Matt C. Abbott
'Journalism Is War': Abusers, users in Congress, media
By Matt C. Abbott
The following is a significant portion of the Introduction to four-time Pulitzer Prize nominee George Archibald's book Journalism Is War. Thanks to Anomalos Publishing for granting me permission to reprint, and providing me with, Archibald's material. (Incidentally, yours truly is mentioned in the book; see the link at the end of this column.)
Introduction
"Journalism Is War." How come the title? When covering and reporting our nation's capital, Washington, D.C., for more than two decades, there is no way to avoid the perpetual warfare fueled by constant political self-climbers and the endless, wasteful indolence of a permanent government bureaucracy entrenched within the spiderweb of federal agency offices in the capital and throughout our country.
A national news reporter faces this group of competing political and bureaucratic forces every day, both in D.C. and state capitals, and sees firsthand the efforts of political and bureaucratic powers of all persuasions to marshal corporate, media and academic powers to back their own self-interests.
It's a constant circus of egos, strong and weak personalities. Amidst this corruption, the aim is for an honest, committed print or broadcast report that tells the story as fully, completely and honestly as one can every day.
One such story involves the perpetual increased spending madness by members of Congress of both parties who shell out trillions of taxpayer dollars each year for pet political programs and projects, fueling the growing permanent bureaucracy and its constant threat to our civil liberties and national economic growth. This is a constant story that needs to be covered fully. Journalism is war. We take no prisoners. We owe the people an unabridged and truthful report. So be it.
As politicians of all parties and ideologies like to spend and spend once in office, and have to raise hundreds of millions of campaign dollars each year to get re-elected and build power for themselves, they surround themselves at every turn with highly paid people, campaign fund-raisers, powerful people everywhere, and sycophants who rely on them for political jobs, contracts, tax breaks, self-importance, and a major piece of the economic and political power in their own local communities and nationally.
It should come as no surprise that career politicians and their perpetual crowd of glad-handers soon view themselves as demigods and become less and less accountable to people at the local and state level — the people who really make our economy work — and voters who actually elect them.
They make themselves into the elite with cell phones stuck to their ears almost 24 hours a day and big expense accounts at taxpayers' costs, as they do all they can to further their own power and control in the self-serving political bubbles they live in as perpetual office-seekers and bureaucrats.
It was Winston Churchill who once said democracy was the worst form of government except everything else that had been tried. Presidents and governors of both national parties, the political organizations at their disposal, state legislators and their political apparatus, and the intergenerational sex that is a constant ingredient of the political scene in Washington and state capitols all combine as an explosive fuel for inevitable scandals that regularly emerge from the dog-eat-dog political cauldron.
It was almost 20 years ago that Washington was in a lather over charges that President George H.W. Bush's Cabinet nominee for defense secretary, Senator John G. Tower of Texas (then chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee), was a womanizer and alcoholic, not fit to run the Pentagon.
At the time, I was assigned to do what we call in the news trade a "clip-job" story for The Washington Times about the sexual peccadilloes of Washington's high and mighty, going back almost to the hot affair between Thomas Jefferson and his beautiful slave girlfriend Sally Hemmings.
The anchor revelation of the front-page story run by The Washington Times in summer 1989 was that Senator Edward M. "Ted" Kennedy, Massachusetts Democrat, took Elaine — a female lobbyist for the textile industry — for lunch at noontime at La Brasserie restaurant opposite The Heritage Foundation on Capitol Hill near Union Station and was caught (by the waitress) having sex with her under the table in an upstairs private dining room after a sumptuous lunch of New England crab cakes and several expensive bottles of wine.
Such indiscretions of the high-powered are protected by restaurant and hotel managers of our nation's capital and state capitals throughout the country. A regular customer would be kicked out, barred from an establishment, and perhaps arrested and prosecuted for improper public behavior — but not a member of the political elite. Events like Ted Kennedy's fornication in a Washington, D.C. restaurant go on all the time as arrogant politicians push the limits with their hedonist, self-aggrandizing behavior for power and recognition.
This public show of affection by the distinguished gentleman from Massachusetts was two decades after his drunken plunge into Dykes Pond with Mary Jo Kopechne, who died at Chappaquiddick in the back seat of his car. And was Ted Kennedy among complainers in September 2006 about Florida's disgraced Rep. Mark Foley, the male teenage page-stalker, insisting that everyone in the Republican leadership resign as Democrats grabbed any straw to win a majority in Congress?
