The No Maas Moment Approacheth for the Washington Press Corps
The political atmosphere on the eve of the putsch
Despite Gorbachev's having greatly strengthened his formal political power and asserted the right to issue decrees on everything from military operations to the price of fish (when it is available), it was probably fair to say that he had less real power to affect the course of events in the USSR in the first half of 1991 than at any other time since his accession to power in March 1985. People in authority in the republics and provinces simply were not listening to him, and few members of the general public seemed to have much respect for him.... The Lithuanian Declaration of Independence of 11 March 1990 certainly brought matters to a head, even if it seemed quixotic at the time. There can be little doubt, also, that the sacrifices in human life that were the unfortunate result of his persistence in acting upon the Declaration which paved the way for speedy international recognition of the independence of the Baltic states and set the stage for the subsequent collapse of the Soviet empire. Dr Robert F. Miller, February 17, 1992 (1)
Glasnost’ coverage of Soviet politics was indeed an essential part of the strength of the democratic movement, because it politicised a formerly quiescent Soviet society, giving the various parties and neformaly mass popular support. Although it is true that the press was dominated by the liberal, Westernising intelligentsia, and did not accurately reflect the dispersal of political opinions amongst the populace, the preponderance of this view in news stories and features, and the presence of public opinion polls which reflected this news bias were very important in manufacturing popular dissent. This mass politicisation of a formerly apathetic Soviet population was very important in giving opposition parties and neformaly the support they needed to present a credible alternative to the crumbling Soviet Communist ideology, as well as giving the press leverage against the government to continue and enhance its independence. ... The pattern of media intransigence, attempted governmental control, wider media outrage, and popular demonstrations against the government was to be repeated many times over and served to strengthen active hostility to an already weakened regime. Television also played a vital role in the transformation from popular apathy to discontent, to political action. Olivia Boyd, Autumn 2006 (2)
In China...
It is noteworthy that the Chinese media, surprisingly objective in its reporting of the demonstrations until then, began to positively support the students. This 'press revolt' was so unified in its style and purpose as to bespeak manipulation from the very start. Subsequently, in his official report to the National People's Congress in late June, Beijing Mayor Chen Xitong identified Zhao Ziyang's comments to China's propaganda chiefs Hu Qili and Rui Xingwen on 6 May regarding media coverage of the demonstrations as crucial to the buildup of the protest movement. Geremie R. Barmé , May 2006 (3)
In Serbia...
The fearsome Serbian propaganda machine appears to be beginning to falter as hundreds of state media journalists call for more balanced reporting.The independent media have dismissed the unprecedented protests as cynical opportunism by regime journalists who fear opposition retribution if Milosevic is defeated. Political observers in Belgrade believe that while the (press) revolt in itself will not pose a serious threat to Milosevic, it suggests that his regime is beginning to weaken. In the biggest revolt to date, 300 employees at Serbian state television and radio, RTS, are reported to have gone on strike in Belgrade on Thursday, demanding an overhaul of the station's editorial policy. Mirna Jancic, October 5, 2000 (4)
In Ukraine...
Independent media played a positive and critical role in communicating news about the falsified vote and helping in turn to mobilize popular opposition to the regime after the vote. Channel 5 played the central role, first in communicating the results of the exit polls and in reporting on the hundreds of cases of electoral fraud. Channel 5 then served an especially vital function of providing live, 24-hour coverage of the events on Maidan, broadcasts that helped to encourage others to join the protests, especially when viewers saw the peaceful, festive nature of the crowds. By the end of the demonstration, Channel Five catapulted from 13 in the national ratings. Channel 5 coverage also put pressure on the other channels to stop spewing their propaganda. Michael McFaul, May 2006 (5)
In America...
