State of the Media

With some rare exceptions, the media has drifted from the story of CIA-sponsored torture during the Bush administration. But still it begs for the same righteous reporting that Seymour Hersh once applied when he unmasked the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. It remains a vital story for journalists to pursue—not just to affix blame, but to help rebuild our international image and ultimately strengthen national security.

Some media critics will say that journalists shouldn’t be responsible for rehabilitating America’s standing abroad. But that would certainly be a byproduct of reporters digging down with the same ferocity that Hersh employed. It would be proof that we have a healthy press, that we have an independent mechanism for holding an imperial presidency accountable, and that the American media still have a vital role as an investigative arm that will do the work that public agencies won’t.

In the last several weeks, two Bush administration insiders, the usually secretive former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and former Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee, found themselves in the news and offering up leads that reporters need to chase down. Gonzales granted a rare interview to Texas Monthly; Bybee made the papers after his closed-door testimony to a House committee investigating torture was released.

The men are tied by infamous deeds: Bybee helped write two infamous “torture memos” that went from his desk at the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel to the hands of then–White House counsel Gonzales. Those memos greenlit the use of waterboarding and inspired other “enhanced interrogation techniques” that Bybee now claims he never intended to happen—but that, based on his testimony, rogue elements in the CIA apparently inflicted with brutal precision.

The news accounts of the two men had a remarkable similarity: You hear them both talk about their sensitivity, their humanity … the fact that they have families. You can feel Bybee and Gonzales spinning, mightily, in order to inoculate their legacies and maybe even head off any deeper media inquiries into their role in the ill-fated U.S. torture regimens.

But reporters must not allow that to happen.

Gonzales and Bybee essentially offered investigative journalists road maps: Gonzales admitted that he didn’t know anything about the Geneva Conventions, and Bybee finally admitted that, yes, someone had gone too far when it came to waterboarding and human rights abuses.

Those two admissions alone should jump-start media investigations into the dark story of torture during the Bush administration’s muscled-up “war on terror.” They should inspire editors to work backward from Gonzales’ and Bybee’s words and unleash reporters who can determine whether the two men were inhumanely reckless or criminally negligent.

It’s not just an academic point. As the Washington Post series “Top Secret America” illustrated, since 9/11 the intelligence industry has grown so large that it now employs almost 1 million Americans. The growing demand for information on terrorists can only be satisfied with help from our well-compensated allies in the Middle East and South Asia. In other words, America may have stopped torturing people, but we’re probably still paying other people to do it for us.

Unfortunately, some in the media would like us to forget the whole nasty torture thing. The New York Times’ David Brooks once humiliated himself on PBS in a discussion about Americans torturing other human beings:

“Is this something we want to go back and criminalize?” asked Brooks. For good measure, he leaned on his preferred voice of reason: “This is what Dick Cheney is talking about.”

Well, to answer Brooks’ self-damning rhetorical:

Yes, it is something we want to criminalize.

And the media needs to wake up and hound the truth the way Sy Hersh once did and still does.

 

Read more about Gonzales in Bill Minutaglio’s unauthorized biography.

Watch Seymour Hersh speak at the Observer’s MOLLY National Journalism Prize dinner.

I.F. Stone said this almost 50 years ago: “The bureaucracies put out so much that they cannot help letting the truth slip from time to time.”

Stone would be nodding his head as he watched the U.S. military denounce the fact that on Sunday, Wikileaks worked with The New York Times, The Guardian and Der Speigel to release tens of thousands of classified war documents.

Stone, more than almost any other American journalist, learned to feast on government records – ones he ferreted out from deep inside the grey buildings (the “bowels of government” as he called it), as well as ones that conscience-guided whistleblowers handed to him.

Either way they arrived on his desk, it didn’t matter – Stone believed that all governments lie and that sometimes it was only the Big Bureaucratic paper trail that led to the truth. And he believed in the public’s right to know what the hell the government is doing for them – or to them.

People familiar with many of the 92,000 documents that the still-anonymous source gave to Wikileaks are suggesting that perhaps the scariest thing that the papers reveal is a bigger pattern of civilian casualties in the Afghanistan war than was widely known.

And the head of Wikileaks has been suggesting that there is more to come, and that it might eventually lead to war crimes investigations.

