Speaking Freely

From Asia Times Online at http://www.atimes.com/
SPEAKING FREELY
Media fail to report for dutyBy Kent Ewing

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HONG KONG - It is already patently clear who the biggest loser will be in the US presidential election - and it is neither President George W Bush nor Senator John Kerry. Rather, it is the US news media, which (to borrow a recurrent theme of the interminable campaign) failed to report for duty.
We thought US journalism had reached its nadir on election night nearly four years ago when the country's major news networks, without a shred of reliable data, prematurely projected that Bush had carried the key state of Florida and thus won the presidency.
That claim was as irresponsible as it was incorrect and had to be retracted later that night. But the damage had been done: Bush had already acquired the aura of a president and wound up the winner of the protracted legal battle that followed his virtual draw with Al Gore in Florida.

But how many of us know that it was a cousin of Bush who made that initial, baseless projection for Rupert Murdoch's Fox News Channel?
And how many of us remember the slavish stampede as other networks followed the Fox report with the same groundless projection, which they then falsely claimed to be their own?
Yes, that was bad enough, but things are even worse this time around. There is no other way to explain why a recent Newsweek poll shows that 42% of Americans continue to believe that Saddam Hussein was "directly involved" in the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon near Washington, DC.
Or why the smears against Kerry's honorable military record have gained such sticking power. This is not just a bitter battle between two candidates; the US media have in large part renounced their role as objective reporters of the campaign and leaped into the partisan fray.

Murdoch's Fox News, which is little more than a propaganda arm (and fist) of the Republican Party, is the main culprit, but because Fox is so entertainingly good at being bad, others are now imitating the Fox style. Since Fox has won a monopoly on die-hard Republicans, for example, CNN seems to have decided to join the Kerry camp.
And what do you suppose compelled veteran CBS news anchor Dan Rather to jump into an unflattering story about Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard that was apparently based on forged documents? After a week of fending off attacks on the reliability of their source, Rather and CBS were forced to apologize.
But let's not just pick on these three giants of the television media. For a more general indictment, go on the Internet and take a look at the transcript of the now-infamous presidential news conference of March 2003. It was there and then that President Bush articulated what has turned out to be an almost entirely bogus rationale for going to war against Iraq.

And, since the president gives press conferences just about as often as North Korea's Kim Jong-il, this was the time for the White House press corps to rise to the occasion. Yet the transcript is notable for its lack of substantive questions. This was not only a president girding the nation for war, but also a US media too cowered to question why.

While the right questions are finally being asked, they come too late and in the midst of a furious campaign of distraction - about Kerry's service in Vietnam, about Bush's service (or lack thereof) in the Texas Air National Guard, about anything but the heart of the matter. The Fox-driven agenda has triumphed.

US journalism is no longer a question of who, what, where, when, why and how. Instead, it is more about us versus them. Both the country and the world suffer for this woeful loss of balance and credibility.

Kent Ewing is a writer and teacher at Hong Kong International School who worked as a journalist in the US before moving overseas. Several of his articles have appeared on the op-ed page of the South China Morning Post.