Good Evening from Upper Darby!
Now? I added this last article to SHOW YOU how Whites and White-Jews in Nazi-American Media-Mediums, try to INTENTIONALLY PLAY STUPID. To appease Whites and pretend like everyone here doesn't know that the CIA was always EXPLICITLY INVOLVED in the Crack Epidemic and how things were being run and done. Just like they are EXPLICITLY INVOLVED in the Opium Trade in Afghanistan.
From Gary Webb to James Risen: The struggle for the soul of journalism
Two courageous reporters dug up dark government secrets. Only one was betrayed by his peers. Why did it happen?
In thinking about the cases of Gary Webb and James Risen, two famous investigative reporters aggressively persecuted for their explosive revelations (in very different situations, and with different results), we are drawn into the thorny question of journalism and its so-called professional ethics. How well do the supposed codes of journalism work, and whom do they serve and protect? Is the primary role of journalism as a social institution to discover the truth as best it can and raise the level of public discourse, or to preserve its own power and prestige and privilege? I don’t claim to know the answers with any certainty. If anything, the stories of Webb and Risen suggest that those questions yield different answers in different contexts.
I’ve been a working journalist for more than 25 years, across the demise of print and the rise of the Internet, and I’ve always viewed the idea of journalism as a profession as, at best, a double-edged sword. I mean the word “profession” in the sense that law or medicine or accounting is so defined, each with its own internal codes of conduct administered by various self-governing institutions. All too often, the ideal of professionalism in journalism becomes an excuse for “the View from Nowhere”described by media critic Jay Rosen – a bogus conception of impartiality and “balance,” a refusal of critical thinking and a disinclination to challenge official sources or disrupt accepted narratives.
Amid the chaos of Internet journalism, and the evident fact that many people in the field have no conception of ethics or responsibility, it seems laughably nostalgic to talk about professionalism. But in any case journalism never resembled those listed professions, which was always a strength and a detriment. There is no examination to pass and no credentialing board to face. Graduate programs in journalism have grown more influential, paradoxically or not, even as the trade itself has decayed. But no one would claim they are necessary. I’ve known plenty of journalists who didn’t have college degrees at all; Hunter S. Thompson never finished high school. It’s one of those jobs you learn best by doing, with the right guidance and mentorship. Most of the people who got me interested in the possibilities of journalism in the first place, like Joan Didion and Thompson and Lester Bangs and Robert Christgau and the underappreciated, long-dead San Francisco critic John L. Wasserman, had no professional training, would have refused to join any such association and repeatedly violated the norms and customs of the trade.
On the other hand, maybe journalism does qualify as a profession, in that it displays a sense of tribal identity also found among the doctors and the lawyers. Insiders with the right connections, who conform to established codes, are zealously protected; outsiders perceived as threats to the established order are thrown to the wolves. This is an entirely understandable human reaction, and not always a bad thing. Mainstream journalism has pretty much circled the wagons around Risen, a national-security reporter for the New York Times who was working to uncover the extent of illegal or unconstitutional NSA spying long before anybody had heard of Edward Snowden. His work has sometimes made his own editors uncomfortable – former Times editor Bill Keller repeatedly killed Risen’s NSA story in 2004 and 2005, after a private meeting with President Bush – but in broad terms both the Times and what’s left of the journalism establishment have grasped that the government’s attempt to shut Risen down or send him to prison was a direct assault on the role of the press in a so-called democracy.
Over the course of the past decade, Risen has been the focus of malevolent attention from several grand juries and two successive presidential administrations. Ostensibly, the government wants to compel Risen to reveal the identity of a confidential source who told him about a botched CIA operation in Iran. But it’s not unduly paranoid to speculate that the real issue is not a 10-year-old leak no one cares about anymore but rather an attempt to single out and scapegoat a reporter who has repeatedly revealed the most corrupt and disturbing and even tragicomic aspects of the war on terror. (Risen’s new book, “Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War,” is full of horrifying and sometimes hilarious detail.) Risen recently toldAmy Goodman of “Democracy Now!” that he believed the government was reluctant to come directly after the Times over his NSA stories, which might have provoked a constitutional showdown at the Supreme Court level. Instead, the apparatchiks fixed on the Iran-CIA leak – which was revealed in his 2006 book “State of War,” but not in the newspaper – as a way “to isolate me from the New York Times.” Risen has become the central test case in the Obama administration’s vindictive and adversarial relationship with the press, and its unprecedented persecution of whistle-blowers.
I’d like to believe that some of the professional journalists who stand with Jim Risen today, largely because he’s a credentialed member of the tribe and an employee of the flagship American newspaper, feel ashamed when they look back at the case of Gary Webb. We know at least one does. Jesse Katz was one of the 17 Los Angeles Times reporters who were assigned to pick apart “Dark Alliance,” Webb’s groundbreaking 1996 CIA-Contra-cocaine investigative series for the San Jose Mercury-News, which became one of the first viral phenomena in the short history of the Internet. In retrospect, it looks an awful lot like the L.A. Times management felt embarrassed by a cowboy reporter at a smaller regional rival, who had broken a huge story on their turf, and set out to demolish him. As Katz told a radio interviewerlast year, the Times counterattack was “kind of a tawdry exercise … Most of us who were involved in it, I think, would look back on that and say it was overkill.”
If you don’t know much about Gary Webb or his big story, you can learn his basic narrative – in an admittedly truncated and Hollywoodized form – in the new movie“Kill the Messenger,” a tidy drama anchored by a fiery performance from Oscar-nominated actor Jeremy Renner, who also produced the film. A Pulitzer-winning reporter with a reputation as a maverick and a checkered personal life, Webb broke one of the biggest scoops of the 1990s, working essentially on his own for a paper that had modest resources, limited experience with investigative reporting and almost no experience in international coverage. “Dark Alliance” put the Mercury-News on the journalistic map, partly because it was published simultaneously in print and in the newborn electronic medium many old-school journalists believed was a passing fad. “Dark Alliance” remains well worth reading more than 18 years later, but here’s the “too long; didn’t read” version: The Contra war in Nicaragua in the 1980s, which was avidly sponsored and supported by the Reagan administration, was at least partly funded by Latin American cocaine smugglers who fueled the crack epidemic in America’s cities. At the very least, the CIA knew about these big-time drug smugglers, tolerated them and protected them.
No comments:
Post a Comment