from the wire services don't tend to have as much of this, though there's still some. But the ones published under a by-line always have a hidden agenda of trying to boost the career of the reporter -- and sometimes they give in to the temptation to make news where there isn't any, or to make a big story out of something that is, or should be, small. The best example of that is to compare the Watergate story against Clinton's Lewinsky scandal. Watergate was a serious constitutional crisis; in my opinion it was the biggest danger to our system since the Civil War. We had a President who was actively scheming to subvert the democratic system. In that sense, Woodward and Bernstein contributed quite a lot to saving the Union. They did deserve their Pulitzer prizes. But I honestly think that much more was made of the Lewinsky scandal than it deserved. Was Clinton a philanderer? You betcha. Was that a constitutional crisis? Not even slightly. He was far from the first President to be one and won't be the last. It certainly didn't prevent FDR from doing a good job, for instance, or JFK. But the story cascaded and grew because the reporters wouldn't let go of it, and pretty soon it attained a life of its own. Finally there was a grand jury investigation about it -- even though I never figured out just what laws they thought might have been broken. Clinton then made the mistake of lying about it, for which he was impeached. None of that should have happened; it was not that serious. It was a firestorm raised by a new generation of reporters who all wanted to be the next Woodward/Bernstein, the next reporter who helped to topple a President. (Looks mighty good on the ol' resumé.) The point being that reporters are not really anyone's friends except themselves. They wrap themselves in the flag and try to portray themselves as the "fourth estate", and it's true that a free press is important to monitor what the government does. But unlike the other three estates (Congress, Executive, Judiciary) the press is unelected and answerable to no-one for what they do, and that means that they can descend into tyranny -- and have, on a frightening number of occasions, in order to push their own sordid agenda. This article laments that the military is trying to keep the press relatively distant from day-to-day operations. You bet your sweet ass they are, and rightfully so. That's because ultimately there's too much chance that any given reporter will be more interested in advancing his career than in actually trying to report honestly what he's seen. Not every reporter does this, nor even the majority of them, but it doesn't take too many doing that to really drastically harm the public's support for a military operation, or to reveal information which should have been kept secret "because the public has a right to know". No, the public doesn't, if the price is too high: sometimes revealing information can cause our soldiers to die. Doing so may advance a reporter's career, but sacrificing soldiers for that is not acceptable. While this became a big-time problem after Watergate, on some level it's been with us for a long time, and according to this article: A government censor, asked in 1943 what he thought the American public should be told about the war, replied: "I’d tell them nothing till it’s over and then I’d | |||
