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VOICES
Want to Be a Patriot?
Do Your Job
BY
RUSS BAKER
 In
the aftermath of September 11, Dan Rather publicly shed patriotic
tears on David Letterman’s show, demonstrating that he was
in as much pain as any American and as loyal to the national cause.
At the same time, TV news programs across the country were wrapping
themselves in stars-and-stripes graphics as news outlets of all
kinds rushed to associate themselves, in subtle and not-so-subtle
ways, with the nation’s surge of patriotic emotion.
Flag-waving is not surprising in the aftermath of a full-scale
attack on American civilians. As individuals, we are all part
of a severely traumatized body politic. But it is precisely during
the most trying periods that journalists must distance themselves
from their emotions if they are to do their best work. And it
is also imperative to distinguish between patriotism, love of
one’s country, and nationalism — the exalting of one’s
nation and its culture and interests above all others. If patriotism
is a kind of affection, nationalism is its dark side. Nationalistic
pressure also makes it hard for journalists to do their job. Even
today, eight months after the events, many journalists are troubled
by a sense that we have failed an important test, that we have
allowed certain kinds of honest reporting to be portrayed as somehow
disloyal.
Raising questions about the wisdom of government actions in wartime,
particularly early in a war, is not easy. For example, early in
Operation Desert Storm, ABC anchor Peter Jennings says he commissioned
a piece on the antiwar activist Ramsey Clark. Despite his own
sense of urgency, Jennings recalls that it took weeks to get the
piece on the air. “It was not quite the right moment,”
he says. Internally, “people were arguing less about the
relationship between the media and the administration than about
the media’s relationship with its public.” To confront
a popular government at such a time, he says, is to be “running
emotionally upstream.”
When war began in Afghanistan, Jennings says, “We decided
early on that we would not exploit the violence of all of this
without losing sight of how violent it was, and that we would
be reluctant to sloganeer.” But when Jennings and his people
departed from the patriotic consensus they paid a price. Jennings
had a howling pack after him, inflamed by Rush Limbaugh’s
charge that the anchor was disloyal for raising questions about
Bush’s conduct on September 11, when the presidential plane
zig-zagged across the nation while the World Trade Center and
the Pentagon were burning. (ABC eventually was able to get Limbaugh
to issue a correction noting that Jennings had merely observed
that some presidents are perceived as handling crises better than
others.) After a study showed that Jennings paid more attention
to civilian casualties in Afghanistan than either his NBC or CBS
rivals, he was subject to on-air criticism from Fox News’s
Brit Hume, while conservative media critics pointed to his Canadian
citizenship.
Another news program that successfully upheld journalistic principles
in the post-9/11 world was Ted Koppel’s Nightline, which
consistently asked pointed questions about the executive branch’s
newly assumed domestic law-enforcement powers, and insisted on
airing cautionary voices. This on a show that, during the Letterman
affair, an unnamed ABC executive called irrelevant.
We are, of course, at war. And the public does not have a right
to know everything. Still, in the post-September 11 world, an
official obsession with secrecy has grown out of the war against
terrorism, making the job of the journalist even harder. As we
know, Americans have been given less information about what is
being done in this war than in any prior conflict in U.S. history
(see “Access Denied,” cjr, January/February). Lack of
access to information is not, in itself, a journalistic dereliction
of duty. Failing to make a public issue out of it is, however.
“Information is being managed in this war, and frankly, we
can’t expect a lot of breaks,” says Jeffrey Dvorkin,
ombudsman at National Public Radio. But why don’t we read
and see more news about this serious problem? Walter Cronkite,
who set the standard for television anchors, laments that TV no
longer has the kind of editorial voice typified by the late Eric
Sevareid. Cronkite says if it were up to him, he would be running
“opinion of the management” editorials. “Complaining
to the Pentagon is not good enough,” he says. “We should
be letting the public know the restrictions under which we operate.”
The need for tough-minded reporting has never been clearer. When
journalists hold themselves back — in deference to their
own emotions or to the sensitivities of the audience or through
timidity in the face of government pressure — America is
weakened. Journalism has no more important service to perform
than to ask tough, even unpopular questions when our government
wages war.
Russ Baker is a contributing editor to CJR.
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