Friday, August 29, 2008

News vs. Noise

A lot has been going on in August, and I haven't been blogging about it. Russia invades Georgia, President Musharrif steps down, the Iraqi government demands a timeline for US withdrawal, and human-rights impaired China hosts the Olympic games. I was bothered by all of these events in the same way, and was unable to express what was bothering me. Then it hit me - it wasn't the events, it was the news reporting. There's a difference between informing and influencing. From news agencies, we want the former, and too often get the latter.

People associate the word "news" with the word "factual," for now at least. We all know that the ideal of journalism is to take in the history of an issue, mix in the partisan and conflicted views of the major players, and summarize current events objectively and factually. In any newsworthy event there are people with something at stake. These stakeholders are going to try to influence us, not inform us. So when the major news outfits blindly repeats their statements without correction or comment, it really doesn't do us much good. It does not even approach the ideal.

The problem is an old one. Thomas Jefferson said "The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers." As usual, General William Tecumseh Sherman was more blunt, saying "I hate newspapermen. They come into camp and pick up their camp rumors and print them as facts. I regard them as spies, which, in truth, they are." Last week Jon Stewart took the media to task. I don't have an answer to the problem. Perhaps all we can do is be aware of the imperfections in the system, and remind ourselves to always listen with a skeptic's ear, and never come to rely on a single voice.

Friday, August 1, 2008

One Party Rule

Last Monday the Department of Justice released the results of their investigation into the hiring practices of Monica Goodling and Kyle Sampson. They were both implicated as hiring attorneys for the Department of Justice based primarily on political loyalty instead of qualification. It didn't get much air time in the mainstream media, which is not too surprising. There's no strong visuals and no easily grabbed punchline. It sounds like some bureaucrats violated some obscure internal policies and may get their hands slapped.

Let's be clear. This story is about the survival of democracy in America. This is "shout it from the rooftops" and "march in the streets" kind of news. The key is to understand the difference between political appointees and career employees. The idea that the current administration may appoint a wide variety of department heads and agency officials has been accepted for about two hundred years. But, while political appointees come and go, the real work is done by career employees. They do not serve a single president, but serve all equally. They are expected to be non-partisan and competent--because they serve the nation--not the leader. Yet one of the questions Monica Goodling regularly asked applicants was why they wished to serve George W. Bush. Kyle Sampson wanted "loyal Bushies" to be given preference when hiring judges. In order to get the job, you had to belong to the right party. Eventually, that party would have a monopoly on government - One Party Rule. Now think of every country you associate with the rationale "My father really wasn't that way, he just joined The Party to get a good job. Everybody had to back then." Do you really want to live in that country? The path of Goodling and Sampson leads us all there. It is up to us to categorically reject and denounce these practices in any administration.

The Department of Justice controls who gets investigated and prosecuted for wrongdoing. It doesn't matter how many federal crimes a person commits, if the DOJ chooses not to investigate, they will go scot free. We cannot tolerate those decisions to be completely controlled by one political party any more than we can tolerate a military that defends only one party or an educational system that only allows the members of one party to go to school. We do not tolerate monopolies on oil, or food, or telephone service. "Power corrupts" has been true for all people in all ages and all times. We cannot tolerate a monopoly on power.

What really frightens me is that these actions were not isolated cases of low-level workers. Goodling and Sampson reported directly to Alberto Gonzales, who was then the Attorney General (his attorney claims Gonzales did not know what was going on). Similar actions were suggested within the White House to hire
Federal Prosecutors. The State Department used the same criteria to hire diplomats working in Iraq's Green Zone. It sounds more systematic than accidental, so who designed the system? I suspect there will be no serious inquiry into that.

What others are saying:
Christian Science Monitor
CNN
MSNBC
Josh Marshall