Can you give me some advice on how to deal with Woodward and Bernstein?
I had the opportunity to have lunch with an editor of the Beijing English language daily newspaper China Daily on Sunday. He was in town as part of an exchange program for Asian journalists to see how we do it over here.
In preparation for our meeting, he’d read the May issue of the Rake, and noticed an ad for the Friends of the Minneapolis Library which featured a little blurb about Mao Ze Dong, and compared him in unflattering terms to American librarians, who are guardians of our free access to information. I asked him what he thought of that, and he just smiled.
In journalistic, if not terribly polite fashion, I pursued the theme a bit. “Does the government closely monitor what you publish in your newspaper?” I asked. “Yes,” he replied.
“Is there someone in the government who assures what you write conforms with the story the government wants to tell?” I continued. Again, “Yes.”
“Who does that for your newspaper?”
“I do.”
“Oh…How do you like your sandwich?”
I thought back on this in the context of the blowup over the Newsweek flap over the report on whether some copies of the Koran were finding their way into Guantanamo toilets. The Bush version of the Maoist Censorship Society has certainly had its jollies being righteously indignant about the story that a Pentagon report contained the information about the crapped-on Korans. (Note please that the story has been reported before on several occasions and that the Pentagon was shown the story and didn’t deny it before it ran. It’s also worth mention that the reporter, Michael Isikoff, was a lot more popular with Republicans when he broke the Monica Lewinsky story.)
But those troublesome facts have nothing to do with what’s going on here. What this flap is about is a concerted effort to discredit the press at every opportunity–with the hoped-for result of limiting the press’s desire to do the sort of investigative reporting that revealed the official sanction and practice of torture by Bush and his decorated Myrmidons.
Mao didn’t have a troublesome First Amendment to deal with, so his methods of information control didn’t have to suffer any intermediate hurdles to get his message across. But given the obstacles Bushies face, don’t you agree they are doing a great job of making sure America gets the news they want?
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