Mary Mostert
Internet journalism - - the guerrilla warfare wing in the media and propaganda war
By Mary Mostert
When I submitted my Wednesday article, “Should Americans Feel Guilty Or Rejoice For Freeing The Iraqi People? to Toogood Reports I wrote an e-mail aside to the editor, noting that many of my articles end up being used by other journalists, and observed: “You know, the real war in America is a media war. … Internet news is the journalists’ equivalent, I’m beginning to think, to guerrilla warfare on the battlefield.”
I didn’t expect a response, but the editor, A.J. Toogood, responded with the suggestion that I write an analysis about my observation.
My first reaction was to dismiss the suggestion inasmuch as commenting on it would require a lot of background information on what has occurred in American journalism since I began writing professionally 55 years ago. In 1948, at the age of 19, I was the Mid-South correspondent for the Nation Magazine. As many of you probably know, the Nation Magazine is a 100-year-old left wing magazine.
By the 1960s I was writing a weekly political column for the Rochester, New York Times-Union, which was the flagship of the Gannett Newspaper chain at the time, before it launched USA Today.
In the early 1970s, I concluded that Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty was not only undermining equality for blacks, an issue I worked on all my life, but was destroying black families. A few years later, when the oldest of my six children was 16, I also stopped attending the Unitarian Church because the youth pastor was encouraging the teen-agers to have “trial marriages,” that is to live together without committing to marriage first. I considered that a recipe for disaster.
Looking back I realize that period was the opening days of the culture war that today threatens ALL families.
My goal when I began to write was to find the facts, report them, and then comment on their meaning. I quickly discovered that was a writing style that was no longer in vogue. Journalists on both the left and the right quite often just skipped the facts, and often merely reported the comments that reflected their own opinion.
I found in writing that editors often simply edited out any facts that did not fit in with their bias. For example, in the 1950s there was a national story in which Willie McGee, a black man, was accused of raping a white woman in Mississippi. He had been convicted and sentenced to die in the electric chair. I investigated the story, which, according to the left was a love affair between a black man and a white woman, and concluded, along with a colleague, Clark Porteous, a Memphis reporter who wrote the story for Time Magazine, that there simply was not enough evidence or proper investigation to determine who was telling the truth. Based on that, I wrote an article giving the meager known facts on both sides and questioning the capital punishment.
The Nation Magazine deleted everything in my article favorable to the woman and Time Magazine edited out of everything in Clark’s article favorable to Willie McGee. The two articles appeared the same month, told exactly opposite stories and we both were scolded by readers for not knowing what we were talking about, depending on their uninformed opinions.
Last year, Democrat Congressman Gary Condit was treated pretty much the same way by the media, both conservative and liberal, which accused, tried and convicted him based entirely on conjecture or unsubstantiated rumors with literally NO facts to back up their witch hunt. Gary Condit was a conservative Democrat.
Over the years I found that was about par of the course. Increasingly, newspapers, magazines, then radio, talk shows and television took sides as commentary and speculation, not facts, increasingly dominated the “news” media. This is not a “liberal” versus “conservative” issue. Both sides seem equally guilty. It’s an integrity issue. I discovered in writing for both liberal and conservative editors that people like me, who look for facts, not support for a bias, often find it impossible to keep a paying writing job. Editors really dislike writers who tell them their editing just made an article inaccurate.
In today’s journalism, there are actually only 4-5 major media giants in command of the standing armies in the propaganda war. They control the majority of the nation’s newspapers, magazines, TV, (both network and cable) and radio, the movies you see and the music you hear. That leaves the Internet with its free-wheeling journalism, much of which has sprung up in just the last 2-4 years, as the guerrilla warfare wing of world journalism.
The growing inability of the public to get an accurate story told by the dominant media has prompted many politicians, business executives and religious groups to begin to tell their own story on the Internet. The Bush Administration has led the way by providing unedited actual transcripts of what the President and administration leaders really say, obviously realizing that relying on reporter misquotations effectively keeps the public from ever knowing what is really going on. Today readers, especially young people, who want to find the facts about issues of the day, increasingly rely on the Internet, searching for information without the spin from either the right or the left. This, incidentally, is why I nearly always link to the source of information I print in my articles. I don’t blame the public for not believing the media and I think the public deserves the opportunity to check out the accuracy of my statements.
For example, on the Internet you can read a full transcript of what President Bush said in January 2003 in his State of the Union Address about Saddam Hussein and nuclear weapons, (not just 16 words) what Secretary of State Colin Powell said about Bush’s trip to Africa or what Secretary of Education Rod Paige says about “No Child Left Behind” and decide for yourself whether you agree or disagree with their statements.
Actually, the subject of Saddam Hussein’s search for uranium is old news. People can also read, on the Internet, the May 1998 Nuclear Control Institute report on Saddam Hussein’s “large stocks of natural uranium” and the article by Khidhir Hamza, Iraq’s chief nuclear scientist, in the September/October 1998 issue of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. Hamza, who defected to America in the mid-1990s told the world of “Saddam Hussein’s determination to produce weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons. The nuclear weapons group is still in place; the expertise is still there; and Saddam Hussein and his colleagues are well practiced in the arts of deception.”
Those I consider Information Age guerillas, and I include myself in that category, are people that maintain their own websites in an effort to accurately inform others. It’s a bit comparable to a time when a concerned citizen rode into town on horseback, stood on an upturned barrel and told the folks about the approaching danger of a party of Indians or a smallpox epidemic in a wagon train out on the prairie.