Of course not. At least the man is not a hypocrite. With Kennedy's history, having earlier defended his nephew prosecuted for raping a woman in Florida — who got off thanks to Kennedy money plowed into defending the lad and denigrating the victimized woman — the senator from Massachusetts was not going to wage war over a hapless Republican homosexual congressman who stalked teen male pages in the U.S. House of Representatives.
There have been many heterosexual and homosexual abusers and users over the years and other scandal-damaged members of Congress who Kennedy gladly welcomed into the secular club of injured political money-grubbers. Each protect their own was the motto.
The institutional congressional sex scandals, the most appalling of which are detailed throughout this book, go back decades and have been a pox on all sides of the political aisle since our nation's beginning. A few brief examples are as follows:
The dishonor roll of politicians who have committed sexual crimes and cheated on their spouses is even more extensive than has already been listed: former Senators Brock Adams of Washington state, David Durenburger of Minnesota, and Charles S. Robb of Virginia; Senator Hillary Clinton of New York with her brief affair with Rose Law Firm partner Vincent W. Foster Jr. in Little Rock before moving to Washington as first lady and orchestrating the cover-up after Vince Foster's suicide in Fort Marcy Park up the George Washington Parkway near McLean, Virginia, on July 20, 1993; and Congressmen Gus Savage of Illinois, Fred W. Richmond of New York, and Jim Bates of California all conducted sexual affairs. The list goes on and on.
Washington, D.C. has been a scandal city for decades. However, the politicians have not blinked an eye so long as contributors continue to pony up the money that they need for their re-election campaigns and voters keep them in office.
I do not believe these scandals will stop in our lifetime. This bad behavior has gone on for so long, protected by those who run Washington, paid for by corporate people who seek favor from Congress and fund the parties and sexual dalliance that occur constantly, and covered up by most of the press who hobnob socially with the political offenders and glorify them at yearly black-tie dinners.
Members and leaders of Congress, even the president and the nation's largest news organizations, protect and perpetuate this shame on our country's coat of arms. The problem is political power run amok. And the sadness is that voters continue to elect many morally repugnant people who ceaselessly brag about bringing home the bacon, make Smithville the center of the universe, save the military base that should be closed because it's outmoded and redundant, and kiss the president's behind no matter what in order to get a photo op anywhere Air Force One can fly.
When will people get the message? Politics in our age is all about protecting those in power, regardless of their ability and regardless of their perfidy. We're walking on broken glass, as Annie Lennox croons in one of her best songs.
The Washington Times itself had its own history of sexual dalliance, adultery and harassment cases over the years that were mostly ignored, covered up by a human relations director, Randall Casseday, who now sits in jail for soliciting minor girls for sex on the company computer system.
Casseday, who had handled and covered up many sexual harassment cases brought to him during his tenure as human relations director, including one involving the paper's female publicist and managing editor, was indicted in September 2006 for propositioning an undercover policeman he thought to be a loose 13-year-old girl he found on the Internet.
Casseday had helped cover up predatory sexual antics of several Washington Times news and photo editors as well as managers on the business side of the newspaper — men who tried to seduce and sexually exploit employees, freelancers and employee applicants
Most of these cases, as in the Catholic Church priest scandal of the 1990s, were settled at high cost to the company....
All of the continued indiscretions of politicians and corporate/media executives have helped make journalism a greater battleground over a quarter century as honest news reporters and their organizations squared off with each other across the political and cultural divide.
My national editor for many years at The Washington Times, Francis B. Coombs Jr., would celebrate a breaking story that beat the competition by coming into a news meeting or into the newsroom, throwing his fist into the air, and yelling, "Journalism is war!" Coombs' phrase became our mantra.
Unfortunately, Coombs was a racial bigot, and this became a growing problem for me and many other reporters in The Washington Times newsroom. Many star reporters left because of Coombs' bigotry and foul temper.
Battle lines are drawn on cultural, moral and political principles among newsmakers, news reporters and news organizations in a wildly competitive news marketplace. The war is among honest; fair; and balanced news reporters, editors, and organizations of a traditional stripe (going back generations) and wild new journalists who know no boundaries and are pushed by advocacy-oriented media not committed to a complete, balanced and fair report but rather are concerned with only their take on the story. It's become an ugly battle.
