From Fourth Estate to Fourth Branch of Government

by John T. Simpson

I remember when the term investigative journalism used to mean something. My first introduction to it was through Peter Maas’ seminal classic The Valachi Papers at the tender age of eleven. Hooked me right away. A year later, at the age of twelve,  I devoured William L. Shirer’s monumental and award-winning ‘Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany.’ A very heady 1250 pages of fine print in paperback, and I do mean fine print. Worth its weight in gold.

From that point on, I was addicted. I couldn’t get enough of Peter Maas, Robin Moore, Woodward and Bernstein, Nick Pileggi, Ovid Demaris, James Bamford, James Michener, Cornelius Ryan, anything from the Ballantine Espionage/Intelligence Library, and too many others to list here.

I only recently read Michener’s The Bridge at Andau, an account of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising based on hundreds of eyewitness accounts, written in novelized form to protect identities at the time. It takes you right into the chaotic and revolutionary Bupapest of the day as though you were there.

Mr. Michener, who was living in Austria at the time, went to the nearby Hungarian border to conduct interviews among the hundreds of thousands fleeing the brutal Soviet backlash, which claimed the lives of 2,500 Hungarians and 700 Soviet troops. The Bridge at Andau is a must-read that clearly illustrates the contrast and conflict between an oppressive Communist regime and its freedom-seeking people.

Many of the above authors’ works were serialized in the press, and stand as testaments to pure investigative journalism that always followed hot on the trail, no matter where that trail led. Stalwarts such as Ernie Pyle and Edward R. Murrow risked life and limb to give Americans the real skinny on World War II, be it reporting from rooftops during the London Blitz, or from the beaches of the Pacific.

If you wanted to go all the way, you might even call Albert Speer’s Inside The Third Reich, or Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel Prize-winning Gulag Archipelago masterpieces of eyewitness investigative journalism, though they are far more than that. These profound words from Mr. Solzhenitsyn, from his address to Harvard’s graduating Class of 1978, really jump out at me:

Harvard’s motto is “Veritas.” Many of you have already found out and others will find out in the course of their lives that truth eludes us if we do not concentrate with total attention on its pursuit.

Also, truth is seldom pleasant; it is almost invariably bitter. There is some bitterness in my speech today, too. But I want to stress that it comes not from an adversary but from a friend.

Those words could not sum up more my attitude to and perceptions of today’s Fourth Estate in America, and even the entire democratic Western press. It is like I married young and totally in love, only to watch as the years passed as my betrothed became bitter, polarized, angry and even a mortal enemy. I still remember the reasons I fell in love, but am now filing for divorce out of my own bitterness and remorse at how far a once-great love has descended into madness.

And it has been a long downward slide. I certainly know how John Nash’s wife felt now.

Pyle’s and Murrow’s war reporting was intelligent, gritty, unfiltered and unadulterated with propaganda. Unlike, say, Geraldo Rivera giving away our troops’ positions to the Iraqi army. Or TNR knowingly fabricating Nazi-like tales of American soldiers in the Iraq War.

Or anything on the Iraq War from Pinchy’s New York Times. This Times article is eerily reminiscent of DHS’ implication of veterans as prone to violence, though the numbers in fact prove the homicide rate is far lower for returning veterans than the general population. And they always throw in alcoholism on vet stories. It’s like there’s a left wing playbook somewhere. Hmm. Curious.

Even worse, I had to kick all their asses to start reporting on Roxana Saberi when everyone, and I mean everyone, the White House, State, Congress, the press, EVERYONE, pulled a major disappearing act on Roxana in early March. It’s like they were all trying to sweep the Obama bad press on Roxana under the rug.

By the way, my best piece on that subject is approaching 4000 hits. You tell ME who’s doing the reporting as a public service here! In fact, the only subject the MSM is even more silent on is Iran’s egregious human rights abuses. Bunch of hopeless dupes is what they are on Iran, just like Team Oscar and Sean Penn. I ask you. What good are they?

In short, ‘excellence in journalism’ today is less reflective of Murrow and Pyle than Jayson Blair, Stephen Glass and Frederick Foer. And why? Because like Fox Mulder in the X Files, all their editors Wanted To Believe, because those frauds and plagiarists wrote all the News To Print That Fits. When editors like the NYT’s Howell Raines get stories that line up neatly with their own left-wing tinfoil worldviews, who needs editorial oversight? Doesn’t exactly give me a tingle up my leg.

