November 2006 | From the Editor
Where the Truth Went
Comedy, Documentaries, Muckraking Books
My first job out of college was being an overnight disc jockey at a mid-market radio station. I thought I was pretty cool; behind the mic at a classic rocker, broadcasting Creedence Clearwater and Led Zeppelin to a four-county area, chatting with Mike the schizophrenic outpatient for hours on the request line and at 2:15am having it blow up with “shoprats” from the Buick-Oldsmobile plant who had struck-out at the bar and needed to hear “Comfortably Numb.”
It was show business. But it was also the mass media: We had a license from the FCC and people depended on us for weather advisories, school closings and the really big stuff like announcements of impending nuclear attack and the live Grateful Dead New Year’s Eve concert.
One night while on-air I reached for some scrap of wire copy: an outdated Tigers score at the corner of the soundboard that previous jocks had forgotten to take out of the studio, which I then proceeded to read over the air. Another time I announced a heavy fog advisory from the day before, saying that visibility on the roadways was down to 25 feet when it was clear as a bell from here to the Milky Way. So, I know firsthand that just because you hear it on the radio, it is not necessarily true.
But in general, if Americans read it in print, see it on TV or hear it from a monotone radio newsman, they tend to believe. We don’t question or suspect. We trust. Even in the age of Fox News, press release journalism, large corporate media and all the fluff and celebrity worship that comes with it. Beyond trusting that the facts are right, Americans assume that the news media is serving us the whole truth...and sounding the alarm like Paul Revere’s midnight ride. But as that Bob Dylan song we used to play said, “The times they are a changin’,” and boy oh boy have they.
Just ask a journalist who’s lived through those changes, like Helen Thomas, who spoke last month in San Francisco’s War Memorial for Media Alliance’s 30th Anniversary gala. As the first woman member of the White House Press Corps, she’s covered every administration since John F. Kennedy’s for the UPI wire service. Since 2003, she sits in the back row by request of the press secretary, and Bush knows never to call on her. The one time he did, she asked him why he really invaded Iraq. It was a question he dodged, and her so-called peers in the corporate media probably laughed as he made some frat boy joke and moved on to the next reporter. “He doesn’t dare say why,” she told the SF audience, “because it wouldn’t be worth one life.”
In our June issue we published an excerpt from her newest book, Watchdogs of Democracy? The Waning Washington Press Corps and How It Has Failed the Public. This month we publish an excerpt of Best War Ever, an account of how Bush & Partners manipulated the mass media and the public into rushing to war against a nation that was never a threat to anyone but its own people. There are still people in the media to trust. It’s that they just might be comedians like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, or filmmakers like Robert Greenwald (Iraq For Sale), or writing books like Best War Ever instead of filing stories for corporate news media.
Maybe someday soon, Americans will wake up—and I don’t mean understand intellectually, but really wake up—to the fact that a hundred thousand or six times that number could be dead in Iraq and that Edward R. Murrow is dead too, and no longer working at CBS. He’s been “replaced” by Katie Couric (so CUTE!). This is not our grandfather’s media. As Thomas said after 63 long years in newspaper journalism, head cast down to the stage at the War Memorial building on Van Ness, “I really think we’ve reached rock bottom.”
— Todd Spencer
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