OpinionJournal.com THINKING THINGS OVER -
On child abuse and breast implants, our editorials are vindicated.
The Power of Modern Fads
BY ROBERT L. BARTLEY
Monday, October 27, 2003 12:01 a.m. ESTA couple of disparate events sent ripples of satisfaction through our editorial-page offices last week. A Massachusetts parole board at long last recommended Gerald Amirault for parole, and a Food and Drug Administration panel recommended that silicone breast implants be returned to the market.At the time these Star Chamber proceedings were conducted it didn't matter that the famous--and famously "conservative"--editorial page of The Wall Street Journal correctly pointed out that these were nothing more than witch hunts. And what public interest was served by them?Retrospectively we see clearly and officially that there was none. But at the time these stories titillated the public, and thereby interested us. The essence of my brief against broadcast journalism is that it is great at interesting the public, and counterproductive at serving the long-run public interest. And also very determined to obscure the difference between the two.
Just as with the Stacey Koon (Rodney King) riot and the Florida 2000 litigation horror, journalism was de facto in league with trial lawyers working against the public interest in both these cases. Journalism got its interest from the public (thus its advertising dollars), and the plaintiff bar got its class-action dollars. The public got a hangover.
It's frustrating to see all this, yet to understand that the judiciary is, by and large, coopted by journalism. There is only one SCOTUS justice who is willing to let his legacy speak for itself without reference to what journalism says of him in the here and now.
Well, first of all, the Tet offensive was a militarily significant effort, not four truck bombs. After erosion of their position during 1967, the Communists threw all of their South Vietnam guerrilla forces into attacks in more than 100 cities across the length and breadth of the country. Most spectacularly, since it came before the eyes of the Saigon press corps, a 19-man sapper squad penetrated the U.S. Embassy compound. They failed to enter the chancery building, despite early reports, and the last of them was killed or repulsed after a six-hour battle.In other words, Tet was a hugely successful media eventGeneral William Westmoreland appeared in the shattered compound to proclaim a great victory. His televised appearance came against a backdrop of destruction throughout the country, and the American elite decided to believe not the general but their own eyes. A widely cited Wall Street Journal editorial proclaimed that "the whole Vietnam effort may be doomed, it may be falling apart beneath our feet." Walter Cronkite turned against the war, editorializing on the need for negotiation. With this home-front reaction, Tet was the turning-point in the war, the anvil of Communist victory and American defeat.
Yet in fact, Westmoreland was right, subsequent analysts have uniformly concluded. The Communist offensive was decisively repulsed. There was no general uprising in favor of the North. The South Vietnamese army did not buckle, though operating at 50% strength because of imprudent holiday leaves. The indigenous Viet Cong were destroyed, leaving the rest of the war to be conducted by troops recruited in the North.
The big-picture lesson of Vietnam is that free, competitive journalism is free to--and does--collude openly in plain sight. Its very freedom assures that journalism is essentially impossible to hold to account for such collusion; journalists herded together and gave us a monochomatic picture of Vietnam. It was superficial, both in the sense that it was proven historically inaccurate retrospectively and in the sense that the journalists are far less expert in military affairs than American generals but subjected the expert's accurate assessment to withering ridicule.
This would seem to have been impossible, assuming that the freedom of American journalism produces vigorous intellectual competition in journalism. Unfortunately, it does not. Freedom does produce vigorous intellectual competition, but journalism is a venue which rejects intellectual competiton. That is, anyone who seriously and determinedly critiques the timid consensus of journalists is excluded--retroactively--from the ranks of journalists.
Journalism is the venue of arrogant timidity. Externally, journalism is arrogant--as the example of its rejection of correct expert opinion show not merely on Vietnam but on fads in general. The riot after the Stacy Koon acquital was caused by journalism's rejection of the expert opinion of the jury, as informed by the defense counsel as well as the prosecution. The list goes on.
But internally, each journalist is afraid of the herd, unwilling to oppose it courageously. Each individual journalist is a mere celebrity, someone who is not expert in whatever subject is at hand but nevertheless is in a position to pontificate about it--and whose real expertise is not in the truth but in what it is safe for him/her to say.
Journalism is not "objective" but systematically anticonservative. A historian should, in order to comment accurately on relatively recent events, view journalism from that perspective. Any history which is merely the second draft of jounalism is BUNK.