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“media.” That is a dangerous word; all evil rises
around those afflicted with it.”
Please, Jimmy, don’t just blame the reporters.
They don’t assign themselves stories. They don’t
edit their work or decide how much time or
space to allocate for it. They work in an industry.
They are paid to do a job, and disciplined when
they stray from the appointed path. Being a team
player is rewarded; being a troublemaker is not.
THE MASTER NARRATIVE
IT is fair to ask which major media companies
had the gumption or the guts to deviate from the
official story and “master narrative” adopted
with such ease on so many seemingly competitive
outlets. It is hard to name many reporters
who challenged the hourly and daily onslaught
of rah-rah newspeak built around constant briefings,
endless “breaking news” bulletins and utter
contempt for critics?
Could there be another explanation for this
culture of compliance? Could the economic interests
of the media cartels have had something to
do with it? Especially at a time when economically
challenged media companies had lucrative
business pending before the FCC, a government
body headed by the son of the Secretary of State,
a high profile salesmen for the war policy.
Earlier in this book, I argue that there was a connection
between war coverage and FCC deliberations.
For a long time, I felt very alone in suggesting
such a link, since few other media writers
explored the relationship. But now, New York Magazine’s
Michael Wolff, who covered the CENTCOM
briefings in Doha, is making me feel like I am not
crazy of conspiratorial to think this way.
“It’s important to understand how much this
WHAT CAN WE DO ABOUT IT?
249
FCC ruling means to these companies,” he
writes. “News (especially old-fashioned headline
news) is a sick business, if not a dying game. For
newspaper companies, the goal is to get out of
the newspaper business and into the television
business (under the old rules, it’s a no-no to own
newspapers and television stations in the same
market). For networks with big news operations,
the goal is to buy more stations, which is where
the real cash flows from. The whole point here is
to move away from news, to downgrade it, to
amortize it, to minimize it . . .
“All right then. The media knows what it wants,
and the media knows what the Bush people
want. So is it a conspiracy? Is that what I’m saying?
That the media – acting in concert – took a
dive on the war for the sake of getting an
improved position with regard to the ownership
rules? Certainly, every big media company was a
cheerleader, as gullible and as empty-headed-or
as accommodating-on the subject of WMDs as,
well, Saddam himself. But conspiracy wouldn’t
quite be the right word.
“Negotiation, however, would be the right one.
. . . The interesting thing is that in most newsrooms,
you would find lots of agreement as to
this view of how businessmen and politicians get
the things they want. A general acceptance of
the realities of ass-kissing, if not a higher level of
corruption”
The sad truth is that the truths that are now
trickling out were known before the war began.
There was no secret about the Administration
was up to. On September ll, 2001, Bill Kristol, editor
of Rupert Murdoch’s Weekly Standard, and
the founder of the Project for a New American
Century, the lobby group that mapped a the plan
for unilateral preemptive intervention that the