One could go back as far as the Vietnam War and the Big Three’s incessant campaign to ensure America’s loss in that war, turning even major battlefield victories into ignoble defeats. The Big Three are still at it even today, only now turning their cameras into swords to hack their fellow citizens, who peacefully protest against government policies with which the Big Three’s PRAVDA-like bureaucracies happen to vehemently agree. By the way, pravda in Russian means truth.

I don’t believe it necessary to rehash every propaganda lie spewing forth from today’s ‘Main Stream Media’. We are awash in them. Perhaps the seminal moment in American media today, in which the Fourth Estate shed all vestiges of objectivity and aligned itself ideologically to the Democratic Party lock, stock and barrel, occurred in 1998. Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff was denied the scoop of a lifetime, because Newsweek’s propaganda chiefs buried his expose on President Clinton’s sordid affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

Even today, Newsweek is still burying Isikoff’s scoops, as they did with this piece outlining senior Obama advisor David Axelrod’s extensive lobbyist connections, even as candidate Obama vowed that “lobbyists won’t work in my White House!” They also had no issue with David Axelrod, still an Obama kingpin, suggesting Tea Party protests could ‘mutate into something that’s unhealthy’ and are ‘peaceful so far,’ implying an underlying proclivity toward violence that has no basis in fact.

Even worse, Mr. Axelrod’s own left wing extremist viewpoint is now official government policy based on equating all conservatives, and even veterans returning from war, with Timothy McVeigh, much in the same manner Lefties condemn furiously when all Muslims are equated with Osama bin Laden. It is in fact blatant propaganda aimed at alienating and intimidating the minority party of dissent. Nothing less. And our so-called Mainstream Media is right there with him one hundred percent.

But what else would you expect from a de facto fourth branch of government? Or ‘news giants’ that even hold meetings to pressure their networks to lay off the President? Or fails to condemn Janeane Garofalo’s slandering of Tea Partiers as ‘racist teabagging rednecks’ based on journalistic standards? How sick and twisted a policy is THAT?

The really sad part is, that ideological rigidity is only the publicly visible tip of a very large iceberg into which MSM Titanic is sailing with reckless abandon. Actually, perhaps the Bismarck is a better analogy. That terror of the seas was once all powerful as well. It, too, was also sunk by its own crews on captain’s orders. And I couldn’t be happier to see all the MSM lifeboats being hoisted today, just as the Allies took a great deal of pleasure in watching the Bismarck fanatics take a dunk.

Since I was very young, I have been both fan and student of the methods and processes of intelligence gathering, propaganda, psy-ops and counter-intelligence, i.e. the Spy Game. Blame Ian Fleming. Even scored a 3.8 on the very tough officer-level Fundamentals of Naval Intelligence course, which the Navy graciously allowed me to take as an enlisted man.

I also spent a few years of my naval service during the Cold War listening to Radio Moscow, which often interrupted VOA broadcasts through jamming, which the USSR spent more money on at the time than we did on the entire VOA program. Even caught Radio Moscow’s coverage, if it can be called such, of the KAL 007 passenger airliner shootdown in 1983, which consisted of jamming VOA broadcasts for three days straight with silence, then spewing a series of heated accusations that KAL 007 was actually on a spy mission. They even pointed to the KAL flight number, 007, as proof.

The main point of my listing all my bona fides here is that I know propaganda when I see it. And boy, do I see it today. Too much of it! I believe today’s MSM would not look so much at that Soviet ‘reporting’, or even Orwell’s ‘1984′, less as examples of the worst form of propaganda and more as instruction guides. And they have learned well from their Soviet-era progenitors. Too well.

In fact, I really can’t tell which is the bigger lie from the infamous Olbermann-Garofalo hatefest: Garofalo’s rant that Tea Partiers are all ‘racist teabagging rednecks’, or Olbermann’s opening claim that Garofalo is ‘an actor and an activist’. Where is the evidence for any of those claims?

The big difference here, of course, it that Radio Moscow and PRAVDA were organs and extensions of the Soviet-era government masquerading itself as a free press. Actually, I take that back. No difference. But that is what happens when our so-called Fourth Estate abrogates its duty as an impartial, objective and investigative free press and becomes a fourth branch of government, slandering opposition candidates, even turning on its own citizens with unbridled contempt and sinister intent, in order to demonize huge swaths of the American electorate for political purposes.

We even have names now for these types of political manipulations by the press, so common are they. RatherGate, a blatant and clumsy attempt to influence an American presidential election with fake documents. Fauxtography, primarily used by the worldwide press to demonize Israel during their war with Hezbollah in 2006. When the press starts piling up colloquialisms for their blatantly fraudulent attempts to manipulate the news, you know we’re in trouble.

