July 4, 2006
The bruises come with the job
When things aren’t going exactly as planned our leaders like to blame the media with attacks on the patriotism of The New York Times and the like. The media are an easy target, plenty easy for a scattershot like Dick Cheney to hit. They’re big and slow and aren’t going anywhere. Plus, as an added bonus, the media tell us things that people in power really don’t want to hear trumpeted about town.
So, what to do about this nasty media telling tales that shouldn’t be told in public? The game plan for Our Fine President and is crew of verbal hatchet men is always two-pronged and the same. When the media informs the public that you are monitoring their phone traffic, their online traffic or all international money movements, you just question the media’s belief in America during wartime and say their actions “give aide and comfort to the enemy.” Then you follow this up by jabbing at the media’s credibility and eroding the public’s trust about anything they say about anyone or anything that isn’t a celebrity.
But as usual with this crew in charge at the moment, they’ve got everything backwards. The media are not hurting our freedom or aiding our enemies by informing the public of clandestine and possibly illegal government programs that actually curtail liberty in this country. It is important for the public to know as much as possible about how the government spends our money in defense of this country, and it is also important that our tactics and motives are beyond reproach as we do battle with an enemy’s ideology as much as his physical presence. Besides their attempts to assault and discredit the media are unlikely to achieve widespread success or their desired pacification of the public.
The administration’s argument that the media publicizing controversial and legally questionable programs is basically that knowledge of the programs lessens their effectiveness. The reasoning seems to follow that if al-Qaida and their allies know we’re listening to their phone calls, reading their e-mails and watching their cash they will stop using those systems. That might be true, but we’re not at war with morons and they were surely aware we’d be monitoring these things. Besides, how is it a bad thing if we’ve made it harder for our enemies to communicate and fund their operations?
The only reason these programs were kept secret is because when their concept was first brought up after Sept. 11 as Total Information Awareness (by the evil New York Times) the public balked at so much government spying and data collection. So the duties continued under different names in a more secretive fashion. Rules and procedures were ignored and the data mining and massively scaled data abstraction set in motion. Of course getting caught doing what the public said they did not want can be a bit embarrassing.
So, what to do? What to do? Blame the messenger is an old and easy game. The bearer of bad news is never popular, but often necessary. The American media has withstood attacks of this sort before and as long as we don’t cut the Constitution out from beneath them, the truth of the situation will play out over time and the media will be vindicated and return to their traditional position of being simultaneously loved and hated. And as long as celebrities keep doing stupid stuff the media will never be totally hated.