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had when our voices could reach only from one
end of the bar to the other.”
A final relevant recollection comes from one of
your producers, Joe Wershba, who wrote a book
about your work and times. He tells of a moment
when many at CBS had second thoughts about
going after McCarthy’s Red Hunt. They wanted
to kill the broadcast. You observed, as you listened
but did not bow to the fears of your colleagues:
“The terror is right here in this room.”
And so it was – and so it is today when journalists
hesitate to challenge the dominant storyline
for fear of appearing unpatriotic. Dan
Rather, of today’s CBS, voiced his concerns about
stirring a backlash and being bullied in an interview
with the BBC on May 22, 2002. He worried
he would be “necklaced” in the way some South
Africans had been, with burning tires put around
their necks if he stepped out of line. For him, that
was a metaphor – but what a metaphor, what a
nightmare to have embedded itself in his brain.
Talk about intimidation. Talk about “the terror”
in the room.
Some things don’t change. Media institutions
remain citadels of conformity, conservatism and
compromise. Courage is in short supply in our
unbrave world of news because it is rarely
encouraged or rewarded, especially if and when
you deviate from the script. Ask Peter Arnett.
There is little space, airtime or support for those
individuals in the media who stand alone, who do
it their way, who at times dissent to challenge the
paradigm or who suspect that today’s emperor
has no clothes.
Ed, today’s news business hands out awards in
your name by the bushel. They revere your legend
and embellish its impact. But few are willing
to battle the way you did or take the stands you
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did because when you come right down to it they
stand for so little.
Today, the challenge news people face involves
how to get along by going along, how to keep
their heads down to survive cutbacks in a
volatile cut-throat news world. A young woman
told me of her work at MSNBC during the war.
She was part of a team of eight whose job was to
monitor all the news on the other channels
around the clock, “We didn’t want Fox doing stories
or features we didn’t do,” she explained.
There was constant pressure to do what the others
did and not fall behind. Competition became,
in effect, cloning. When the war “ended,” so did
her job.
Is the war over? Not on the evidence. Occupation
breeds resistance in Iraq as it does on the
West Bank. American soldiers are dying and so
is the dream of the Administration to go in, get it
over with, proclaim democracy and steal the oil.
They knew how to pummel a far weaker fighting
force. They prepared for that with unequalled
force and a war plan that used psy-ops, bribery,
and deception as much as not such awesome or
shocking bombing raids. They won, or have
they?
Seven weeks after the President landed in triumph
on the deck of an aircraft carrier to strut in
uniform and proclaim victory (even if that was not
the term he used), the storyline has changed. Ten
weeks after the “fall” of Baghdad, new questions
are being raised that sound an awful lot in tone
like those raised during Watergate. What did the
President know and when did he forget he knew
it? Is he lying or did he merely “exaggerate.”
On June 22, 2003, The New York Times prominently
displayed a lead Week in Review analysis
headlined: “Bush may have exaggerated but did