It’s convenient to blame the messenger and skip the message – the cautionary lessons about the First Amendment, about the right to truth in a democracy. This is not new. There were people who wanted Stone to vanish – in any way possible.

And it was never really a long leap from past revelations like the Pentagon Papers, which revealed how the public was lied to over Vietnam, to other more contemporary government charades and lies – and other attempts to muffle the First Amendment, to muzzle the media.

There was the carefully organized, smoke-and-mirrors invitation for reporters to “embed” themselves with military units during the 2003 launch of the war in Iraq. The military couldn’t wait to slap helmets on gullible reporters whom Donald Rumsfeld and Karl Rove correctly assumed would love to play G.I. Joe and forget that the real stories: Why exactly was the U.S. in another war in the first place? Who said there were WMDs? What was the real prime directive?

Now, the Wikileaks episode has already reprised a lot of these regrettably redundant lessons. Some critics are more worried about how the Afghanistan war documents got out, instead of what damning news is in them.

We might not ever be privy to the full conversations that editors might have had with the military over what exact portions of the leaked documents can run – and what was held back from readers.

That’s another dilemma itself. It raises the question of whether editors should censor themselves in the name of government policies. It raises the question of how editors decide what is a matter of national security, and what is a nation’s right to know.

For now, the Wikileaks saga has proved at least one thing.

We still have an aching need for a ballsy, aggressive press — one utterly defined by a belief that governments really do lie … and really need to be held accountable to their citizens.

For Mark Schleifstein, covering the oil tragedy in the Gulf has to be like revisiting a nightmare. In 2002, the veteran, much-honored reporter wrote a definitive series for The New Orleans Times-Picayune accurately predicting hell on earth was coming in the form of floods. No one heard him. No one answered the questions he was trying to raise. When Katrina landed in 2005, he found himself trying to stay alive in a wounded city … and having to write about exactly what he had said would happen. It was death-grip surrealism. He and his extraordinary colleagues eventually won the Pulitzer for work that revealed to many readers how a criminally inept president, his cronies, and the Louisiana state government had left one of the great cities of the world to rot.

Now Schleifstein and other reporters are covering the BP disaster and, again, it seems as if their questions are going unanswered—if they are allowed to ask questions at all.

As with Katrina, the world craves straight answers—and it needs reporters who know what the hell to ask, how to ask it, and how to determine who is lying to the American people. If folks still think the public’s right to know hard facts is best served by “citizen bloggers” thousands of miles away from the disaster area who theorize wildly about life-and-death complexities, then their brains should be used to dam up the spewing BP pipes.

We need serious journalists holding BP, the Coast Guard, President Obama and anyone else accountable. Especially now that the federal government seems blissfully intent on ceding the flow of information to a private company. “It’s a frustrating situation,” says Schleifstein. During Katrina, “there wasn’t this private entity you had to deal with … they don’t understand the media, and they don’t understand what our needs are.”

It’s not just BP or the feds. Schleifstein runs into walls with state officials. That, perhaps, is not surprising to anyone who knows how Louisiana and Texas are run by Big Oil. For years, he has been trying to get state officials to address a chronically underreported story—what the hell happened to the 8.7 million gallons of oil leaked from rigs and storage tanks during hurricanes Katrina and Rita? “You can’t get any information out of the state on those spills,” he says.

So when reporters learn there is another “press conference,” it is like a flashback to the toxic reporting environment of the Bush era. The briefings are aggressively fire-walled and 15 to 25 minutes long. You’re lucky to be one of the six or seven reporters allowed to ask one question. That’s if you are told where a conference will be.

Sandy Davis, with the Baton Rouge Advocate, had someone climb onto a fire station roof in Grand Isle, La., to examine a 7-mile stretch of coastline to find a press conference. No one would tell her where on the island the event would be held.

All the evasive dancing is designed to avoid culpability. The feds relentlessly point at BP—and BP ducks low as it becomes increasingly worried about bankruptcy. So the big questions go unanswered: Who knew when there was a problem? Exactly how many barrels of oil have been leaked? And who is really in charge—BP or the federal government?