Traditional, honest, hard-working journalists are not wed to any particular ideology or political party but instead are committed to providing a complete report to the public each day. The wild journalists have no particular commitment to truth but rather just want to make a mark each day, and they are loved by politicians who use them for their own glory and vice versa.
Traditional news organizations, regardless of their focus, have scrambled for their place versus the fervently biased and ideological advocacy media in the public square and profitability. The Internet has changed the face of global communication to favor the wild journalists, ideological media and advocacy bloggers, and truth in journalism has been the great victim.
The usual tests for factual accuracy, fairness and, ultimately, truth have been largely thrown out the window because rigid accountability and fact-checking of news stories and opinion commentary on the Internet — before publication — have gone by the wayside.
The test now is whether the Web site supervisor likes one's viewpoint and the buzz one's piece will generate. The only accountability is the Web site's fear of getting sued, which is unlikely given the dynamics of Internet Web sites with anonymity, pseudonyms, and the usual devices used by gossip-hounds and advocates from the ideological swamps who want to evade accountability. So almost anything gets published today, regardless of its authenticity.
Thomas Jefferson had a clearly stated set of principles when it came to public policy and our polity as an independent and free people with a free press. Jefferson saw the problem clearly between the time he penned the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and became America's third president 27 years later, after serving as Secretary of State, ambassador to France, and vice president of the United States.
A strong advocate of the supremacy of disaggregated state government power as opposed to national imposition of public policy on the states by the federal government, Jefferson fervently worked for separation of powers, believing that Congress, as the nation's legislature, should set policy and appropriate money specifically to implement those policies. The president, as head of the executive branch and spokesman for national policies, was to do what Congress told him to do but had an independent role to position America in the best interests of its people with the rest of the world. This model of government has worked for almost three centuries.
Thomas Jefferson strongly supported a strong federal court system and judicial review of national government actions — U.S. district courts throughout the states, appeals courts in regions of the country, all headed by the U.S. Supreme Court, whose role was to make sure the president and federal executive branch agencies implemented the will of Congress in all matters, because members of Congress in the U.S. House and Senate were elected at the state level. This, of course, goes back to state supremacy over federal power that Jefferson knew would grow if allowed.
Fast forward to Abraham Lincoln and a Republican president's use of federal power in the mid-1800s to eliminate slavery, as originally envisioned by Jefferson and Adams, in order to subdue Southern states and state autonomy against growing federal power ù a splitting point in Republican Party politics that continues to this day.
Fast forward again to Barry Goldwater's election to the U.S. Senate from Arizona in 1952, his writing of "The Conscience of a Conservative," which reiterates Jefferson's vision of limiting national government so that it supports the collective wisdom of successful state economies but does not militate against the religious, moral and economic values and work ethic of most Americans and their families throughout America.
This was a formula that had worked, but a liberal realpolitik was at war to build its own political power base to change the nation's culture and politics during the administrations of Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Jimmy Carter.
Fast forward again to the administrations of Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush, where you have three obvious men of faith who book-ended the president who sought satisfaction from female intern Monica Lewinsky in the White House Oval Office.
The cabinets of Reagan, Clinton and both Bushes were mainly strong advocates of the Judaic-Christian faith, but it was President George W. Bush, with steadfast support from British Prime Minister Tony Blair and other allies, who drew the line in the sand against Islamic fascism and the present terrorist enemies of our nation-state and Western culture.
Yet under the George W. Bush administration, counter to Goldwater-Reagan conservative principles, the federal government became more powerful, spent more taxpayer money, than all prior administrations of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton. Federal spending and taxation under President George W. Bush exceeded any prior administration in America's history.
And for the first time since 1776, we had become an imperialist nation on the world stage that, in the name of anti-terrorism, unilaterally declared war against two sovereign countries, with the prospect of more to come, in the mirror image of Abraham Lincoln's federal declaration of war against American states that refused to buckle to federal government dictates.
It's the continuing story of Washington in our lifetime. This is a transparent memoir; you will know where I'm coming from all the way.