(At the "Confronting the Seduction of Secrecy: Toward Improved Access to Government Information on the Record," Panel) Bill Kovach, director of the Committee of Concerned Journalists, described the short-lived revolt he tried to lead when he was Washington Bureau chief of the New York Times in the 1980s. "A few other reporters joined us at first when we asked briefings be kept open and left the room if they were not. But the support didn't last long," he said. "The main argument from other journalists was that they would surrender their independence if they took part in such group actions," he said. But Kovach said that in this era of spin and misinformation, it's time to head to the ramparts again. "And maybe if we're lucky we can find that cooperation and collaboration are not threats to our independence but are the key to strengthen the value and the appeal of a journalism of verification to the American people." Several panelists said that another response to Bush's control of the press should be to report more about the process the White House is using to achieve it. In other words: More stories about the endlessly repeated talking points, the merciless spin, the fake news, the screened audiences, and the increasingly sophisticated public relations apparatus. Dan Froomkin, The Washington Post, March 18, 2005 (6)
He chose the opposite path, and his hyper-partisanship has proved to be a travesty of governance and a comprehensive failure. I've tried to be respectful of the man and the office, but the three defining sins of the Bush Administration--arrogance, incompetence, cynicism--are congenital: they're part of his personality. They're not likely to change.And it is increasingly difficult to imagine yet another two years of slow bleed with a leader so clearly unfit to lead. Joe Klein, TIME Magazine, April 5, 2007 (7)
Even more than most national journalists, The Washington Post's Fred Hiatt has been a stalwart defender of the Bush administration with regard to the U.S. attorneys scandal. ... In just two weeks, we went from firings that "didn't need covering" to "troubling evidence of improper political motivations." ... Now it's the very, very esteemed Fred Hiatt and the Post Editorial Page -- rather than merely the loudmouth partisan dirty blogging masses -- recognizing that the U.S. attorneys scandal involves accusations of very serious wrongdoing, along with substantial evidence to support those accusations. And even Hiatt now recognizes that Rove and even the President are quite near the center of it all. Perhaps this Editorial is a signal that national conventional media wisdom will shift. Glenn Greenwald (quoting Fred Hiatt in The Washington Post), April 10, 2007 (8)
When I went to University in Estonia, one of the things I was most interested in was how the press functioned in the former Soviet Union, in dealing with censorship and constant attempts at propaganda. I was lucky enough to be able to take courses in studying this. One of which was even titled, “Media under a Totalitarian Regime"' The course that made me wish to go to the University I did attend for my Master's degree in Sweden was a course entitled, “Why Revolt?” For me they are intertwined, for you cannot have a revolution, political, electoral, or otherwise, without a sympathetic press ready to embrace change, somehow somewhere within the region.
What specifically I looked for in so-called “revolutions,” none of which mentioned above probably deserve the term as they are mostly electoral and superficial, is what I call the “No Maas” moment. It means “No More” in Spanish. It is that moment when journalists become journalists and no longer function as mouthpieces for the official regime. They start to dissect press releases and official statements from an adversarial point of view. They stop getting invited, nor would they choose to be after that, to hobnob at the political power broker's parties. They begin to function independently to do what they believe is to inform instead of blindly surrendering their own judgment of the so-called 'facts' they are putting out to the public and stop allowing themselves to be misinforming rather than informing.
The public, at least in America, believes this is what journalists always do, and that is why when they are not doing it, it is so valuable, and so destructive. Americans are much more naive than the Soviet citizens were and tend to believe whatever they hear on television. Fox News and CNN may have been tarnished in some people's eyes as propagandists, but by and large Americans think what they are being told in television news is the truth and objective.
Other nations have varying degrees of faith in their own press as well, unless owned more openly, or more openly siding with, political elites or political parties which are thought to favor the wealthy. And even when these ties are known, the effect of this is superficial, for even propaganda known to be propaganda is listened to and often believed when constant enough. Lies repeated enough are thought to have a grain of truth to them by the general publics, even when known to be from biased sources. If its on the air, it must be answered and if left unanswered, by many people simply taken as less factual 'facts' nonetheless.
The No Maas moment to me is when the tide begins to turn within the press against unpopular and often criminal regimes. The press starts playing up more and more potential crimes and scandals, incessantly until the get the publics attention. Scandals are always there to be found as any government has thousands of employees, often political appointees.
The press, when it so chooses and united, can bring down any government. They can brand a new much less corrupt administration as more corrupt just by the number of stories they run about them linking them to possible corruption scandals. Indeed, from seeing the coverage in countries of extreme disparity in wealth, a populist government can or could be far less corrupt than its predecessor and still get many times more stories accusing it of supposed corruption. And often this is the case. It is called “perception management.”
Many reporters will rightly feel that the job of the press in a democratic society is to support the supposedly popularly elected government, or the “legitimate” government, or even the “de facto” government when legitimacy is in short supply. This encourages 'stability.' The existing government would not have arisen to hold power, so the thought goes, if it did not already have a base of support, and the alternative is usually thought to involve chaos.
But when a groundswell in the public arises against the current government, it becomes open for specific incidents to trigger a nations press corps to rethink their main job is to give support to the existing political status quo. Some reporters fear seemingly supporting public movements to unseat existing parties or governments to be risking to lose objectivity, without realizing to constantly allow the existing government to use its "bully pulpit” as Theodore Roosevelt called it, to dominate the discussion and debates, to print whatever 'official' statements they are told to, can be to surrender their objectivity as much as required or asked, depending on who is asking and how willing their owners appointed editors are to let it go unfiltered into the public discourse.
In defining the No Maas moment as when a new, more critical angle is taken by the press corps which threatens to add to, or fuel, the rising popular discontent, I have long ago decided that such a moment in the USSR occurred when the Lithuanian TV station was attacked on-air by Soviet troops. Not only was it a blow to the growing independence of the press under Gorbachev's Glasnost program, it was a threat pointed at the press itself, an outright desire for control.
