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Last
night I watched the stunning " Buying the War," a
Bill Moyers investigative piece for PBS about the failure of the media to dig
for the truth prior to Bush administration taking the country to war in
Iraq. It was a chilling indictment of
the Fourth Estate, and several top media professionals admitted they had been
taken in by the sales job and propaganda waged by the administration.
The question was asked, broadly and
specifically, "should the White House 'market' its positions?" And it was demonstrated how well the
administration used both traditional and covert marketing techniques to sell
the war to America. This, of course, raises profound ethical
questions. Should an administration,
elected to reflect and advance the view of the people ever "sell" its
views to us? Is not that a complete
undoing of the democratic agreement? And,
in an age of government-mandated (and deeply needed) corporate accountability
and transparency, should not that same government be expected to be equally accountable
and transparent? If there is a case to
be made for the administration "selling" its agenda to us, shouldn't
we be told, as confident leaders do, why the agenda is worthy of support? Instead, we have gotten the likes of Frank
Luntz and his word-weaseling, advising the administration always to tie the
terms "Iraq"
and "9/11" together in speeches (and to replace phrases like
"off-shore oil drilling" with "deep water energy exploration").
We must ask: if the agenda is sound, if
the means are ethical, if the language is honest, why hide one of them, much
less all three? Then again, we thought
we did not need to ask these questions; we thought we had journalists who asked
them for us. It turns out there may be
only one professional news organization and one real, traditional journalist
left: Knight Ridder and Bill Moyers respectively.
In the absence of other journalists doing
their jobs -- and thereby breaking the public trust placed in the Fourth Estate
-- we should have asked the questions ourselves. A few "new media" types did, and
this is part of why the rise of citizen journalism is so crucial right now: it
is doing what the press was originally intended to do.
To stay silent doesn't
simply mean we buy the war, it means we sell our minds in the process.
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