Courage to Act
Just once I think I’d like to open a news article, or newspaper, and read something that could be politically sensitive and see a persons name next to it. Instead, these days, we see an article and we read things like, an official close… or, unnamed sources inside… or a thousand other ways of saying that the person giving the information, though known to the reporter, is unwilling to actually act upon their principles and risk being fired. Often this person is close enough to see what is going on (Deep Throat), but far enough removed that they are not culpable when the roof caves in.
This, I think, is becoming a real issue. G.W. and his staff, and Vice President Dick Cheney, have been using this for some time to leak information they want leaked to the press. Most presidents do this. Semi-authorize someone within the administration to leak information and then watch as no names are ever revealed. The outcome is that you have deniability for someone else’s actions because you never know, beyond a VERY LARGE shadow of a doubt, whether or not the person was actually authorized to say or do something.
As I write this I am thinking of some spy novels and movies where the protagonist is told, at the outset, that if he/she is caught the government will deny any knowledge of the individual and will leave them to die or be tortured by a hostile government. I believe this is called Black Ops where the U.S. (or in the Cold War era. Russian) government orders a hit on someone politically tied and then washes their hands of the whole scenario.
That’s what leaking information to the press has come down to. In essence, in government or corporate America, the source is told two things: one, we want you to leak specific information to the press; and two, if you are somehow figured out we will deny that you were told to leak information to the press and you will be fired.
Does that sound like a moral stand? Does it sound like we should be lauding the behaviors of people who do things because their superiors told them to? I mean, sure, there are probably just as many examples of people within government and corporations where the “source” is not under orders from someone higher up; but how much of a moral leg does that person have to stand on over, say, someone who is under orders to make a statement without allowing the reporter to reveal his/her name as having made the comments. This form of reporting actually makes it easier for the former example to do what they do. If the people who were speaking to reporters on principles, alone, always let the reporter use their name because they believed that the information was more important than the paycheck, than an anonymous source becomes unreliable and the government and corporations lose leverage.
And yet, people are interested in the paycheck. They want to see a positive (in the black) bottom line. The outcome is that they are unwilling to do anything that might threaten the bottom line so they say nothing with their names on the record and they do nothing that might threaten their jobs and what we have is a pile of human refuse, starting at the top, that makes many reports coming through the press circumspect because you can’t trust whether or not the source is doing the right thing by telling the world, or doing the wrong thing by allowing them to be used as shills in a high stakes card game.
Reading the news is interesting most days. Reading the news when something important is happening and the sources are those inside of an organization that are unwilling to share who they are and how they know what they know to the world at large make the stories, themselves, unreliable and bad journalism. Granted, lots of stories are broken this way and the Nixon administration fell because of it; it would be nice if G.W.’s would take a couple of real hits rather than the fake hits they seem to have gotten. The outcome, though, is that it is hard for me to trust the reporter, the report, or the source when a high ranking member within the vice presidents office has made a statement and we have to guess who that person might be.
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