Pressed for truth

Friends, we are gathered here this Memorial Day to pay our respects to the front-line warriors for truth, our Fourth Estate.

Once the voice for truth, delving into the dark secrets of corporations and governments, enlightening the public to let them make their own decisions, this Bastion of Liberty has fallen. May it rest in peace. Better yet, may it rise from the dead.

Journalism in America has gone through its dark times before. Yellow journalism egging on the Spanish-American conflict into war wasn't one of its finest moments. Yet the days of Deep Throat gave me some excitement over the role of the media in keeping our leaders accountable for their actions. It was quite thrilling for a youngster to be around for such history. But, really now, a simple break-in, some shady dealings involving elections, they brought down a President, but they were nothing to what is happening now. It's a sad definition of the times when one can look back at the time of Nixon as Salad Days. "Remember when all we had to worry about was some election corruption?" Sigh.

Now, Watergate scandals can't hold a candle to the past two election scandles. But despite ad nauseum diatribe over what does and does not define a hanging chad, we didn't hear much about Florida's voter disenfranchisement. Or Pat Buchannon insisting that all those votes couldn't possibly belong to him. Ohio vote numbers didn't add up, and voters in liberal cities stood in line all day to vote while suburban soccer moms had a wall of voting machines open and easily available. And I have yet to hear an explanation for why the exit polls showed Kerry winning handily but voting results insisted otherwise.

But,that's just the press not bothering with the nuts and bolts, only going for the sensationalistic. I mean, I just love reading pages about pregnant chads. Edge-of-the-seat stuff there. After all, editors have to decide what stories they should send their reporters out on, and what should be printed. Can't print everything, and time is short in broadcast journalism, after all. I do hope you hear the cynicism in my "voice."

What gets even more bizarre besides hot stories dropping off the side of the Earth is the dropping of already broken stories. Because a rube in the White House gave 60 Minutes a fake letter, the fact that the President didn't meet his National Guard duties is dropped. Rather, the program is taken to task for believing a highly placed official. Yep, that should have warned them - journalists should know better than to believe anything told to them from Bush's White House. So, all this hoopla over a faked letter diverts attention from the fact that the President STILL didn't meet his military obligations, using his priveledged status to not only stay out of Vietnam, but out of the armory as well.

And what of Newsweek? Even though many other media sources discussed abuse of the Quran, and FOIA documents also mentions it, Newsweek found it necessary to retract it's story. Why? So one of Newsweek's sources got a little wishy-washy. So what, there are lots of other sources insisting there was abuse. Heck, even the Pentagon a few days later admitted to it. But no, Newsweek is the nasty here, not the people who actually DID the stuff.

I remember when abuse and torture in Abu Ghraib was uncovered. A prominent Republican Senator was outraged not at the abuse, but at the press reporting it. No problem, aside from titilating pictures of human pyramids and sexual promiscuity between two prison guards, it's dropped. The real story of children being raped and tortured (warning - very disturbing link)in these prisons by American, British, and "free" Iraqi guards is hidden and only whispered about in the fringe or non-American press.

I remember the days when I had some pride that our press wasn't controlled like Pravda was.

Where are the real heros? The press corp that will stand up to the White House and ask the real questions, and FIND the real answers?


PBU22