Home > An Eye On Power
By Bill Moyers
Between media consolidation and an administration
shrouded in impenetrable secrecy, keeping an eye on
government has gotten a lot harder. In this speech to
the Newspaper Guild of America, the elder statesman of
journalism reminds us that freedom and freedom of the
press were "birth twins" of the American Revolution.
This speech was delivered at a Newspaper
Guild/Communication Workers of America dinner on May
19, 2004.
Bill Moyers is a broadcast journalist currently hosting
the PBS program "Now With Bill Moyers." Moyers also
serves as president of the Schumann Center for Media
and Democracy, which gives financial support to
TomPaine.com.
Freedom and freedom of the press were birth twins of
the revolution. They grew up together, and neither has
fared well without the other. At times, journalism has
risen to great occasions and even made other freedoms
possible. From editors who went defiantly to prison
after being charged under the sedition act for
circulating opinions that questioned the motives of
Congress, or ’criminating’ (whatever that meant) the
president, to the willingness of Arthur Sulzberger and
Katherine Graham to risk criminal prosecution under
espionage laws if they printed the Pentagon Papers;
from Lincoln Steffens and Ida Tarbell and Upton
Sinclair taking on the shame of the cities, the crimes
of the trusts, and the treason of the senate, to Walter
Cronkite devoting an entire broadcast to Watergate;
from Seymour Hersh reporting on torture to 60 Minutes
II broadcasting the horror of Abu Ghraib, the greatest
moments in journalism have come not when journalists
made common cause with power, but when they stood
fearlessly independent of it.
How is it an old press secretary can speak in awe of a
press that once held his own feet to the fire? Two
reasons. I grew up in the Deep South. For a long time
we were in denial about the truth of slavery. The
truth-tellers among us were driven from the pulpit,
driven from the newsroom, driven from the classroom. It
took a ’terrible swift sword’-a Civil War-to drive home
the truth about slavery, and then it took another 100
years of suffocating conformity before the victory of
Appomattox was fully realized. Then, I did indeed serve
in the Johnson administration, when we circled the
wagons and for too long failed to face the facts on the
ground in Vietnam. Although it was hard to acknowledge
at the time, it was the David Halberstams and the
Morley Safers and the Peter Arnetts who were right
about reality. I.F Stone, too. I see in my mind’s eye
as I speak a smiling I.F. Stone, having just published
another of his little four-page weekly exposing the
contradictions in the government’s own documents,
pausing long enough amidst the thunder of battle to
declare: "I have so much fun I ought to be arrested...’
Quite a story we can tell. Quite a tradition we serve.
So, why, when we pause to celebrate it, as we are
tonight, why despite plenty of lip service on every
ritual occasion to freedom of the press-why are we so
uneasy, so uncertain, so anxious for our craft?
Partly it’s because of the secrecy. The secrecy today
is so thick as to be all but impenetrable. In earlier
times there were padlocks for the presses and jail
cells for outspoken editors and writers as our
governing bodies tried to squelch journalistic freedom
with blunt instruments of the law. Now, the
classifier’s ’top secret’ stamp, used indiscriminately,
is as potent a silencer as a writ of arrest. It’s so
bad the president and CEO of the Associated Press, Tom
Curley, last week called publicly for a media advocacy
center to lobby in Washington for an open government.
"You don’t need to have your notebook snatched by a
policeman," he said, "to know that keeping an eye on
government has lately gotten a lot harder."
With little public debate congress gives government
agencies the right to search your home, office,
telephone logs, e-mails, medical records,
restaurant-receipts, even banking and credit card
information-without your consent or knowledge. The
president signs an executive order postponing thousands
of declassified documents that are 25 years old or
more. He signs another executive order sending
hundreds of millions of tax dollars to religious
organizations with no obligation to show us where the
money’s going or how it’s being used. For the first
time in history the vice president is given the power
to decide what is classified and what is not. Behind
closed doors, key environmental protections are
shredded and in the middle of the night, without so
much as a single fingerprint left in the margin, an
anonymous hand inserts into an omnibus bill a loophole
providing billions of dollars in subsidies to powerful
clients. Secrecy poisons democracy and there is only
one antidote. When a student asked the journalist
Richard Reeves to define "real news," he answered,
"It’s the news we need to keep our freedom."
It’s not just government that’s squeezing out this
news. Some of the media giants are doing it
themselves. As they consolidate ownership they are
shrinking their news holes, isolating public affairs
far from prime-time. A study by Mark Cooper of the
Consumer Federation of America reports that nearly two-
thirds of today’s newspaper markets are monopolies.
