NYTIMES
Freedom From the Press
By FRANK RICH
The night before the world got the news
of Daniel Pearl's death, you could hear
another reporter describing the perils of his
profession in a talk carried on C-Span. The
journalist was Bernard Goldberg, formerly
of CBS News and author of the best-selling
"Bias," and his story was tragic.
Mr. Goldberg, you see, had once written an
op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal
criticizing his network for what he saw as its
liberal bias, and the price he paid for this act
of courage was steep. His fellow employees
considered him radioactive. They treated him like a pariah. And then came
the ultimate indignity: Dan Rather stopped talking to him!
Mr. Goldberg might still be telling his tale of woe, had not terrorism
intervened and rendered his tale of self-martyrdom on behalf of Mr. Pearl's
newspaper ludicrous. The savage murder of Mr. Pearl, like the terrorist
carnage of Sept. 11, is an instant reality check.
As it has been said (to excess) that liberals reawakened to the virtues of
New York's Finest after witnessing them in selfless action at the World
Trade Center, so some conservative mediaphobes are now reappraising their
knee-jerk hostility to reporters after seeing the price one has paid in pursuit
of a story in Pakistan. This includes George W. Bush, who had advertised
his own distaste for the press by publicly brandishing a copy of "Bias" a
month ago, but who turned up front-and-center to pay mournful tribute to
Mr. Pearl last week.
The president's sentiments were no doubt sincere, as is his muscular pursuit
of the killers. But there is still scant evidence to suggest that he condones the
idea of a free press. Not since the Nixon years has an administration done as
much to stymie reporters who specialize in the genre of investigative inquiry
Mr. Pearl was pursuing when he was ambushed. Now as then, the
administration is equally determined to thwart journalists whether they're
looking into a war abroad or into possible White House favors for a lavish
campaign contributor who has fallen into legal peril (Ken Lay now, Robert
Vesco then).
The most chilling example involves another newspaper reporter in Central
Asia, the war correspondent Doug Struck of The Washington Post. On Feb.
10 — two weeks after Americans first saw pictures of Mr. Pearl with a gun
pointed at his head — Mr. Struck reached the remote spot of Zhawar,
Afghanistan, to track down reports that a U.S. Hellfire missile targeting Al
Qaeda operatives had instead killed villagers. By his account, Mr. Struck
soon was held at gunpoint by U.S. soldiers. Their commander, after
consulting with superiors by radio, told him, "If you go further, you would be
shot." Once he wrote of the incident, a Pentagon spokesman tried to
discredit his story, saying that Mr. Struck had only been held back for his
own safety. But the Post correspondent called the Pentagon's version "an
amazing lie," adding that "it shows the extremes the military is going to keep
this war secret, to keep reporters from finding out what's going on."
Mr. Struck has credibility not least because his tale is part of a pattern that
began on Sept. 11, when the White House spread the canard that the
president had delayed his return to Washington because of a threat against
Air Force One. Once the bombing of Afghanistan began Oct. 7, press
access to U.S. troops was restricted for months, so that Americans learned
about even the war's red-letter events, like the fall of Mazar-i-Sharif, only
secondhand.
The restrictions have not been applied, as the military implies, merely to
ongoing operations that are necessarily shielded from coverage. In
December, American journalists were trapped in a warehouse on a Marine
base, Camp Rhino, so that they couldn't see the survivors of a friendly fire
incident near Kandahar. "It was an egregious incident in news management,"
said one of the sequestered reporters, CNN's Walter Rodgers, at the time,
observing that the Pentagon was trying to reduce coverage to "soft feature
reporting" and turn reporters into "propagandists." Even now the Defense
Department is using the fog of spin — not to be confused with the fog of war
— to avoid straight answers to journalists' questions about events like the
Jan. 24 Special Forces raid at Oruzgan, where no less an authority than the
American- backed Afghan leader, Hamid Karzai, has said innocents were
killed.
The Orwellian reductio ad absurdum of the Bush attitude was the revelation
in The Times, at the height of the search for Mr. Pearl, that the Pentagon had
concocted an Office of Strategic Influence last fall that might deliberately put
out false news stories as part of the war effort. Donald Rumsfeld tried to
deny knowledge of the office's charter (though one of its officials said
otherwise), then shut it down. But by that point a certain damage had already
been done, since the mere contemplation of such a military manipulation of
the press helps American-hating terrorists foment lies akin to their lethal
effort to portray Mr. Pearl as a C.I.A. agent.
We'll never learn who in the Pentagon concocted this now orphaned idea of
peddling fiction to the press, but it certainly would have been within the
expertise of our secretary of the Army, Thomas White, previously a top
Enron executive for 11 years. Enron had its own myth-making machinery,
recruiting employees as actors to simulate frantic trading activity to fake out
Wall Street analysts when they came to call. The hoax even extended to the
building of a Hollywood-style "trading room" set in Enron's Houston
skyscraper.
That bizarre antecedent of the Office of Strategic Influence aside, Enron may
have nothing to do with the war on terrorism, but the Bush administration is
handling it in the same way by feeding the press only information that serves
its own interests. The president advertises his mother- in-law's loss on Enron
($8,000), but not the killing his father made on Global Crossing ($4.5 million,
according to Business Week) before less well-connected stockholders were
wiped out in its catastrophic bankruptcy.
Last summer, when Enron was still in clover, the administration announced
that its ethics watchdog, the White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, had
found Karl Rove innocent of any conflict of interest after it was revealed that
Mr. Rove owned thousands of dollars of Enron stock while deliberating on
national energy policy with Enron executives. What the White House did not
announce was that its ethicist, Mr. Gonzales, was himself a past recipient of
serious Enron campaign money in Texas. President Bush has done his best to
minimize any further revelations about the history of his team's relations with
his biggest backer by depositing his Texas gubernatorial papers not in the
Texas State Library and Archives, where they'd be subject to the state's
tough Public Information Act, but at his father's presidential library, where
they may not be.
To fill the news vacuum it enforces on Enron and the war alike, the
administration has come up with a brilliant variation on the defunct Office of
Strategic Influence: creating a full-service line of infotainment. In an end run
around ABC News, the Pentagon has joined with ABC Entertainment to
present its own account of the war, a "reality" series produced by Jerry
Bruckheimer of "Top Gun." As Enron heated up, the White House also gave
a mighty impressive retrospective dramatization of its post-Sept. 11 internal
workings to a Bob Woodward team at The Washington Post. In the ensuing
eight-part epic, even second- rung functionaries like Norman Mineta
sounded like Patton.
For his cameo role, Dick Cheney visited Jay Leno last week to deplore
Congress for insisting that he give it "notes of all my meetings" of the energy
task force. It was just the ticket for ducking journalists, who might fire back
by reminding the vice president that Congress is suing him not to get his
notes, but a list of whom he met with. With all the yuks, you'd never guess
that this list has provoked what may prove the biggest struggle between two
branches of the government since Watergate.
For now at least the administration's infotainment strategy may be working.
However many of Mr. Pearl's colleagues are pursuing Enron and Oruzgan,
the White House is betting, not incorrectly, that the overall news culture is
swinging back to its pre-9/11 bias — which is resolutely in favor of fun. Gary
is back. Monica is back. Even Bernard Goldberg, for all his public griping, is
back from his gulag, working as a correspondent for HBO Sports. Only
Daniel Pearl is gone.
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