People, we're in deep trouble

Recently, I reread Orwell's "Looking Back at

the Spanish War." The 1943 essay summarizes
what he learned as a volunteer militiaman
fighting for Spain's Socialist government
against Franco's fascist-backed rebels -- a
bitterly disillusioning experience that inspired
his three greatest books: "Homage to
Catalonia," "1984" and "Animal Farm."
iStockphoto/RuslanDashinsky/Salon
In it, Orwell describes the corrosive effect of
politicized mass media. In Spain, he wrote, "I saw newspaper reports which did not
bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary
lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence
where hundreds of men had been killed ... I saw newspapers in London retailing these
lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had
never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened
but of what ought to have happened according to various 'party lines.' "

Welcome to the contemporary world. My own preoccupation with the awful harm
caused by slipshod journalism concerned a less momentous but nevertheless troubling
event. I can still recall exactly where I was sitting when I discovered that a front-page
report of a highly publicized Little Rock murder trial bore no relationship to the actual
courtroom testimony or crime scene photos introduced into evidence. I had the
transcript and photos in front of me.

Rather, the article reflected the crackpot theories of a publicity-mad sheriff who used
the case as a springboard for his political ambitions, ultimately ending up in the U.S.
Congress. The effect was to cast suspicion upon an innocent man for allegedly
murdering his wife -- a dark shadow he never entirely escaped despite being
exonerated several times in courtrooms and grand juries. I used to think it was a
peculiarly local event. The story is told in my book "Widow's Web."

Then came the great Whitewater hoax, during which the allegedly liberal
Washington/New York press corps pummeled a Democratic president for eight years
based upon transparently false, trumped-up charges. Most disturbing to me, as a
journalist who'd long worked for many of the same magazines and newspapers
pushing the scandal but who lived in Arkansas, was realizing that the "mainstream
media" had acquired property rights in the bogus narrative. Correcting the record was
seen as vandalism.

Reversing the errors and filling in the blanks would have made the "scandal" collapse
like a soufflé. But that never happened, because everybody peddling the story (and
feeding from the hands of the political apparatchiks who invented and sustained it)
collectively agreed not to notice even clearly dispositive facts.

One time, a widely touted witness actually passed out and had to be helped from a
Senate hearing room, never to return, after being confronted with documentary
evidence contradicting her testimony. It was as farcical as a Monty Python skit, and
broadcast nationally on C-Span. The newspapers and TV networks committed to the
scandal highlighted her false accusations yet contrived not to mention the swoon.

I came to understand that the honor code according to which journalism allegedly
regulates itself applied mainly at the lower levels. Big-time political journalism
operates according to celebrity rules. Fake a byline in Des Moines and you're finished.
Help start a war by trumpeting cherry-picked and downright fabricated "intelligence,"
as The New York Times, Washington Post and the same TV networks that promoted
Whitewater subsequently did, and win a guest shot on "Meet the Press."

It also helps if Democrats are the victims of your malfeasance. Does anybody think
that Dan Rather's ignominious exit from CBS News would have happened had the
object of his unverifiable reporting been Barack Obama instead of George W. Bush?
Republicans get even; Democrats act as if they believed all that humbug about liberal
media bias.

Anyway, I wrote all that to say this: Even compared to the manifest swindles and
perversions of the past 20 years or thereabouts, the United States has never seen
anything like Fox News. The closest comparison to what Fox does daily would be the
party-line propaganda sheets of the far left and extreme right that made Orwell worry
"that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world."

Recently, the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) at the University of

Maryland released yet another study documenting Americans' lamentable ignorance of
public events. It found that regular Fox News viewers were "significantly more likely
than those who never watched it to believe" many things that are objectively false: the
economy is worsening, that most Republicans opposed TARP, that the stimulus
contained no tax cuts, that their own income taxes had increased, that most scientists
doubt global warming, etc.

A deluded citizenry can't effectively govern itself. Yet complacency and institutional
cowardice causes "mainstream" media to play along with the fiction that Fox News is
an ordinarily craven, celebrity-driven news organization.

People, we're in deep trouble.