Related link:
Journalism Is War: Father James Haley, Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, and the 'sexually-active priest' crisis
© Matt C. Abbott
The following is a significant portion of the Introduction to four-time Pulitzer Prize nominee George Archibald's book Journalism Is War. Thanks to Anomalos Publishing for granting me permission to reprint, and providing me with, Archibald's material. (Incidentally, yours truly is mentioned in the book; see the link at the end of this column.)
"Journalism Is War." How come the title? When covering and reporting our nation's capital, Washington, D.C., for more than two decades, there is no way to avoid the perpetual warfare fueled by constant political self-climbers and the endless, wasteful indolence of a permanent government bureaucracy entrenched within the spiderweb of federal agency offices in the capital and throughout our country.A national news reporter faces this group of competing political and bureaucratic forces every day, both in D.C. and state capitals, and sees firsthand the efforts of political and bureaucratic powers of all persuasions to marshal corporate, media and academic powers to back their own self-interests.
It's a constant circus of egos, strong and weak personalities. Amidst this corruption, the aim is for an honest, committed print or broadcast report that tells the story as fully, completely and honestly as one can every day.
One such story involves the perpetual increased spending madness by members of Congress of both parties who shell out trillions of taxpayer dollars each year for pet political programs and projects, fueling the growing permanent bureaucracy and its constant threat to our civil liberties and national economic growth. This is a constant story that needs to be covered fully. Journalism is war. We take no prisoners. We owe the people an unabridged and truthful report. So be it.
As politicians of all parties and ideologies like to spend and spend once in office, and have to raise hundreds of millions of campaign dollars each year to get re-elected and build power for themselves, they surround themselves at every turn with highly paid people, campaign fund-raisers, powerful people everywhere, and sycophants who rely on them for political jobs, contracts, tax breaks, self-importance, and a major piece of the economic and political power in their own local communities and nationally.
It should come as no surprise that career politicians and their perpetual crowd of glad-handers soon view themselves as demigods and become less and less accountable to people at the local and state level — the people who really make our economy work — and voters who actually elect them.
They make themselves into the elite with cell phones stuck to their ears almost 24 hours a day and big expense accounts at taxpayers' costs, as they do all they can to further their own power and control in the self-serving political bubbles they live in as perpetual office-seekers and bureaucrats.
It was Winston Churchill who once said democracy was the worst form of government except everything else that had been tried. Presidents and governors of both national parties, the political organizations at their disposal, state legislators and their political apparatus, and the intergenerational sex that is a constant ingredient of the political scene in Washington and state capitols all combine as an explosive fuel for inevitable scandals that regularly emerge from the dog-eat-dog political cauldron.
It was almost 20 years ago that Washington was in a lather over charges that President George H.W. Bush's Cabinet nominee for defense secretary, Senator John G. Tower of Texas (then chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee), was a womanizer and alcoholic, not fit to run the Pentagon.
At the time, I was assigned to do what we call in the news trade a "clip-job" story for The Washington Times about the sexual peccadilloes of Washington's high and mighty, going back almost to the hot affair between Thomas Jefferson and his beautiful slave girlfriend Sally Hemmings.
The anchor revelation of the front-page story run by The Washington Times in summer 1989 was that Senator Edward M. "Ted" Kennedy, Massachusetts Democrat, took Elaine — a female lobbyist for the textile industry — for lunch at noontime at La Brasserie restaurant opposite The Heritage Foundation on Capitol Hill near Union Station and was caught (by the waitress) having sex with her under the table in an upstairs private dining room after a sumptuous lunch of New England crab cakes and several expensive bottles of wine.
Such indiscretions of the high-powered are protected by restaurant and hotel managers of our nation's capital and state capitals throughout the country. A regular customer would be kicked out, barred from an establishment, and perhaps arrested and prosecuted for improper public behavior — but not a member of the political elite. Events like Ted Kennedy's fornication in a Washington, D.C. restaurant go on all the time as arrogant politicians push the limits with their hedonist, self-aggrandizing behavior for power and recognition.
This public show of affection by the distinguished gentleman from Massachusetts was two decades after his drunken plunge into Dykes Pond with Mary Jo Kopechne, who died at Chappaquiddick in the back seat of his car. And was Ted Kennedy among complainers in September 2006 about Florida's disgraced Rep. Mark Foley, the male teenage page-stalker, insisting that everyone in the Republican leadership resign as Democrats grabbed any straw to win a majority in Congress?