Take a look at a recent book called Leaving Readers
Behind: The Age of Corporate Newspapering, published as
part of the project on the state of the American
newspaper under the auspices of the Pew Charitable
Trusts and the leadership of Gene Roberts, the former
managing editor of The New York Times . The report
describes "a furious unprecedented blitz of buying,
selling, and consolidating of newspapers from the
mightiest daily to the humblest weeklies."
A world where "small hometown dailies are being bought
and sold like hog futures, where chains now devour
other chains whole, where they are effectively ceding
whole regions of the country to one another, further
minimizing competition. Where money is pouring into the
business from interests with little knowledge and even
less concern about the special obligations newspapers
have to democracy."
The authors point to The Daily in Oshkosh, Wis., with a
circulation of 23,500, a paper that prided itself on
being in hometown hands since the Andrew Johnson
administration. But in 1998, it was sold not once but
twice within the space of two months. Two years later
it was sold again: four owners in less than three
years. In New Jersey, the Gannett chain bought the
Asbury Park Press , sent in a publisher who slashed 50
people from the staff and cut the space for news, and
then was rewarded by being named Gannett’s manager of
the year.
You better get used to it, these authors conclude: it
won’t be long before America is reduced to half a dozen
major print organizations. According to the Non-
Partisan Project for Excellence in Journalism,
newspapers have 2,200 fewer employees than in 1990.
The number of full-time radio news employees dropped by
44 percent between 1994 and 2000. The number of
broadcast network correspondents has dropped by one
third since the 1980s. And the number of TV network
foreign bureaus is down by half. Except for 60 Minutes
on CBS, the network prime time newsmagazines "in no way
could be said to cover major news of the day."
Furthermore, the report finds that 68 percent of the
news on cable news channels was ’repetitious accounts
of previously reported stories without any new
information."
We know what happens when robust journalism bites the
dust. The Pew report tells of examples like
Cumberland, Md., where the police reporter had so many
duties piled upon him he no longer had time to go to
the police station for the daily reports. But
newspaper management had a cost-saving solution: put a
fax machine in the police station and let cops send
over the news they thought the paper should have. The
report by Pew includes a 1999 survey that showed a
massive retreat in coverage of key departments and
agencies in Washington, including the Supreme Court and
the State Department. At the Social Security
Administration, whose activities literally affect every
American, only The New York Times was maintaining a
full-time reporter. At the Interior Department, which
controls five to six hundred million acres of public
land and looks after everything from the National Park
Service to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, there were no
full-time reporters around.
That’s right here in Washington. Out across the
country there is simultaneously a near blackout of
local politics by broadcasters. The public interest
group Alliance for Better Campaigns studied 45 stations
in six cities in one week in October. Out of 7,560
hours of programming analyzed, only 13 were devote to
local public affairs-less than one-half of one percent
of local programming nationwide.
Meanwhile, as secrecy grows, and media conglomerates
put more and more power in fewer and fewer hands, we
have witnessed the rise of a new phenomenon-a quasi-
official partisan press ideologically linked to an
authoritarian administration that is in turn the ally
and agent of powerful financial and economic interests
that consider transparencies a threat to their hegemony
over public opinion. This convergence dominates the
marketplace of political ideas in a phenomenon unique
in our history. Stretching from the editorial pages
of the Wall Street Journal to Rupert Murdoch’s empire
to the nattering nabobs of know-nothing radio to a
legion of think tanks bought and paid for by
corporations circling the honey pots of government, a
vast echo chamber resounds with a conformity of
opinions, serving a partisan worldview cannot be proven
wrong because it admits no evidence to the contrary.
When you challenge them with evidence to the
contrary-when you try to hold their propaganda to
scrutiny-you’re likely to wind up in the modern
equivalent of a medieval iron maiden, between the
covers, that is, of an Ann Coulter tirade, or wake up
in an underground cell at FOX News, force fed leftovers
from a Roger Ailes snack, and required for 24 hours a
day to stare at photographs of Rupert Murdoch on the
walls of the cell while listening to a piped-in Bill
O’Reilly singing the Hallelujah Chorus in praise of
himself.
So what’s happening here tonight is important. Your
recognition of journalism is more than ritual, ceremony
or even celebration. You are confirming what journalism
can do. I don’t want to claim too much for this craft,
but I don’t want to claim too little either. I believe
journalism and democracy are deeply linked in whatever
chances we Americans have to redress our grievances,
retake our politics, and reclaim our commitment to
equality and justice.
And one last thing. The character in Tom Stoppard’s
play Night And Day summed it up when he said: "people
do terrible things to each other, but it’s worse in
places where everything is kept in the dark."