In the past several weeks, two huge media events have occurred, which isn’t to say that everyone is talking about them. In fact, few people who fall within the category of “the mainstream population and media” seem to be discussing them at all. But that’s to be expected in today’s sound-bite culture; the stories are by now about 15 days old and have long since been replaced by other headlines. The first was “The Washington Post’s” publication of its two-year study of America’s massive growth in intelligence agencies and spy organizations starting after September 11, 2001. Since then, roughly 850,000 employees have been added to the federal payroll to gather information on their fellow citizens and on others abroad. The punch line of this story is not that so many people have been hired for these jobs, but that the system, which carries an official price tag of around $75 billion but has many other hidden costs, doesn’t work very well. It’s gotten vastly bigger without getting any better. How else might that $75 billion or so have been used during a deep economic recession, with a lack of funding for things like schools and teachers? It’s difficult to imagine a larger domestic story than this one.
The second event was the release of about 75,000 documents on the Afghanistan war through the website, Wikileaks. The documents, along with 15,000 other ones that haven’t yet been revealed, provide a damning portrait of the nine-year-old conflict, confirming what countless Americans already suspected or knew. For a long time, the war has gone badly and no one can even define what winning it might look like -- let alone figuring out how to achieve that goal. This past month, July 2010, was the bloodiest so far for American casualties. The Wikileaks information merely backs up the sense that the war, despite U.S. government denials, has produced numerous civilian tragedies and is a quagmire our country doesn’t know how to extract itself from. It’s hard to imagine any international story bigger than this.
I’ve spoken about these two events with a number of highly-educated, well-meaning, and fairly well-informed people, who don’t quite know what I’m talking about. They may have heard a 10-second news report about the “Post” investigation or the leaks, or been tuned in as a FOX-TV commentator suggested that those who put the Afghanistan war information on the Internet be tried for treason. But that’s about it.
Both stories, in their own way, are more important than the Watergate scandal, which the “Post” broke and kept breaking throughout the early 1970s. Their journalistic footwork back then resulted in a Congressional investigation that led to the downfall of those running the Nixon Administration, and then of Nixon himself. A couple of hardworking reporters toppled an American president -- just as the 1971 release of the Pentagon Papers by “The New York Times” deepened the national discussion about the U.S. involvement in Vietnam and may have expedited the end of that war. This was before all of us came down with attention deficit disorder and demanded that media information or news be so entertaining that we’d feel compelled to watch for more than half a minute.
Given our current condition, I can only hope that a member of your family will not be killed in Afghanistan and that you’re not a laid-off teacher.
In 1974, I got into journalism in part because of the inspiration provided by “The Washington Post” in pursuing the corrupt Nixon Administration -- and staying with it until the stables had been fully cleaned. Cause and effect were still operating inside of the American media, politics, and culture. Things had meaning and consequences. Today, I have no expectation that either of these two overwhelmingly significant stories will have any effect at all on American thought or policy. We’ve transitioned into a new world, which none of us yet grasps, but it can’t bode well for the future of investigative journalism, or our democracy. I still want to live in a society that can have a serious public conversation about serious issues, regardless of its immediate entertainment value.
That conversation now exists only on the margins, and very few are listening.
“If you aren’t paying attention,” somebody once said, “you can’t afford anything else.”