“Freedom isn’t free” we have been told by the martially inclined. A good idea of what they meant was presented to the world before the saying ever caught on. 1972 was when the AP ran the Nick Ut photo “Napalmed Girl”. It depicted 9-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phuc running down a rural Vietnamese road naked, molten and sobbing. Her village, where US ordnance had just detonated, incinerated in the background. The picture literalized “collateral damage” for anyone rationalizing in newsy abstractions.
In the years since the once-called “police action” in Viet Nam, another cliché started making the rounds: “we have to fight them over there, so we won’t have to over here.” Supposedly, American freedoms remain intact because the military, stealthily abetted by our cloaks and daggers, have been deployed oceans away for over a century. Going by this reasoning, your right to protest against Richard Nixon 50 years ago was paid for by skin off Kim Phuc’s back.
Ut’s photo arrived less than 3 decades after the end of WWII carnage. Mass atrocity and human suffering were things many people had gotten used to. Casualty figures in daily reports became as routine as sports statistics.
During the 80 years between the war and today much ink has been spilled on the role and responsibility of major media. Does any other kind of “non-fiction” narrative contain as many blind spots as when journalists cover journalism? In the 50’s and 60’s boys too young to vote or drink were conscripted to face enemy fire without any declaration of war. The upper ranks of the news corps of the time were known to consort regularly with policy makers in charge of such decisions. Downing heady liquids as they dined, news industry execs could be part of the planning. In general they’ve been spared much blame or credit for global fate post VJ Day.
By the end of the Johnson administration the wisdom of so-called “Wise Men” began to be called out. Students, not media, led the pack. Some of the informing classes came around, eventually. Others still hold that higher standards reigned in the Cronkite age. Is it true? Was it a journalistic era that writers and academics should recall nostalgically? Would reviving it make American news great again?
Functionally literate people are well aware of the litigious accomplishments of the NYT and WP on the question of “prior restraints.” Where those not quite as erudite are concerned, film-land hasn’t neglected the Pentagon Papers case either. What Daniel Ellsberg divulged was vital to public understanding of relations between Washington and Saigon. But official documents don’t necessarily tell the whole story?
What are the chances, for example, that our initial forays into Viet Nam got rolling steam from a third martini poured for Joseph Alsop at Kay Graham’s house? Is it even a question? Coteries like the renowned Georgetown Set still have sway in American policy making. While there is little accounting in published letters for the impact of their influence. It’s considered “conspiratorial” to pry into discussions at secretive conclaves that news industry chieftains attend.
Ut’s iconic image continues to be worth millions of words. It was the South Vietnamese Air force that mistakenly dropped napalm on their own side in Trang Bang that day. But that’s hardly the point. The US provided the ordnance and had been wantonly bombing all over Viet Nam and neighbors for years. There were many other Kim Phucs outstanding who never got the benefit of a camera. Whatever emotions that little girl evoked, the prerogatives of US leadership loom large in the background.
A lot of mainstream media ire has been devoted to giving too wide an audience to voices considered mendacious and unqualified. The remnants of the traditional scribing trade – and “tradecraft” maybe the better word considering historic entanglements with secret agencies — from the pre-internet age have devoted little circumspection to their own foibles, failures and faults. Their relationships with movers and shakers in the most destructive years of US policy, have never been given a fair shake.
The Sunday, March 2nd NYT Opinion section features the anonymous editorial “Trump Loves Free Speech Only When It’s His.” It’s not hard to find statements, actions and policies of 47 that support this contention. Is it difficult to back up the very same accusations aimed at Biden and many of Trumps other opponents? Consider this sentence:
Officials in Washington have spent the past month stripping federal websites of any hint of undesirable words and thoughts, disciplining news organizations that refuse to parrot the president’s language and threatening to punish those who have voiced criticism of investigations and prosecutions.
While it’s unlikely Trump’s “Gulf of America” will catch on, Biden renamed over 600 pieces of US real estate. You can describe denying journalists’ access as “disciplining” but it still fails to rise to the level of violating the 1st amendment. Government pressure on electronic media, to limit the spread of viewpoints an administration opposes, comes much closer to crossing that line. If the AP sought Kissinger and Nixon’s permission to run Ut’s photo, what do you think would have happened? Content on federal websites and published material has always been in the clutches of political ins. The bill-of-rights exists to protect you from government employees – not government employees from government.
This administration, however, is mustering the arms of government to suppress speech it doesn’t like and compel words and ideas it prefers.”
Does siccing the FBI on parents at school board meetings count as “mustering the arms of government”? What about planting a predatory G-Man in the congregation of a Catholic Church? When it comes to livid linguistic movements suppressing “speech it doesn’t like and compel[ing] words and ideas it prefers,” is the Republican Party really the first transgressor the NYT editorial board could think of? They could call their mothers if they knew what to call them. Academic institutions crank out Democrats like the Fed prints currency. They have been demanding a speech revolution, and conformity to it, that no autocrat yet known would try impose, for years. By limiting the words people can choose from they hope to limit what can be thought. It is difficult to believe this hadn’t occurred to the editorial’s authors. And dismal to imagine they thought they could get away with ignoring it.