© Mary Mostert
When I submitted my Wednesday article, “Should Americans Feel Guilty Or Rejoice For Freeing The Iraqi People? to Toogood Reports I wrote an e-mail aside to the editor, noting that many of my articles end up being used by other journalists, and observed: “You know, the real war in America is a media war. … Internet news is the journalists’ equivalent, I’m beginning to think, to guerrilla warfare on the battlefield.”
I didn’t expect a response, but the editor, A.J. Toogood, responded with the suggestion that I write an analysis about my observation.
My first reaction was to dismiss the suggestion inasmuch as commenting on it would require a lot of background information on what has occurred in American journalism since I began writing professionally 55 years ago. In 1948, at the age of 19, I was the Mid-South correspondent for the Nation Magazine. As many of you probably know, the Nation Magazine is a 100-year-old left wing magazine.
By the 1960s I was writing a weekly political column for the Rochester, New York Times-Union, which was the flagship of the Gannett Newspaper chain at the time, before it launched USA Today.
In the early 1970s, I concluded that Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty was not only undermining equality for blacks, an issue I worked on all my life, but was destroying black families. A few years later, when the oldest of my six children was 16, I also stopped attending the Unitarian Church because the youth pastor was encouraging the teen-agers to have “trial marriages,” that is to live together without committing to marriage first. I considered that a recipe for disaster.
Looking back I realize that period was the opening days of the culture war that today threatens ALL families.
My goal when I began to write was to find the facts, report them, and then comment on their meaning. I quickly discovered that was a writing style that was no longer in vogue. Journalists on both the left and the right quite often just skipped the facts, and often merely reported the comments that reflected their own opinion.
I found in writing that editors often simply edited out any facts that did not fit in with their bias. For example, in the 1950s there was a national story in which Willie McGee, a black man, was accused of raping a white woman in Mississippi. He had been convicted and sentenced to die in the electric chair. I investigated the story, which, according to the left was a love affair between a black man and a white woman, and concluded, along with a colleague, Clark Porteous, a Memphis reporter who wrote the story for Time Magazine, that there simply was not enough evidence or proper investigation to determine who was telling the truth. Based on that, I wrote an article giving the meager known facts on both sides and questioning the capital punishment.
The Nation Magazine deleted everything in my article favorable to the woman and Time Magazine edited out of everything in Clark’s article favorable to Willie McGee. The two articles appeared the same month, told exactly opposite stories and we both were scolded by readers for not knowing what we were talking about, depending on their uninformed opinions.
Last year, Democrat Congressman Gary Condit was treated pretty much the same way by the media, both conservative and liberal, which accused, tried and convicted him based entirely on conjecture or unsubstantiated rumors with literally NO facts to back up their witch hunt. Gary Condit was a conservative Democrat.
Over the years I found that was about par of the course. Increasingly, newspapers, magazines, then radio, talk shows and television took sides as commentary and speculation, not facts, increasingly dominated the “news” media. This is not a “liberal” versus “conservative” issue. Both sides seem equally guilty. It’s an integrity issue. I discovered in writing for both liberal and conservative editors that people like me, who look for facts, not support for a bias, often find it impossible to keep a paying writing job. Editors really dislike writers who tell them their editing just made an article inaccurate.
In today’s journalism, there are actually only 4-5 major media giants in command of the standing armies in the propaganda war. They control the majority of the nation’s newspapers, magazines, TV, (both network and cable) and radio, the movies you see and the music you hear. That leaves the Internet with its free-wheeling journalism, much of which has sprung up in just the last 2-4 years, as the guerrilla warfare wing of world journalism.
The growing inability of the public to get an accurate story told by the dominant media has prompted many politicians, business executives and religious groups to begin to tell their own story on the Internet. The Bush Administration has led the way by providing unedited actual transcripts of what the President and administration leaders really say, obviously realizing that relying on reporter misquotations effectively keeps the public from ever knowing what is really going on. Today readers, especially young people, who want to find the facts about issues of the day, increasingly rely on the Internet, searching for information without the spin from either the right or the left. This, incidentally, is why I nearly always link to the source of information I print in my articles. I don’t blame the public for not believing the media and I think the public deserves the opportunity to check out the accuracy of my statements.
For example, on the Internet you can read a full transcript of what President Bush said in January 2003 in his State of the Union Address about Saddam Hussein and nuclear weapons, (not just 16 words) what Secretary of State Colin Powell said about Bush’s trip to Africa or what Secretary of Education Rod Paige says about “No Child Left Behind” and decide for yourself whether you agree or disagree with their statements.
Actually, the subject of Saddam Hussein’s search for uranium is old news. People can also read, on the Internet, the May 1998 Nuclear Control Institute report on Saddam Hussein’s “large stocks of natural uranium” and the article by Khidhir Hamza, Iraq’s chief nuclear scientist, in the September/October 1998 issue of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. Hamza, who defected to America in the mid-1990s told the world of “Saddam Hussein’s determination to produce weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons. The nuclear weapons group is still in place; the expertise is still there; and Saddam Hussein and his colleagues are well practiced in the arts of deception.”
Those I consider Information Age guerillas, and I include myself in that category, are people that maintain their own websites in an effort to accurately inform others. It’s a bit comparable to a time when a concerned citizen rode into town on horseback, stood on an upturned barrel and told the folks about the approaching danger of a party of Indians or a smallpox epidemic in a wagon train out on the prairie.
© Mary Mostert
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