Of course not. At least the man is not a hypocrite. With Kennedy's history, having earlier defended his nephew prosecuted for raping a woman in Florida — who got off thanks to Kennedy money plowed into defending the lad and denigrating the victimized woman — the senator from Massachusetts was not going to wage war over a hapless Republican homosexual congressman who stalked teen male pages in the U.S. House of Representatives.
There have been many heterosexual and homosexual abusers and users over the years and other scandal-damaged members of Congress who Kennedy gladly welcomed into the secular club of injured political money-grubbers. Each protect their own was the motto.
The institutional congressional sex scandals, the most appalling of which are detailed throughout this book, go back decades and have been a pox on all sides of the political aisle since our nation's beginning. A few brief examples are as follows:
-
— Thirty years ago, to begin the litany fairly recently, Rep. Wilbur Mills, drunken Democratic chairman of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee from Arkansas, jumped into the Tidal Basin with bar stripper Fanny Fox just a shadow away from Thomas Jefferson's statue.
— Maryland Rep. Robert Bauman, previously a Republican telephone page in the U.S. House of Representatives in the 1960s and a leading advocate of conservative causes for morality and limited, leaner government, regularly went to male strip clubs in downtown Washington to pick up teen prostitutes and was convicted in 1980 of oral sodomy with a minor boy.
— South Carolina congressman John Jenrette and his girlfriend, Rita Carpenter, went to the U.S. Capitol steps in 1980, stripped naked, and fornicated under a full moon.
— U.S. Sen. Donald Riegle from Michigan, a Republican-turned-Democrat, was a friend of President George H.W. Bush during their days together in the U.S. House of Representatives. Visiting Bush one day at his Houston apartment, Riegle was tape-recorded by his young mistress whom he called and performed steamy phone sex from the apartment while Bush was taking a shower. The tape was obtained by The Detroit Free Press, which ran a story.
— During the 1980s, Rep. John Young of Texas had a young female aide on his payroll for constant sex.
— Reps. Joe Waggoner Jr. of Louisiana and Allan Howe of Utah both had female prostitutes serving them, fell prey to police decoys, and were convicted of sex crimes.
— House Speaker Newt Gingrich had a continuing extramarital affair with a lovely female aide on the House Agriculture Committee staff named Callista Bisek and divorced his second wife, Maryanne, to marry Bisek after he got her pregnant.
The irony was that Gingrich — as House Republican whip, before he became house speaker — was one of our keenest and best sources in toppling Democratic House Speaker Jim Wright of Texas in 1989 and in feeding us subsequent House scandal stories that ultimately gave Republicans majorities in both houses of Congress in the 1994 elections and put Gingrich in office as speaker.
— Rep. Jon Hinson, Mississippi Republican, resigned from the House in 1981 after being arrested in a Cannon House Office Building men's room for soliciting a policeman decoy for oral sodomy.
— Rep. Barney Frank, Massachusetts Democrat, had a male prostitute lover, Steve Gobie, with whom he lived in his Capitol Hill apartment. Gobie told my reporting partner Paul Rodriguez and me that he ran a prostitution ring out of Frank's apartment while also servicing a Chevy Chase elementary school principal, another homosexual client. Rodriguez and I confirmed these details and broke that lead banner story in The Times on Aug. 25, 1989.
— Rep. Donald E. "Buz" Lukens, Ohio Republican, had a black prostitute fetish and was defeated after being extorted by a young prostitute's welfare mom and slammed with House ethics violations. I walked with Buz Lukens on one rainy day from his House office building to the Republican Capitol Hill Club to hear him deny the allegations against him, and a cab drove up. He had an apartment just blocks away in southwest Washington near Maine Avenue.
A tall, beautiful, leggy black woman got out of the cab. "That's mine," Lukens said and got into the cab with the prostitute and drove off. So much for his denials. The man was a sex addict, yet had been one of the principal movers and shakers in the early conservative movement of the 1960s to draft Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona to run for president. He was also instrumental in building the early conservative college groups — Young Americans for Freedom, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, and ultimately the Leadership Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and a slew of other so-called New Right groups that fueled the conservative movement behind Ronald Reagan's presidential campaign engine.
— Congressman Daniel Crane, Illinois Republican, was censured and bounced from the House in his next election for having sex with a teen female Republican page.