At such turning points, which need not to lead to effective political changes or upheavals to be considered turning points, the press begins to favor the popular movements which previously were ignored, marginalized or demonized in their coverage, or simply shut out completely. It often involves journalists willing to put their careers on the line, their family's security, and even their very lives on the line. They, as much as they can, go off-script, say “We were lying to you before, don't believe what we were telling you. We were being used. Until we are fired or arrested, we will try to do better from now on, or at least for as long as we can financially hold out.”
But the American situation of 2007 is more difficult to judge one single day or one single incident. Surely Hurricane Katrina can count as such a near moment. Reporters on the scene of the humanitarian disaster openly defied their station owners attempts to 'spin' the coverage of what they were seeing and reporting. “Its not true” they dared to openly say, in real time and that is key if not crucial in importance, of what the government was saying to be the case, of what their fellow journalists were saying when repeating the 'talking points' given to them from above. And it was so extreme with pictures no one could deny, that they were allowed to get away with it, careers intact, maybe some lost promotions not withstanding.
The present Bush administration should have zero credibility to the press corps that cover it, so often have they been lied to, threated with arrest and the monitoring of their phone calls and personal lives by the government when looking into government abuses of power and violations of the law arbitrarily and unilaterally deemed off-limits due to national security.
Indeed,the abuses of this Bush Administration are so far reaching in their criminality even the Democrats can appreciate that exposing them would be a threat to national security and our image. What they don't realize is that that image outside the concentric bubbles of the Washington beltway and American ignorance of the relevance of other countries legitimate views of us as out-of-control, is long dead anyway. Likewise, our very national security is no longer served by keeping covered these festering and poisonous actions, treacherous when not treasonous.
Yet instead, greed to those who make their careers and tax cuts, their access to power and all its perks and privileges possible, and even loyalty to that common grouping that politicians and those who cover them now can be thought to comprise, these have kept them from openly asserting that what they are being asked to put out they often know to be lies and disinformation. The backhanded 'corrections' about previous lies are meaningless, when they are even called outright lies, because it does not affect, or has not yet affected, the ability to put out new ones completely unchallenged.
America's No Maas moment this April, if it indeed proves in hindsight to be one, is interesting because of its timing in relation to the impending attack on Iran, intended not only to silence such quibbles, such as “who killed who” or “who spied on who” or “which government leaders committed which felonies or treasonous acts against the Constitution,” but rather instead shift the debate to who is trying to undermine our leaders ability to manage his self-imposed World War III. Without nerve such a stand now is the ultimate brand of futility.
Yet when has honor had anything to do gauging the chances of success?
1) 1992 Miller, Dr. Robert F. Sr Fellow in Political Science, Division of Economics and Politics, RSSS, ANU 1992/02/17 THE BALTIC STATES WIN THEIR INDEPENDENCE: LITHUANIA'S DIFFICULT RENAISSANCE
http://history.eserver.org/baltic-states-independence.txt
2) 2006 Boyd, Olivia 2006/Autumn Information, Ideology And Power: How Glasnost’ Affected The Demise Of The Soviet Union: CROSSROADS JOURNAL, VOLUME 1 ISSUE 1 AUTUMN 2006 ISSN: 1833-878X
http://www.uq.edu.au/crossroads/Issues/Autumn06/Autumn06%20-%204.Boyd%20(pp.14-21).pdf
3) 1991 Barmé, Geremie R. 1991 BEIJING DAYS, BEIJING NIGHTS From The Pro-Democracy Protests in China: Reports from the Provinces , edited by Jonathan Unger (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 1991)
http://www.tsquare.tv/links/Beijing_Days.html
4) 2000 Jancic, Mirna 2000/10/05 State Media Revolt: Journalists loyal to the Milosevic regime are rebelling in the aftermath of the opposition election victory. Institute for War and Peace Reporting, London, UK
http://iwpr.net/?p=bcr&s=f&o=246807&apc_state=henibcr38938691c88c678d8ab7c39d4fd713a9
5) 2006 McFaul, Michael 2006/May Importing Revolution: Internal and External Factors in Ukraine’s 2004
http://iis-db.stanford.edu/pubs/21145/McFaul_No_59.pdf
6) 2005 Froomkin, Dan 2005/03/18 What's a Press Corps to Do?, The Washington Post, Washington, DC
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A46867-2005Mar18.html?nav=rss_politics/administration/whbriefing
7) 2007 Klein, Joe, 2007/04/05 An Administration's Epic Collapse, TIME Magazine, New York, NY
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1607243,00.html
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/04/10/hiatt/
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