What’s the media got to do with it? Everything.
By Chloe Kovner Ballatore
The constitution of this great country was drafted to include certain
key provisions about the separation of administrative powers. In
the system our forefathers devised, each branch would be checked
and balanced: executive power is overseen by legislative, legislative
is adjudicated by judiciary, judiciary appointed by executive, but
confirmed by legislative and so on in a system meant to maximize
democratic rule by the people and for the people. In the last year,
however, we have witnessed efforts by the executive branch to upset
this balance. These efforts include the establishment of a shadow
government to assume power in case of an emergency that includes
only the executive branch, and the failure to release documents
requested by Congress regarding an array of issues from recent Energy
Department meetings with Enron to decades old prosecution strategies
for the 1960s Boston murders. The judiciary branch is not immune
to the powers that Bush either: we saw no better evidence of that
than the twisted logic the US Supreme Court used to overturn the
Florida Supreme Court's decision and stop counting the votes of
Florida citizens.
Yes, yes, for many of us this is old news
already. For many of us, especially those of us that work in the
media or entertainment businesses, we have had to throw up our hands
in despair at the state of the government and thank our lucky stars
that we still have the freedom of the press, the freedom of speech.
Not so fast: In an little publicized memo that Attorney General
John Ashcroft issued on October 12, 2001, he vigorously urged federal
agencies to resist most Freedom of Information Act requests made
by American citizens. He said, "...institutional, commercial and
personal privacy interests could be implicated by disclosure of
information...When you carefully consider FOIA requests and decide
to withhold records, in whole or in part, you can be assured that
the Department of Justice will defend your decisions unless they
lack a sound legal basis or present an unwarranted risk of adverse
impact on the ability of other agencies to protect other important
records." This leaves American citizens in a virtual news blackout.
As for members of the fifth estate, we are forced to rely on increasingly
nervous government sources for news and information, sources who
have begun to insist on anonymity almost across the board as Secretary
of Defense Donald Rumsfeld rants on "Meet the Press" about government
"leaks." And dependence on sources alone can turn the press into
sycophants currying favor with sources, making deals and ultimately
threatening the integrity of the information granted and printed.
No wonder no one at ABC News wanted to talk to me about the flap
over ABC Entertainment's new reality TV show based on the War in
Afghanistan, to be produced by Jerry Bruckheimer (Black Hawk Down,
The Rock) with the "full, unparalleled support and cooperation of
the Defense Department and the Pentagon."
On February 22, the Los Angeles Times
reported that the new show, "Profiles from the Front Line," prompted
ABC News to file a complaint with the network's entertainment executives
about the show's producers getting access to the war in Afghanistan
- access that sounds precisely like what news organizations have
been struggling for for months. The show intends to tell "the compelling,
personal stories of the U.S. military men and women who bear the
burden of this fighting...particularly as they interface with the
Pentagon's efforts...and will rely on materials provided by the
Department of Defense," states the ABC Entertainment press release.
Network publicist Cathy Rehl confirmed that the idea was to virtually
place cameras in the hands of the fighting soldiers, and that the
producers are currently in Afghanistan where they will be filming
for twelve weeks to cover the thirteen intended hours of television
the show has contracted. When questioned about their complaint,
ABC News representative Todd Polk simply responded, "It's an internal
matter [about] an entertainment special," though he also confirmed
there have been news access issues with the Pentagon in regard to
the war in Afghanistan.
Despite Lieutenant Colonel Ken McClellan
of the US Air Force's claim that "The news media will continue to
receive timely and accurate information, as well as continued access
to Defense officials and US operations," many reports from the media
front line state just the opposite. For months after the bombings
in Afghanistan started in October, reporters were allowed no access
at all to the US troops inside the country or even to US troops
setting up air bases in neighboring countries. When they were finally
allowed into the country, they were not permitted to quote soldiers
using their full names, and were even locked in a metal shed one
afternoon to keep them from covering something. Sherry Ricchiardi,
a senior writer specializing in international issues for the American
Journalism Review and a professor of journalism at the Indiana University
School of Journalism, reported to CNN that journalists she's spoken
to have referred to the war in Afghanistan as being clamped down
with the most severe information freeze in the last 35 years. "The
military is operating in almost total secrecyÉwe have had reports
quoting the Pentagon as saying that the war against terrorism will
be fought with unprecedented secrecy," said an editor at NPR who
wishes to remain anonymous. And to anyone picking up a newspaper
or turning on the news, these claims seem patently obvious: numbers
of dead are repeatedly reported as unknown, battles are against
a generalized blanket of "enemy forces that may or may not contain
members of the Al Qaeda network," and even the war's duration has
been up for grabs Ð personally, I've heard it was already over twice.
