Posted on 06/30/2002 3:12:01 PM PDT by ancientart
Thomas Jefferson is famous for his advocacy of a free press, and particularly for his insistence that newspapers were an essential safeguard to liberty. "Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without government, I should not hesitate to choose the latter."
Jefferson believed that, if the nation ever headed in the wrong direction, a free press would give the public the information it needed to bring about enlightened change.
But as much as Jefferson valued newspapers, he knew that a corrupt press was worse than useless. He was immensely frustrated with the papers of his own time. "The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them, inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors."
Jefferson might have been even more disturbed at the 20th century American press, and particularly the almost reflexive media habit of pandering to ruthless dictators.
Consider, for instance, the way the American press treated Joseph Stalin. In 1932 and 1933, Stalin deliberately engineered a famine in Ukraine, ultimately killing (according to Mikail Gorbachev's estimate) 12 million Ukrainians. The famine was widely reported in Western Europe and the United States, and yet the democracies of the world did nothing. Why?
Because Stalin found at his disposal plenty of what Lenin had called "useful idiots," non-communists who, for odd reasons, would serve as Soviet apologists.
Among the useful idiots: the editors of The New York Times. The Times did publish articles about the famine - but, at the same time, it published twice as many articles dismissing the famine as nonsense. The result: national paralysis. The U.S. government did nothing at all to end Stalin's butchery - and helped cover his crimes by officially recognizing the Soviets as the legitimate government of Russia.
Former Syrian president Haffiz al-Assad was sometimes as skillful as Stalin in manipulating the press. He and his party (the pan-Arabic, socialist Baathists) bamboozled the Western media, partly by token acts of moderation and partly by playing up their differences with various terrorist organizations.
And the Baathists frequently did come into conflict with one terrorist organization or another. During the Lebanese civil war, for instance, the Syrians went to war with Yasser Arafat, eventually expelling him from Lebanon. But this was not opposition to terrorism: on the contrary, the Syrians simply wanted their own people in charge of the PLO. And to secure this control, Syrian troops would stop at nothing. Among their crimes: joining with Lebanese Phalangists to massacre Arafat supporters at the Tal al-Zatar refugee camp.
Throughout his reign, Assad was a useful (if not altogether reliable) ally of terrorist organizations ranging from Hizbollah and Hamas to Abu Nidal. But the most horrifying aspect of Assad's regime was his systematic use of terror against his own people. Dissidents protesting Assad's corrupt one-party state suffered unspeakable tortures. And Assad often demonstrated a Stalin-like disregard of human life. In 1982 alone, the Baathists massacred over 30,000 of their own people.
Will Assad's successor, his son Bashar, be any different from his father? The younger Assad has released some dissidents and moved toward freedom of the press (there's one quasi-independent paper in Syria now!). But is he really a force for peace? Or is our State Department right in continuing to classify Syria as a terrorist-sponsoring state?
On these issues (and in everything connected to the war on terrorism) extensive and accurate media coverage can be a blessing.
But in attempting to give "both sides" of an issue, the American press needs to be extremely careful not to spread disinformation. As Jefferson warned, "The press is impotent when it abandons itself to falsehood."
The framers gave us a republic rather than a democracy precisely in the hope that its quality might exceed that of our press. 'course the Seventeenth Amendment didn't help that any, and neither has Broadcast Journalism.
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