— Congressman Gerry Studds, Massachusetts Democrat, was censured after having sexual relations with a male teenage page around the world on government-paid congressional delegation junkets called CODELS.
No journalist has done a good complete story about all the booty, tons of discounted purchases worth millions of dollars brought back from foreign lands by members of Congress and their family members on these perpetual CODELS. This is a huge continuing scandal all on its own.
— Congressman Jim Kolbe, Arizona Republican and former powerful member of the House Appropriations Committee, left his wife for sex with boys and men and became a major advocate of homosexual rights and gay marriage. The same with former Congressman Steve Gunderson of Wisconsin, known as "Dairy Queen," and outed as gay by The Advocate, a national homosexual magazine.
The dishonor roll of politicians who have committed sexual crimes and cheated on their spouses is even more extensive than has already been listed: former Senators Brock Adams of Washington state, David Durenburger of Minnesota, and Charles S. Robb of Virginia; Senator Hillary Clinton of New York with her brief affair with Rose Law Firm partner Vincent W. Foster Jr. in Little Rock before moving to Washington as first lady and orchestrating the cover-up after Vince Foster's suicide in Fort Marcy Park up the George Washington Parkway near McLean, Virginia, on July 20, 1993; and Congressmen Gus Savage of Illinois, Fred W. Richmond of New York, and Jim Bates of California all conducted sexual affairs. The list goes on and on.
Washington, D.C. has been a scandal city for decades. However, the politicians have not blinked an eye so long as contributors continue to pony up the money that they need for their re-election campaigns and voters keep them in office.
I do not believe these scandals will stop in our lifetime. This bad behavior has gone on for so long, protected by those who run Washington, paid for by corporate people who seek favor from Congress and fund the parties and sexual dalliance that occur constantly, and covered up by most of the press who hobnob socially with the political offenders and glorify them at yearly black-tie dinners.
Members and leaders of Congress, even the president and the nation's largest news organizations, protect and perpetuate this shame on our country's coat of arms. The problem is political power run amok. And the sadness is that voters continue to elect many morally repugnant people who ceaselessly brag about bringing home the bacon, make Smithville the center of the universe, save the military base that should be closed because it's outmoded and redundant, and kiss the president's behind no matter what in order to get a photo op anywhere Air Force One can fly.
When will people get the message? Politics in our age is all about protecting those in power, regardless of their ability and regardless of their perfidy. We're walking on broken glass, as Annie Lennox croons in one of her best songs.
The Washington Times itself had its own history of sexual dalliance, adultery and harassment cases over the years that were mostly ignored, covered up by a human relations director, Randall Casseday, who now sits in jail for soliciting minor girls for sex on the company computer system.
Casseday, who had handled and covered up many sexual harassment cases brought to him during his tenure as human relations director, including one involving the paper's female publicist and managing editor, was indicted in September 2006 for propositioning an undercover policeman he thought to be a loose 13-year-old girl he found on the Internet.
Casseday had helped cover up predatory sexual antics of several Washington Times news and photo editors as well as managers on the business side of the newspaper — men who tried to seduce and sexually exploit employees, freelancers and employee applicants
Most of these cases, as in the Catholic Church priest scandal of the 1990s, were settled at high cost to the company....
All of the continued indiscretions of politicians and corporate/media executives have helped make journalism a greater battleground over a quarter century as honest news reporters and their organizations squared off with each other across the political and cultural divide.
My national editor for many years at The Washington Times, Francis B. Coombs Jr., would celebrate a breaking story that beat the competition by coming into a news meeting or into the newsroom, throwing his fist into the air, and yelling, "Journalism is war!" Coombs' phrase became our mantra.
Unfortunately, Coombs was a racial bigot, and this became a growing problem for me and many other reporters in The Washington Times newsroom. Many star reporters left because of Coombs' bigotry and foul temper.
Battle lines are drawn on cultural, moral and political principles among newsmakers, news reporters and news organizations in a wildly competitive news marketplace. The war is among honest; fair; and balanced news reporters, editors, and organizations of a traditional stripe (going back generations) and wild new journalists who know no boundaries and are pushed by advocacy-oriented media not committed to a complete, balanced and fair report but rather are concerned with only their take on the story. It's become an ugly battle.