Davis calls BP and is steered to people who offer generally useless drips of information and refuse to give their names. She routinely asks: Can I talk to anyone at all who can be quoted? The Coast Guard spin doctors are in drone mode. “They know nothing beyond how many feet of boom is being laid,” says Davis.

Then there was the deputy sheriff trying to throw Davis and a photographer off a beach. And the sheriff who told her to call BP after she tried to chase down a report about a possible offshore accident.

One day Davis felt she was getting closer to asking the Coast Guard “what they knew and how much they knew.” She was patched through to the inner circle around Adm. Thad Allen, the alleged point person for Obama’s federal response. Then a lieutenant commander told her, “You should be hearing back from BP.”

Of course there was that press conference on Grand Isle. The rooftop spotter spied national TV trucks and determined that’s where the short conference was. (That episode suggests the feds and BP are catering to the networks rather than local print reporters.)

“They are on a learning curve on how to deal with the public,” says Davis. “Their first reaction is to control.”

So she has a modest suggestion: “Don’t worry about what we’re doing. Let us have access … what can you hide in this thing? We’re watching the oil leak in.”

The fact that British Petroleum has been one of the most clandestine corporate citizens in recent history should be as brutally evident as the scummy oil now eating away at our nation’s hem. It has aggressively skirted media scrutiny for years, and its dismal lack of transparency is especially visible in Texas City. ¶ People in hard-working Texas City know all too well what the mainstream media is only just coming to understand. They know that dead men haunt the waterfront—men who lost their lives in earlier British Petroleum disasters. So it is beyond perverse that oil the company plans to “capture” from its gushing underwater well was destined for refineries in Texas City, where BP is still untangling the consequences of its bloody past.

Texas City’s history of calamity is long. In one of the most underreported environmental stories in American history, the town was laid to waste in 1947—more than 500 people killed, thousands injured, tons of deadly petrochemicals poured into the bay and the gumbo soil. BP wasn’t in Texas City in 1947. The so-called Texas City Disaster was the product of a neglectful federal government and the secretive petrochemical industries lining the coast. It dominated headlines for a few weeks and then all but disappeared.

That’s a pattern that BP is angling to replicate as it unleashes spin doctors, ignores inquiries, refuses to set up a press room and insists on locating its “response headquarters” in the less-than-convenient small Louisiana towns of Houma and Roberts.

“They are just not forthright about what’s going on,” says Dr. Robert Thomas, the Texas native who directs the Center for Environmental Communication at Loyola University in New Orleans. “BP is not talking about what they are spraying [as a dispersant] … and what the implications are. For days we couldn’t find out what they were spraying.”

A veteran biologist and zoologist, Thomas has been deeply absorbed in both the spill and BP’s attempts to control the story. Reporters, he says, are trying to squeeze straight answers from a behemoth accustomed not just to avoiding the media, but to controlling it.

“I’ve heard a lot of people saying, ‘I can’t get the information I need.’”

In Texas City, some folks aren’t surprised. They know BP as the clever giant that years ago began pouring millions of advertising dollars down the gullets of thirsty mainstream newspapers and magazines. With the calculated callousness of a corporate Nostradamus, BP executives no doubt saw a future when Americans would wise up to the fact that Bush-Cheney Inc. was nothing but an especially willing servant of the oil industry. So British Petroleum launched an aggressive “reinvention,” working the media hard, sending corporate soothsayers into editorial boardrooms and taking out handsome ads asserting a greener BP, “Beyond Petroleum,” safe, clean and verdantly inclined.

In 2005, the charade was revealed when 15 workers died in a tragic accident at the BP facility in Texas City. A shitstorm of investigations, fines and accusations finally unmasked the company. Media accounts, including those in The New York Times, expressed a naïve sense of surprise, as if the incident had been just a singular, asymptomatic stab. BP simply waited it out.

Now, as BP oil pumps into the Gulf, Thomas sees reporters screwing up the courage to face down the energy-industry gods. Some very brave reporting is coming from New Orleans’ Times-Picayune, the saintly publication that has been fighting with one hand tied behind its back since Katrina. And Thomas knows all about the entrenched cultural reluctance trickling down from the upper links of the media food chain in this part of America: “We tend to not be as confrontational with them [the energy companies]. There tends to be, from the top, a sense of ‘let’s don’t be too harsh.’”

