June 8, 2003 by lonbud

Don’t Believe Everything You Read

I must confess, mine are not the swiftest feet on the track. Not until today, more than a month since the story broke, was I able to connect enough dots to see where Jayson Blair fits into the narrative of our National Debate.

Not surprisingly, his story is a big red herring, designed to shift people’s attention away from What’s Really Going On.

The first inclination that Mr. Blair might have any claim to my attention came from Aaron McGruder’s fine comic strip, The Boondocks, one feature of which is something the artist calls “The Most Embarrassing Black People Awards.” For those unfamiliar with this intelligent, provocative gem on the comics page of your local newspaper, Mr. McGruder, himself an African-American, spares no mercy revealing and depicting ways in which black people act to disserve their own interests.

A couple of weeks ago, former New York Times reporter Jayson Blair was nominated in the comic for Most Embarrassing Black Person of the Year, and I wondered what this character, unknown to me at the time, could have done to elevate himself into the rarified company of people like record mogul & clothing designer Sean “Puffy” Combs, pop star Michael Jackson, recording artist Snoop Doggy Dogg, “actress” Carmen Electra, former pro basketball star Dennis Rodman, and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

A cursory glance at the news and op-ed pages of a few journals of opinion revealed Mr. Blair had resigned his post at the Times after being caught plagiarizing the work of other writers and fabricating quotes and background information in such high-profile stories as that of the Washington DC-area snipers.

Mr. Blair was immediately seized upon as The Reason We Should Abandon Affirmative Action. With the Race Card having returned face-up to the table, once again people were earnestly debating whether people of color and minorities in our society deserve any special consideration in the award of jobs or admissions to institutions of higher education. But I had already resolved in my own mind the issue of whether those of wealth and privilege owe something to people of African-American heritage for the centuries of abuse, exploitation, and discrimination against blacks which have kept the former largely in control of corporate and public governance and the latter disproportionately represented in the prisons and below the poverty line.

Not until this past week, when I noticed the two top editors at the Times also resigned in the wake of the scandal, did I begin to think there was something larger afoot than the story of yet another lazy journalist, a la Stephen Glass, Patricia Smith, or Christopher Jones.

Was this really a case of ineptitude at the highest levels of our country’s most venerable daily? Was it merely the tale of a rogue sociopath who conned his way into the favor of journalism’s most elite newsroom? Could it possibly serve as the crucible in which we might distill away the complexities vexing a clear and just determination about the costs and benefits of affirmative action?

The first clue came from Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, who accepted the resignations of his two top editors with “sadness” and “regret,” but averred he did so only in the interests of maintaining the paper’s reputation for unassailable veracity. This is a dark moment, he said, but the Times will survive and persevere and continue to be the place where people turn for the truth about “all the news that’s fit to print.”

Then, when three of my favorite writers at The Nation magazine, Alexander Cockburn, Katha Pollitt, and Patricia J. Williams, all wrote about the story in the June 9 and June 16 issues, I got the requisite background and perspective to understand why Jayson Blair exploded on the radar.

We are SUPPOSED to question what we see on the television and what we read in the newspaper, but the corporate boards who run the networks, and the publishers who own the newspapers, and the administrations they serve, are desperately afraid for us to do that.

So every now and then, a few sacrificial lambs are roasted on the altar of public humiliation. Incantations regarding preservation of the integrity of the news gathering and reporting processes are offered up to assuage the skepticism of the body politic. Then commercials are shown for the next episode of Girls Gone Wild and Ford’s 0% financing on all new Really Big Trucks.

And no one thinks to question whether the unnamed “military officials” and “intelligence officials” and “White House officials” quoted in Judith Miller’s front page stories in the New York Times -always officials, but never named human beings- have in truth provided her or her readers with any believable “news” regarding the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. No one thinks to ask if perhaps the glorious footage of Saddam statues being toppled in Baghdad and “crowds” of jubilant Iraqis welcoming their American “liberators” weren’t planned and staged and acted out by small groups of hand picked “extras” in a secured, virtually deserted square. No one thinks to doubt American POW Jessica Lynch was heroically “rescued” from her Iraqi tormentors, when in fact what we saw was pictures of her prearranged transfer from an Iraqi hospital where she was being treated by unarmed (not to mention under staffed) Iraqi medical personnel.

Beyond the hubris and the mean spiritedness with which the Bush administration has conducted itself since being placed in power, what rankles me the most is the outright deceit with which they have sought the public’s blessing and support.

Had the President or the Secretary of Defense or the Secretary of State or the National Security Advisor or the Secretary of the Treasury or even the oily, mendacious Press Secretary Ari Fleisher stood up at any point and said, “Our economy, the largest and arguably the most important on the planet, is on the ropes. We must secure access to a reliable source of oil to keep our industries operating within predictable parameters, so we are going to seize Iraq’s oilfields because they are the 2nd largest in the world and the Iraqi government is incapable of defending them. We must do this because it is politically impossible and practically inefficient to begin exploration in our own Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and because if we do not and if our economy fails, the entire world will slip into depression the likes of which history has not known,” had the real reason for going into Iraq been given, I would still have been against it, but I’d have respected the administration more.

Instead we got the lies about Saddam being linked to Al Qaeda, the lies about him being capable of unleashing a weapon of mass destruction within 45 minutes of giving the order, the lies about his producing hundreds of TONS of chemical and biological weapons; the lies about wanting to free the Iraqi people and give them the gift of Democracy.

We were so worried about Saddam allowing his nuclear materials to fall into terrorist hands we neglected to provide for enough security once we “won” the “war” to prevent Iraq’s nuclear facilities from being destroyed and looted by their own people. Now, Iraqi children are bathing in drums that recently held radioactive waste and no one knows where or how much potentially devastating amounts of nuclear material might be circulating among the very people we are supposed to fear. But hey, Iraq’s a big place and, to quote our President from a speech he made to American troops in Qatar last week, “we’re on the look.”

Here’s some news, Virginia: the highest rate of unemployment in nine years means we are on the brink of economic recovery; the next cut in the federal funds rate (due at the FOMC meeting on June 24th), which will be Alan Greenspan’s 14th interest rate cut since 2001, will be the one to kick-start our economy back into the fast lane; the two million plus jobs that have been lost during the Bush administration’s tenure will be re-created, and then some, by giving over 250 billion dollars worth of tax relief to Americans making more than $150,000 a year; even though John Ashcroft’s Justice Department has yet to produce the first terrorist fanatic with the desire and ability to harm a single American citizen, if you acquiesce in giving up more of your constitutionally protected civil liberties he will make you safer.

God wants us to win.

George W. Bush is a genius –buy stocks now.