Traditional, honest, hard-working journalists are not wed to any particular ideology or political party but instead are committed to providing a complete report to the public each day. The wild journalists have no particular commitment to truth but rather just want to make a mark each day, and they are loved by politicians who use them for their own glory and vice versa.
Traditional news organizations, regardless of their focus, have scrambled for their place versus the fervently biased and ideological advocacy media in the public square and profitability. The Internet has changed the face of global communication to favor the wild journalists, ideological media and advocacy bloggers, and truth in journalism has been the great victim.
The usual tests for factual accuracy, fairness and, ultimately, truth have been largely thrown out the window because rigid accountability and fact-checking of news stories and opinion commentary on the Internet — before publication — have gone by the wayside.
The test now is whether the Web site supervisor likes one's viewpoint and the buzz one's piece will generate. The only accountability is the Web site's fear of getting sued, which is unlikely given the dynamics of Internet Web sites with anonymity, pseudonyms, and the usual devices used by gossip-hounds and advocates from the ideological swamps who want to evade accountability. So almost anything gets published today, regardless of its authenticity.
Thomas Jefferson had a clearly stated set of principles when it came to public policy and our polity as an independent and free people with a free press. Jefferson saw the problem clearly between the time he penned the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and became America's third president 27 years later, after serving as Secretary of State, ambassador to France, and vice president of the United States.
A strong advocate of the supremacy of disaggregated state government power as opposed to national imposition of public policy on the states by the federal government, Jefferson fervently worked for separation of powers, believing that Congress, as the nation's legislature, should set policy and appropriate money specifically to implement those policies. The president, as head of the executive branch and spokesman for national policies, was to do what Congress told him to do but had an independent role to position America in the best interests of its people with the rest of the world. This model of government has worked for almost three centuries.
Thomas Jefferson strongly supported a strong federal court system and judicial review of national government actions — U.S. district courts throughout the states, appeals courts in regions of the country, all headed by the U.S. Supreme Court, whose role was to make sure the president and federal executive branch agencies implemented the will of Congress in all matters, because members of Congress in the U.S. House and Senate were elected at the state level. This, of course, goes back to state supremacy over federal power that Jefferson knew would grow if allowed.
Fast forward to Abraham Lincoln and a Republican president's use of federal power in the mid-1800s to eliminate slavery, as originally envisioned by Jefferson and Adams, in order to subdue Southern states and state autonomy against growing federal power ù a splitting point in Republican Party politics that continues to this day.
Fast forward again to Barry Goldwater's election to the U.S. Senate from Arizona in 1952, his writing of "The Conscience of a Conservative," which reiterates Jefferson's vision of limiting national government so that it supports the collective wisdom of successful state economies but does not militate against the religious, moral and economic values and work ethic of most Americans and their families throughout America.
This was a formula that had worked, but a liberal realpolitik was at war to build its own political power base to change the nation's culture and politics during the administrations of Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Jimmy Carter.
Fast forward again to the administrations of Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush, where you have three obvious men of faith who book-ended the president who sought satisfaction from female intern Monica Lewinsky in the White House Oval Office.
The cabinets of Reagan, Clinton and both Bushes were mainly strong advocates of the Judaic-Christian faith, but it was President George W. Bush, with steadfast support from British Prime Minister Tony Blair and other allies, who drew the line in the sand against Islamic fascism and the present terrorist enemies of our nation-state and Western culture.
Yet under the George W. Bush administration, counter to Goldwater-Reagan conservative principles, the federal government became more powerful, spent more taxpayer money, than all prior administrations of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton. Federal spending and taxation under President George W. Bush exceeded any prior administration in America's history.
And for the first time since 1776, we had become an imperialist nation on the world stage that, in the name of anti-terrorism, unilaterally declared war against two sovereign countries, with the prospect of more to come, in the mirror image of Abraham Lincoln's federal declaration of war against American states that refused to buckle to federal government dictates.
It's the continuing story of Washington in our lifetime. This is a transparent memoir; you will know where I'm coming from all the way.
Related link:
Journalism Is War: Father James Haley, Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, and the 'sexually-active priest' crisis
© Matt C. Abbott
The views expressed by RenewAmerica columnists are their own and do not necessarily reflect the position of RenewAmerica or its affiliates.
(See RenewAmerica's publishing standards.)