It’s as if a billion-dollar global volcano has been smoking in plain sight for decades, and the media responds only when it erupts, when lives are lost, when entire ecosystems are in danger.

Otherwise, “They [BP] are absent, they are not at the forefront of the discussion,” Thomas says.

So the question is this: Shouldn’t the media always keep BP front and center, based solely on the company’s haunted history? And if we don’t, what will the ghosts of Texas City’s dead think of the 2015 report that BP will inevitably issue on the still unfolding tragedy in the Gulf?

There is zero question that hellish violence is going on along the border, largely on the Mexican side. It has to be reported—and it often is, by enormously courageous reporters. But as the news has been spiking over the last few years and deeply seeping into America, it has become an increasingly easy temptation for fear-mongers to lump very distinct issues and people together. It began, perhaps, with Glenn Beck playing to the cheap seats one night: “This is al Qaeda stuff,” said Beck, a few years ago as much of the country was first becoming attuned to the border realities. He had a rotating set of pictures over his shoulder—images of unidentified bloodied men, maps with ominous arrows charting drug cartel violence, the words “BORDER CRISIS” on the screen.

The breathless “reports” simply keep escalating. Flash forward to today: An online Fox News story on border violence quotes a grand vizier from the Cato Institute saying a “worst-case scenario” will lead to a “sudden surge” of 1 million Mexicans crossing the border and Mexico becoming “the Western hemisphere’s equivalent of Somalia,” and that it all “would clearly require a military response from the United States.”

Our very own state Sen. Dan Patrick, R-Houston, has been busy connecting dots through the media as he tries to raise his national profile. The radio show host posed this question to Fox News for a report on border violence: “Do you strengthen the borders so people cannot get in by the thousands every day, or do you create detention centers where people are held until their status is determined?”

Tying the drug wars to a long-lusted-for, growing web of immigrant detention centers is an insidious piece of old-style Texas political craftsmanship. It’s also part of a great tradition in our state: In the 1970s, the Texas Rangers basically occupied Crystal City. They were ostensibly there to look for drugs and corruption, but their real job was to break the back of the La Raza Unida movement. Gov. Dolph Briscoe said organizers were actually not creating farms but “establishing a little Cuba.”

Now, as then, the fear has gone mainstream. Oscar Garza, a former editor at The Los Angeles Times and Tu Ciudad, points to a story in the New York Times travel section on South Texas bird sanctuaries: “Not long ago, that story would have recommended a visit across the border for lunch or dinner. Instead, there was this: ‘The United States Border Patrol is a constant presence along the river, and in light of the recent drug-related violence on the Mexican side, a welcome, if disquieting sight.’”

Garza says, of course, that the media must respond to the breaking news: “I think the media is in a tough spot right now. … The violence can’t be ignored. There is no vacuum to escape its presence.”

But the fallout can get complicated: “Immigration and the violence … get all rolled up into one point of view,” says Meg Guerra, with the LareDOS newspaper in Laredo. She’s not blind to what’s happening: men with guns at the lunch counter, what sounds like bombs going off south of the river, thudding helicopters hovering over her ranch. But the beleaguered media aren’t reporting “the human side” of the borderlands, she says.

There is little time, money and manpower. It is triage reporting. And the reporters can’t control how the talk shows and spin doctors try to parlay drug war stories into some wicked political advantage. Worse, Guerra wonders if racists reading the border news are increasingly demonizing anyone with Mexican heritage.

Years ago, I was in The Classic Club, a cool blues haven in southern Dallas. The phone rang, and the African-American owner, Earnest Davis, answered and I saw a big weariness wash over him. The presumably Anglo caller was asking if Earnest’s club, his neighborhood, “was safe to visit.” He told the person that not everyone was bad in the southern part of town.

It’s a microcosmic parallel, but jingoistic, damning stereotypes are no doubt being reprised right now, as coverage of the drug wars in Mexico gets abducted by the screaming high priests of the reactionary right.

In the Rio Grande Valley, Alberto Salinas, a longtime faith healer in Edinburg (he channels the spirit of folk saint Niño Fidencio), asked me to relay this message to the politicians and the media: “There are only a handful of bad people ruining it for the rest of us.”