And now the four branches of government, led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, seek total and absolute media dominance with the Fairness Doctrine. Which of course, only would mean less Fairness and more Doctrine, and could even regulate web content. Just like Iran and China do.

What else can you call it but a Goebbels-like left wing power grab, when Rush and conservative talk radio is specifically targeted, yet NPR and Far Left TV news ‘reporting’ is considered so honest and grand it doesn’t require any intervention? Don’t answer, it’s a rhetorical question.

But all is not lost. It was the ‘pajamas media’ that ran Howell Raines out the Times’ door on a rail. Otherwise, he and Blair would probably still be there. And even though Newsweek buried the Isikoff scoop on Lewinsky, Matt Drudge picked up on it and set the bar for online journalism.

I remember reading somewhere, I believe either in Matt Drudge’s Drudge Manifesto or Ann Coulter’s High Crimes and Misdemeanors, that White House operatives were refreshing the Drudge Report screen 3500 times an hour during the Lewinsky scandal. If our press functioned today as it should, the White House would have full-time crews doing the same for dozens of media outlets. Not really necessary when those same media outlets ARE your full-time crews.

Yet Americans are not as stupid as those in the MSM, America’s left-wing extremist Reichministry, would have you believe. In fact, it is the MSM’s own stupidity and unabashed bias which is now leading these media behemoths straight into the tarpits of history, not unlike those in La Brea which devoured the mammoths of old. And like those towering monstrosities, today’s versions stagger likewise into those tarpits, totally oblivious and self-blinded to the dangers their own clumsy and misdirected footsteps bring.

The Dead Tree Press is in fact today’s Petrified Forest. Though many claim the explosion in online journalism and fall in ad revenues is to blame, even the New York Times’ online version is as biased and partisan as the fishwrap edition, which explains their demise. Yet the New York Post and Daily News have actually seen increases in circulation, and USA Today is holding relatively steady.

The same is true for television. Though FOX News is roundly condemned as right wing by those who proselytize a left wing agenda, FOX is at least willing to brook opposing opinions. The puerile jolly teabag frat house jokesters of the MSM brook none. And that is why FOX is blowing them all out of the water. Who wants to watch a ‘news’ program when you already know what their ‘news’ is going to be, or whose ‘reporters’ insult the very viewers they seek to attract?

Predictably, members of Congress, spearheaded by Senator John Kerry, are even now looking at ways to bail out left wing propaganda organs like the Boston Globe, aka the New York Times Jr, and which may close its doors soon if a contract with union workers falls through. Celebs like Alec Baldwin are pleading to save the New York Times, which may bring added weight in Congress to that facetious argument.

Yet in reality, the only real political difference between a privately or publicly financed Globe or Times would be their source of income. In fact, government paychecks to the press would actually be more honestly reflective of their current ‘journalism’ status.

I say let them die. Pull the plug, even. They are dying for a reason. Put them, and all of us, out of our misery. And I’ll be damned if my tax dollars go to Pinchy so he can remain President Obama’s and the Democrat Party’s PRAVDA on my dime! On that note, here’s Congress. Let your representatives know how you feel about the government subsidizing their own private Reichministries with our tax dollars. And let then hear it on the Unfairness Doctrine, too.

I hope someday we see a real press that not only doesn’t serve as a fourth branch of government, but engages in the same old-school investigative journalism that should keep our government officials sitting on pins and needles. THAT is the function of a truly free, objective and impartial press, regardless of the ideological positions of the government in power.

Needless to say, I’m not holding my breath on that one. But I am withholding my dollars and viewership on the most egregious offenders. And I hope you do, too. Let the free market decide these modern-day dodo birds’ fates, and not our government and tax dollars. All bad things should come to an end.

Good Night and Good Luck.

AFTERWORD: One very pleasant surprise in modern-day reporting, and I never thought the day would come I would say this, is today’s Huffington Post. Granted, many of their pundits are as brain-dead as KOS, but their Iran coverage is phenomenal, perhaps the best out there. As a bonus, even many of their naively idealistic pundits are starting to realize Iran isn’t the Garden of Paradise Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, AMPAS and Sean Penn would have us believe.

And I seriously doubt in HuffPo’s early days that you would have seen Op-eds like this one by Daniel Sinker: “When The Left Went Teabagging: As You Chuckle At The Right’s Newfound Activism, Don’t Forget That The Left Sucked Balls For Years.” Some are even criticizing President Obama!

Hope Springs Eternal.


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Posted Apr 27th 2009 at 8:40 am in Media Criticism, Politics | 101 Comments