After September 11 (Part 2)

In Part 1 I wrote, among other things:

• the terrorists may have a spy in the White House;

• American society's abruptly heightened concern with evil might be an apt occasion to reflect on its own morality.

As it turns out, these two themes fit together well. The information suggesting a highly placed terrorist spy was a lie to the American people fabricated by senior White House officials for political advantage. In the midst of a national emergency, on September 12, Karl Rove, senior adviser to President Bush, and Ari Fleischer, the White House press secretary, invented and promoted to the press the false story that the terrorists had made a threat against the president, and that the threat was considered credible because it showed knowledge of secret information. Their objective: to counter political embarrassment over Bush's low profile immediately after the terrorist attack.

What's more significant is the way this revelation of deceit by the White House was reported sotto voce in the national press. It was not considered an important news item in its own right.

Shakespeare wrote:

This above all: to thine ownself be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.

One wonders these days about the converse: of what is a people not capable, when it shuns the truth about itself?

The New York Times, along with other news media, underplayed the revelation of deceit (after initially helping to publicize the false story), but its columnist Maureen Dowd offered an apt comment (Sept. 30) on both the revelation and on White House suggestions that criticism is unpatriotic:

To deflect criticism that the administration had been without any commanding and reassuring Giuliani-like voice for 10 hours, as the president and other high-level officials scrambled around, Karl Rove and Mr. Fleischer pushed the spurious and elaborately embroidered stories that the White House and Air Force One were also intended targets.

Such big, lame inventions undermine our trust, just as the Bush team starts to do a lot fast and in secret.

The chief of staff, Andy Card, has instructed the whole White House to stop speaking to reporters, so that the chosen few can spoon-feed the press the image of an In-Charge, Focused, Resolute President....

At a time when Americans are willing to vest extraordinary power in the president, to trust him with life-and-death decisions, to give him considerable leeway in curbing civil liberties and spending billions, this is a time when questions and debate are what patriotism demands.

Further White House deceit arose after a declaration by Fleischer that seemed at odds with American free-speech principles. As the Times reported (Sept. 28):

Last week, [Bill Maher, host of the late-night talk show "Politically Incorrect,"] said that the hijackers were not cowards but that it was cowardly for the United States to launch cruise missiles on targets thousands of miles away....

On Wednesday, Ari Fleischer, the White House press secretary, denounced Mr. Maher, saying of news organizations, and all Americans, that in times like these "people have to watch what they say and watch what they do."

When the White House later released the official transcript of Mr. Fleischer's briefing, the portion of his comments urging people to "watch what they say" was not included. When that sparked yet another round of discussion over Mr. Fleischer's comments, Anne Womack, an assistant to Mr. Fleischer, said yesterday that the transcript did vary from the remarks Mr. Fleischer made. She called it "a transcription error."

What about the bigger question of who Americans really elected in the presidential election last year? Salon.com founder and editor in chief David Talbot writes (Sept. 29):

An elite press consortium made up of the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and CNN also apparently handed the Bush administration another big favor this week when it indefinitely delayed making public the results of its Florida election recount. The long-awaited analysis of 200,000 disputed ballots from the presidential election was supposed to be published on Monday, but the Times quietly informed its readers in a Sunday essay by political reporter Richard Berke that the "move might have stoked the partisan tensions" and "now seems utterly irrelevant." A journalist involved in the project later told Inside.com, "There's a sense that now is not the time to be writing about something that might make it look like someone else should have been elected president."

The Times' decision to withhold information that is clearly the public's right to know is a startling one, and in its desire to avoid reopening potential wounds, more therapeutic than journalistic. In 1971, a much more divisive time in the nation's history, the Times was motivated more by First Amendment considerations than by appeals to a narrow patriotism when it pressed to publish the Pentagon Papers. In lifting the restraining order that the Nixon administration had brought against the Times, U.S. District Judge Murray Gurfein, a Nixon appointee, agreed that the paramount value for the press -- even in a time of heightened national security concerns -- must be the public's right to know. "The security of the Nation is not at the ramparts alone," declared Gurfein in his surprisingly passionate decision. "Security also lies in the value of our free institutions. A cantankerous press, an obstinate press, a ubiquitous press must be suffered by those in authority in order to preserve the even greater values of freedom of expression and the right of the people to know." It would be wise of the Times and the rest of the press to keep these words in mind during these fearful times as the government feels emboldened to clamp down on the flow of information.

Former Senator Gary Hart is also displeased with the news media. The U.S. Commission on National Security which he headed (with Senator Warren Rudman) issued a report seven months ago predicting a substantial terrorist assault on U.S. soil. But as Arianna Huffington writes (Sept. 13) in salon.com,

the Hart-Rudman report received practically no play either in print or on television.

"What happened," Hart told me, "ought to call into question what is important in our society and how the media cover it. But no one is asking this on TV, and I'd be amazed if there was a single discussion on the board of any newspaper asking: Did we do our job? There seems to be no self-reflection, no understanding by the media that they have a job under the direction of the Constitution to inform, not just entertain, the American people."

At the time the report came out, the media were too busy ferreting out the latest info on the supposed defacing of the White House by Gore loyalists and, later, on Gary Condit, over-age Little Leaguers and shark attacks.

In our modern, information-drenched times, the power of the media has increased as dramatically as the number of people wielding that power has shrunk. We are at their mercy. They set the agenda, they decide what we as a nation should be concentrating on.

The First Amendment wasn't intended as a license to make billions. It was there to guarantee that the people stay informed. And when the media fail at this job, we all suffer.

Unfortunately, the American press's penchant for rigorous -- even merely diligent -- reporting is rapidly disappearing, a victim of corporate pressure to build the bottom line and not rock the highly profitable status quo. Muckraking has been replaced by smut-raking, with the media hunting down the latest sensation as opposed to the hard stories that are essential to maintaining our freedom and democracy.

"Essential to maintaining our freedom and democracy." We've heard this kind of threat so often the meaning barely registers. It's just like the threat of domestic terrorism before Sept. 11, when the media ignored a major congressional study promising trouble ahead. But this is another threat Americans should treat seriously: the way things are going, their freedom and democracy might soon be history.

"American values" are admirable. The trouble is they are under continual assault within American society -- and given the inexorable tilting of the balance of strength towards their opponents, it is hard to see how their defenders will prevail. If a "war on terror" really begins, generating millions of recruits to jihad, "American values" are liable to survive as nothing more than an official position which can no longer be questioned.