There is but one filter between scheming policymakers and the impressionable multitudes. That filter, of course, is journalism, that Fourth Estate that ideally acts as an impartial analyst of what is proposed. In doing its job responsibly, it neither endorses official stupidities out of slavish balance nor caresses the sanctity of popular passions, simply because they are popular.
Good journalism is a kind of intellectual scorekeeper -- it takes policies pitched at the top and clinically deconstructs them; it brutally disabuses the populace of any baseless affinities as well.
This is what the press should have been doing in 2001, 2002 and 2003, prior to the Bush administration's launch of the most egregious foreign policy blunder in American history. Yet it did not.
So it was with a sense of the bittersweet yesterday that I read the New York Times' only editorial, "The Road Home," whose first line encapsulated its content: "It is time for the United States to leave Iraq."
The editorial board's opinion, it could be argued, was less sound judgment than a resigned recognition of reality. Either way it was welcome. Yet the bittersweetness came about because the belated sound judgment or reality recognition was most likely unnecessary -- if only the New York Times and its fellow journalistic bastions had, all along, been doing their rudimentary job as outlined above.
If nothing else, the paper of record should have been tipped, big time, that some monumental skulduggery was afoot when, more than four years ago, it was being fed classified information on the evils of Saddam's regime by administration officials and then heard those selfsame officials lugubriously quote New York Times' stories as well-researched evidence of those selfsame evils on the Sunday morning talk shows.
I mean, come on, would that not prompt even the feeblest of journalistic watchdogs to scratch his or her head, and then just as promptly connect the dots? Would that not inspire even a journalism-school washout to suspect something was dreadfully amiss?
It didn't at the New York Times. Or if it did, mum was the word as the paper stenographically heaved official stupidities and caressed and nurtured popular passions.
Yesterday's editorial noted -- after noting the wrongful, sustained sacrifice of "lives and limbs of American soldiers," that "the war is sapping the strength of the nation’s alliances," that it's "a dangerous diversion from the life-and-death struggle against terrorists" and an "increasing burden on American taxpayers" -- that "a majority of Americans reached these conclusions months ago."
Yes, and a minority of informed Americans reached the conclusion years ago that the administration's mere folly of an invasion would ultimately transmogrify as a gargantuan catastrophe.
These Americans yelled from rooftops, but few listened, principally because even fewer journalistic organs of impartial enlightenment gave their beseechings any print space or air time. This profoundly doubting minority was a case study of voices in the wilderness, because the filter between scheming policymakers and the impressionable multitudes was clogged, and by its own ineptness and dereliction of journalistic duty.
If only it hadn't obstructed itself, perhaps the New York Times and its editorial board would not have had to now spell out observations like this: "It is frighteningly clear that Mr. Bush’s plan is to stay the course as long as he is president and dump the mess on his successor."
If only, more than four years ago, the paper had instead thoroughly vetted observations like this: "It is frighteningly clear that Mr. Bush's plan is to ignore the grim warnings of many a thoughtful Middle East expert and military strategist, sink the nation of Iraq into a bloody civil war, and ours into an abyss of human and fiscal waste."
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