James Bovard: How the Media Enables Government Lies

icon gravatar.comwww.counterpunch.org/bovard11062009.html
sent by Sparrows since 13 days 12 hours 43 minutes, published about 12 days 21 hours 2 minutes
Why do politicians so easily get away with telling lies? In large part, because the news media are more interested in bonding with politicians than in exposing them. Americans are encouraged to believe that the media will serve as a check and a balance on the government. Instead, the press too often volunteer as unpaid pimps, helping politicians deceive the public. In 1936, New York Times White House correspondent Turner Catledge said that President Roosevelt’s “first instinct was always to lie.” But the Washington press corps covered up Roosevelt’s dishonesty almost as thoroughly as they hid his use of a wheelchair in daily life. President Bill Clinton benefited from a press corps that often treated his falsehoods as nonevents — or even petty triumphs. Newsweek White House correspondent Howard Fineman commented that Clinton’s “great strength is his insincerity…. I’ve decided Bill Clinton is at his most genuine when he’s the most phony…. We know he doesn’t mean what he says.”
tags: govt lies, deception, media's docility
3 commentscategory: Media karma: 167

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  1. #1    Flora Lewis, a New York Times columnist, writing three weeks before 9/11, commented in a review of a book on U.S. government lies on the Vietnam War, “There will probably never be a return to the discretion, really collusion, with which the media used to treat presidents, and it is just as well.” But within months of her comment, the media had proven itself as craven as ever. The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank, who did some of the best exposés of George W. Bush’s falsehoods in his first term, noted that it was not until July 2002 that “the White House press corps showed its teeth” in response to administration deceptions. Even the exposés of FBI and CIA intelligence failures in...

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    written by Sparrows since 13 days 12 hours 40 minutesSparrows
  2. #2    I would credit this to two primary factors. The Media's profit motive, and Reporters' celebrity.
    The reporters that cover Washington, particularly the WH, are FAMOUS and they like that. It not only translates to big money, but also strokes their egos (and gets them laid). Getting too critical of the President or his staff (or anyone else that is the central player in a reporter's beat) can get you banished, cutting off the flow of Tv standups, cash and adulation.
    For the companies that hire them, access means story, no access, no story, and since no story means nothing to sell papers (or commercial time) on, that's bad for bidness. FUX is feeling the wrath right now (though, Murdoch doesn't care that much, he can afford to run it at a dead loss if need be, he's in it for the facility it gives him, the constituency that he controls access to). Less well heeled News Orgs are at risk if they cross the Press Secretary, Helen Thomas excepted.
    written by CwV since 13 days 12 hours 26 minutesCwV
  3. #3    Nothing there that you have said CW that I disagree with. Only one minor point. Journalists' allegiance is to the public, not to be popular. I know we all have to eat, and that is our biggest excuse. Yet we will sit back and whine about when did the meaning of life expire? It expired when we decided to sit back and allow those people we chose as leaders to drive our values and rights into the ground.

    Nothing is worth anything that is not fought for. The lazy get nothing but enslavement!
    written by Sparrows since 12 days 17 hours 18 minutesSparrows
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