The press function is a sacred tradition, in a line of succession dating back to the bards of Celtic societies. Bards functioned as official historians and genealogists, vital to the prosperity and well being of society. The bards’s praise could confirm a King or his satire could ruin the King's ability to maintain authority. As the "mediators between gods and men" they were the interpreters of Lex et Gratia, universal law and the grace that came with observing it. Words were never wasted through overuse or misuse. The language was literally alive with "truth" that nurtured society and spoke to the soul.
We have been conditioned to believe that journalists dig out the “truth,” and get us the stories we need to know. During the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan Dan Rather intentionally propagandized the "truth" and compromised the role of the journalist. Then the mass media continued its own undoing by creating the illusion that the war was over when the Soviets withdrew in 1989.
The events of September 11 changed a naive America and brought the US directly into the crisis that had become Afghanistan. Here was a cauldron we had watched over 20 years come to a boil, explode and explode again with hardly any media attention paid.
Something happened to journalism when the Soviets crossed their southern border. The press accepted a cover-up of a growing American role in Afghanistan and they have kept that cover-up in place for over 20 years. In 1980 it was the American media that chose to ignore what was being done to Afghanistan in the name of defeating the Soviet Union. The radical standards of self-censorship that Rather helped establish now haunt the American media as it finds itself without credibility. The journalist, the bard’s opinion is no longer of any value unless it is in the service to the state. The idea of state propaganda isn’t new. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, “The democratic, Western idea of journalism is that it acts as a mirror to the world, reflecting its nature and reporting on its events, however good or bad. But the communist idea of journalism, shared by dictatorships that restrict personal freedom, is that journalism should be a tool of the state and used to ‘educate’ people. This type of journalism is called propaganda.”
Undoing the compromise that eroded the authority and vibrancy of journalism over decades of cold war secrecy, anti-communism, bureaucratic pressure and intellectual corruption - will require journalists to demand open access to information. But unless our media is willing to return to the status of the bard and equalize the pressure on the forces of self-interest and abuse, our freedom to know the truth will disappear. Without it we will simply cease to be a democracy. Can we afford to accept events that drive our society away from democracy without knowing the intent of the people who caused them? These are the questions that journalism should be asking of our leaders.
The world didn’t change on 9/11. What changed was only our perception of it. The terrorism that gripped Afghanistan didn’t materialize from nowhere. It was nurtured one day at a time by well-known anti-democratic forces over 20 years and then delivered into the heart of America on 9/11. But now the individuals and issues that created Afghanistan as the cauldron for Soviet destruction and the incubator for a worldwide terrorist threat have barely been brought into the picture. Even when Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski claimed to a French magazine in 1998, that the US had been undermining its own diplomatic efforts by secretly destabilizing Afghanistan for months prior to the Soviet invasion with the intention, in Brzezinski’s words, “of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap,” the American press ignored it.
Until we understand the Devil’s bargain that our media struck when the Soviets entered Afghanistan, we will not realize how our freedom to know the "truth" has been severely compromised.The need for a free press to maintain a democracy was so clearly understood by America’s founding fathers that it was enshrined in the First Amendment to the Constitution. But in order to fulfill the vision of the founding fathers and truly protect the rights of Americans to know from their media what is really going on in the world we must demand a new standard.
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