Perhaps this has something to do with
the new but now (apparently) defunct Office of Strategic Influence.
As the New York Times reported on Februrary 19, the Office was developing
plans to provide news items, possibly even false ones, to foreign
media organizations as part of an effort to influence public sentiment
and policy makers in both friendly and unfriendly countries; seeking
to broaden the longstanding practice of information warfare against
hostile nations in Middle East, Asia and even Western Europe; and
assuming the role traditionally led by civilian agencies, mainly
the State Department. The Office, headed by Air Force General Simon
Worden, envisioned "using a mix of truthful news releases, phony
stories and e-mails from disguised addresses to encourage the kind
of news coverage abroad that the Pentagon considers advantageous,
while using clandestine activities, including computer network attacks,
to disrupt coverage it opposes." News organizations that did not
"follow the Pentagon line" would be punished in unspecified ways.
Still, the administration is not content
with controlling the press alone. Since the destruction of the Trade
Towers back in September, the US military began meeting with Hollywood
movers and shakers, including Bruckheimer, for advice on how to
develop the plot, the characters and the sense of suspense in future
terrorist attacks. And while the Pentagon has said they will not
seek editorial control over "Profiles from the Front Line" they
do maintain pre-screening rights over the show for "reasons of national
security." In light of recent Bush administration activities, it
would seem unlikely that we'll see any malcontent soldiers grousing
about the American military on TV. What the administration has done,
though, in addition to the above, is create an atmosphere in which
American citizens including the press and the entertainment media
have become afraid of dissension, have become fearful of the liberty
that this country was founded on. We have exchanged freedom of speech
for self-censorship and safety.
To be fair, this trend did not start with
the Bush II administration. There has been an undercurrent of conservativism
and fear of government and law enforcement that has informed both
the news media and entertainment for the last several decades. In
1999, I was a writer/producer on Fox network's primetime reality
television show "World's Wildest Police Chases." First of all, I
can attest from firsthand experience that "reality" does not have
much to do with it. Since we were dependent on the police for the
tape and footage that made the show, we never produced anything
that wasn't pro-cop. Not to mention, the show's executive producer
was a former cop. So you could pretty much guarantee that anything
that showed cops in a negative light didn't air or was edited to
reflect a positive light. After covering up police misbehavior and
sometimes brutality for a few months, I'd had it. The raw footage
often showed police pulling people over in small towns just because
the drivers were known troublemakers. In one case, six cops tackled
a motorcyclist after his hands were up. While he was on the ground,
one cop screamed, "Welcome to Georgia, bitch!" Then they remembered
tape was rolling. The man, who had no prior record, was simply speeding.
Finding it impossible to do my job under
such extreme constraints, I was finally fired. Although my segments
were praised, the official word was that I didn't share the vision
of the executive producers. The point: no matter what footage comes
back from Afghanistan, you can be sure it will be edited with a
bias to have, in the words of the press release, "a strong patriotic
message." And now, apparently, a patriotic message means it must
be exclusively pro-American government as defined by George W. Bush
and his relentlessly conservative Cabinet. Our country was founded
on the principle that Patrick Henry so succinctly articulated, "Give
me liberty or give me death." Our American founders left England
because they didn't have the right of representation or the right
to vote - neither do Floridians; they couldn't practice religious
freedom - neither can Muslims who are being arrested without cause
today; and for unfair, unjust tax laws - like the rich receiving
most of Bush's trillion dollar tax cut. We are now creating the
government that we feared, becoming our opressors as they say, using
all the same tactics except that now the technology available to
promote our propaganda is more advanced. American media is arguably
the most advanced, most pervasive, most influential weapon the government
has. Sadly, it's no exaggeration to say that the Nazis, who so effectively
used filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl to create influential propaganda
in the 1930s, could have learned a thing or two from Donald Rumsfeld
and Jerry Bruckheimer.
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