When the history of the scandalous first decade of the 21st century is written, there will be more than enough shame to spread around. A fair dollop will land on the mainstream media. Consolidated, corporate-controlled and slaves to the bottom line, the American media is a feeble heir to the muckrakers of the 1920s, the Ed Murrows of the ’50s or Woodward and Bernstein of the ‘70s. Even Woodward and Bernstein are no longer Woodward and Bernstein.
The worse example is News Corp., Rupert Murdoch’s vehicle for simultaneously sucking up to capitalist totalitarians in Washington and communist totalitarians in Beijing. The New York Times (with special mention for Judith Miller) and almost every other major outlet, from the Washington Post to the major networks repeated without question every Bush/Cheney lie in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.
The new line is that the media learned its lesson and the free ride is over for George Bush and his cronies. But is it? I read the papers every day and I every day I see evidence that the fix is still in. The symptoms are insidious; I wonder if the reporters and editors afflicted with this disease are even aware they have it. When the rich and powerful are caught breaking the law, the words reporting their crimes always seem softened, the punches pulled, excuses for bad behavior seem to be sought.
Continue reading
The March of Folly
Historian Barbara Tuchman won a Pulitzer Prize in 1962 for The Guns of August, her magisterial study of how the European powers blundered into World War I. An early reader of the book was John F. Kennedy, who applied the lessons of that book to help the US avoid similar blunders during the tense days of the Cuban missile crisis.
In 1984, Ms. Tuchman published The March of Folly, which considered how governments and institutions through the ages made stupendously stupid decisions, such as the Vatican’s fermentation of the Protestant Reformation, the British government’s provocation of the American revolution and America’s descent into the Vietnam war.
The book opens with the essay “Pursuit of Policy Contrary to Self-Interest.” Brilliant when written, the essay is now shocking because it precisely describes the process by which the Bush administration pitched a nation into the morass of the Iraq invasion and occupation.
Some excerpts:
“To qualify as folly…. the policy adopted must meet three criteria: it must be perceived as counter-productive in its own time, not merely by hindsight…. Secondly, an alternative course of action must have been available … a third criterion must be that the policy in question must be that of a group, not an individual ruler, and should persist beyond any one political lifetime.”
Continue reading »