Trump and Musk’s attitudes on open dialogue leave much to be desired. The idea they started this war of words and other weapons, however, on words, strikes anyone following current events for the last 2 decades as surreal. That’s without going over major media’s selective treatment of content during the era. Both men’s resort to litigation over matters of speech is troubling. It doesn’t come close though, to the number of people who lost their jobs over speech trivialities in recent years and had to litigate to retain them. Meanwhile, people like Taylor Lorenz wail like banshees before the camera getting an unsolicited taste of their own literary medicine. There is a growing caste in the United States demanding unfettered speech for themselves and a muzzle on the masses. This is where we get to the NYT’s most problematic line referring to regime 47:
“It sees the press not as institution with an explicit constitutional privilege but as a barrier to overcome …”
In the age of modern communication, should the press be seen as an “institution”? Was it in 1791 when the first amendment was ratified? Does the NYT hold that the “explicit constitutional privilege” alluded to is one solely prescribed for entities like themselves and not all other citizens? The very people raging over concentrated fortunes and corporate power have long opposed wildcat competition in the news industry.
During litigation of Citizens United v. FEC, most journalists opposed the plaintiff. “Corporations are not people” we heard, and heard, and still hear. It didn’t bother speakers of those words that their own speech was not restricted from wide audiences at election time. It didn’t count, they said, because they were employed by large media corporations. The prevalence of this double standard across the blue world is nearly universal. What makes news industrialists more trustworthy than other kinds of entrepreneurs?
Just how does mega-media somehow evade the human frailty that rendered CU illegal under McCain-Feingold? One reason the law made no sense is that political content shows up in The Simpsons, Bill Nye Science Guy, Oprah and everything in between. Hillary the Movie made no bones about what it was up to, and you had to pay the cable company extra to see it. CNN was free and ubiquitous in every commercial airport the whole time. Nearing the end the NYT says:
The current administration may argue that these steps [bulleted above in the article] are simply payback for an American political left that can be rightly criticized for policing speech in recent years, from trying to shut or shout down conservative speakers to trying to enforce adherence to its own list of acceptable words and phrases like “pregnant people,” the “unhoused,” “ “incarcerated individuals” and “Latinx.”
But the Trump administration’s early and furious reaction to criticism and pungent speech isn’t just guilty of the same sins; it expands on them, worryingly, with the powers of the state. If the MAGA movement were really confident that the American public stood firmly behind the new intolerance, then why not welcome serious news reporting or even the jeers of critics and let the best ideas win?
What “serious news reporting” is could stand some elaboration, especially from this source. A report can easily be 100% factual without including 100% of pertinent facts. A good example of that is defense of continued concealment of the JFK assassination files. At least 3000 are still classified, but 99% are out there and that’s supposed to satisfy the ingrates. Meanwhile, the combined influence of the FBI, CIA and other spookdoms to stifle internet-wide discussion of the Hunter laptop is supposedly not due to “powers of the state.”
There’s no justification for Trumpian maneuvers to control language and dummy up critics, but has any reliable measuring stick been applied by the NYT proving admin 47 is a worse offender than 46? Biden was certainly sneakier.
How is Nick Ut’s Pulitzer winning photo relevant to all of this? The process that led America down the postwar path of coup d’etat, political meddling abroad, assassination attempts, riot incitement, nods at massacre, foreign invasions and other skullduggery included the participation and enabling powers of media moguls of the day and their minions. Any description of ante-internet news reporting as pristine, exacting, honest and honorable is pure propaganda. It was a duplicitous age of hidden agendas, corporate coercion, misdirection and covered up culpability. Men with little confidence in their constituents or consumers decided tomorrow’s headlines at lavish tables, usually with a snootful as they ruled on copy fit for the masses. “Napalmed Girl” was among the fruits reaped from what they sowed.
Numerous policy disasters have plagued the US and the world over recent generations. Is there any journalistic principle or philosophy that would have done better standing in the way of state engineered atrocities like coups in Tehran and Guatemala City, The CIA’s bungled Operation Valuable Fiend, Viet Nam, Iran Air Flight 655, 1983’s Marine Barracks bombing in Beirut or the second Gulf War? The institutionalized media of the US came up short covering these developments. They were often in on the processes that led to grisly results.
Meanwhile, a professoriate led by Tim Wu at Columbia, claims to advocate for free speech. That high-priest and acolytes assure the laity that the trouble is too much information, too much speech. Contradicting them on social media equals interrupting the sermon from the pews. Wu would solve the “problem” of a misled public by limiting the audience people he disagrees with can reach.
The unavoidable fact is that “institution”-alized informers had their chance. The lesson to learn from their abuses, highhandedness, informational blackouts and emotional proximity to their human subjects is that social media should be treated like any other common carrier. Allowing the public free and unfettered access choosing electronic sources of information is the best shot we have at bringing unruly ruling-classes to heel. A racket passing itself off as a professional caste proved incapable of watching power structures faithfully without being drawn into them.
Whatever Trump does, deplatforming, demonetizing and blackballing anyone from acquiring willing electronic subscribers is presently the most perilous threat to free speech. News providers that see themselves as institutions had exhausted their credibility by 1963. That was when Phil Graham made a scene and complained to a room full of publishers in Phoenix, Arizona about, among other things, the influence of the CIA on daily copy. He was dragged from the stage and hospitalized. The top brass of The Company had been meeting for drinks and dinner at Graham’s house for years by then. A few months later he shot himself.
