Telling the Truth

I just saw Marvin Kalb's show on PBS today (7-20-08). He was a famous TV reporter in his prime. His show was of reporters talking to each other, and it was pretty sickening. One "journalist" was Dana Priest from the Washington Post, who is famous for bringing us the Walter Reed Army Hospital scandal that got a general moved to another post even more obscure than Walter Reed. She seemed relatively new to journalism.

What made this show interesting was their mention of the atrocities U.S. soldiers performed at their Iraq prison at Abu Ghraib. A male there appeared to be a contemporary of Kalb's, named "Sy," and apparently a good friend of Bob Woodward (Watergate), seemed to have trouble figuring out how to explain his role in exposing the atrocities at Abu Ghraib. Fact is, he had almost nothing to do with exposing the sadistic torture and murder of prisoners, which was probably why he was stuttering and hem-hawing so much as he took the "glory" for it.

What really happened is a newcomer soldier asked one of the prison-guard soldiers for some shots of Iraq. He was told, "I'll get Graner to get you some; he's always taking pictures." Later, he found a disc on his bed, copied it, then found it had hundreds of pictures of the guards torturing prisoners, mixed with some of Iraq scenery.

This guy had a normal conscience, somehow, despite his soldier training, and tried to do the ethical thing for months. He told their commanding officer, who told him to keep quiet. He told the inspector general, who told him to keep quiet. He shopped the prints to all the major newscorps, who all gave him the run-around. For over a year, everyone in authority and the "watchdog" media tried to keep this proof of hideous crimes against humanity from reaching public notice!

According to "Sy," the many news outlets given the photos and report competed with each other to be second to report only the very smallest tip of this iceberg of 30 murders, seven inexcusable to professional excuseartists, and hundreds of pictures of torture and corpses. No one wanted to be first, because this would lead to being blacklisted by the U.S. gov't. Being second was excusable, because, in theory, this was their job; informing the public, and it was excusable because they would keep reportage to an absolute minimum, editing about all the pictures except about three, and giving very little air time to the story, and pretending it was "no big deal," "unpatriotic" to expose, and possibly not even true.

This "Sy" character finally got his mumbling out, and it was this: "CBS refused to air the story, sitting on the pictures and report for months. Then I told them they had a week to get it out, or we would publish the story in our magazine, The New Yorker." CBS finally grew some courage and first broke the story on a Wednesday, when no one was watching, on its now defunct show "60 Minutes II"

Yes, for a year and a half, while U.S. soldiers tortured prisoners and blew captives' brains out, and fed them to dogs and argued over who was responsible for concealing the corpses, the so-called "watch-dog" media was preventing the story from getting out and stopping the secret torture-murders, merely because they were afraid of losing their invitations to the year-end Washington press-party at the Whitehouse and other reporter-perks. But wait! There's more! Ms. Priest revealed that further atrocities had been committed by U.S. soldiers that were so heinous, they could never be exposed! She admitted hiding from them, in effect protecting the criminals and helping them continue their crimes by ignoring them, keeping them secret, and running away to do more palatable, safer stories, such as "Hospital needs fixing!" What crimes could U.S. soldiers be doing that a female reporter would think worse than murder and torture? Necrosodomy? Infantphagy? Who could be begging her to report such crimes? W'e'll never know.

However, we do know that telling the truth to journalists, and supplying them with irrefutable proof is no longer a way to get the truth out and unspeakable behavior stopped. The people with the megaphones now work for the people who contract the unspeakable acts. These corporate journalists are champion ommiters of the truth. If I could get past the censors of the state and do real research, it would probably be easy to prove that the forprofit media would never have got off this story, and did so only after it became an unstoppable, common discourse among citizens on the world-wide web. Thus the commercial media are door-slammers, not to be trusted.

Another instance of media omitting, or pettifogging with the truth is when they get talking-head conventions of "experts" together to debate (waste viewers' time) about why gas prices suddenly got high, who caused it, and how can we get the poiiticians to make the oil companies bring us more. Do you ever notice how these "experts" are only other reporters, politicians, candidates-for-office and occasionally an oil-regulator, bureaucrat or industry spokes-liar? It's all transparent and predictable -just read the labels of who they represent. Their individual motivations are as obvious as their occupations. The extremely well-paid TV-personality news reporters live in mansions, drive SUV's, fly around the world and probably own yachts, yet they put on JoeSix-pack camouflage and pretend they give a damn how high gas prices go. They pretend they are financially hurting,just like us, and are trying their damnedest to make the Mr. Bigs of the world get right and give us back our cheap gas. The silver-spoon political candidates put on this same camouflage, while acting just as baffled and determined to solve the mystery of the plentiful, yet very expensive gas.

Each one of these "round table" discussions by "blue-ribbon" panels follows the same formula. First, they race off after the culprit like a pack of rabid dogs, promising that somebody is going to get torn apart. This sucks in gullible viewers as if this was a bloody wrestling match. They vent the usual suspects: oil shortage! (True) Demand is too high! (True) China and India bought it all! (Because we overheated their economies, by sending all our jobs over there.) Our refineries are obsolete! (False) Commodity speculators and hedge fund managers bid the price up! (Truest of all, but they "forgot" to include all the Wall Street banks, brokerage houses, New York financial institutions, the corporations and the mega-rich and foreign and domestic gov't operations. All the smart money was on this carcass like a pack of African hyenas, laughing their brains out while buying billions in oil "futures.")

After listing all the possible culprits, these clever rhetoric-artists quietly and subtly shift gears from "Get that dirty gas price hiker!" to "Looks like it's everybody's (nobody's) fault." We did it to ourselves, (though now it looks doubly suspicious, since oil prices are falling as we quit driving.) The news-stalkers have nothing to say about "What would happen if these commodity-sellers had so many "people" buy future-delivery oil contracts from them that they couldn't possibly find that much oil, much less deliver it?" Or, even more interesting, "How do the Soloman Brothers, or Morgan-Stanley, or ChaseManhattan, or City Bank, buy billions of dollars of oil that doesn't exist, and can't exist within the time frame (one month), that they don't even want, suck out a fat profit and get rid of it before it is delivered?" or, "is it ethical to buy and sell imaginary goods solely for the purpose of screwing the unwary?"

None of these questions are considered because the information - and education - and knowledge-level of most citizens does not rise to this stage of understanding.

So the media and the elite can do to the public what a mother does to her infant, "I got your nose!" We are so ignorant that we have no choice but to believe that they do have our nose. It looks like our nose.

The last part of the formula is the best part. The news-stalkers all agree that it's nobody's fault, and that "we" all should roll up our sleeves and fix the problem, this time by driving smaller cars fewer miles, shivering in our homes with the lights turned down, and by urging others to likewise "power down" our "carbon footprint." There's no truth-telling in them, except for the truth that it is safe to tell to five-year olds, and this is good, when our minds are only capable of this level of understanding. To do otherwise is to invite interference with the adults in their orgy of hedonism. Keep the kids locked out and distracted; that's enough truth-telling for them!