Journalists burden

The press has the power to determine what is important every day.

IN 1919, Walter Lippmann wrote three extended essays which the James Madison Library in American Politics has published in this volume. It has a foreword by his biographer Professor Ronald Steel and an afterword by Sidney Blumenthal, former adviser to President Bill Clinton and author of How Bush Rules (Princeton).

The essays reflected Lippmanns disenchantment with the press at the end of the First World War. The reading public was not spared. It was treated as if it was complicit. Some of the comments are sweeping. But the essays are very relevant and it is all to the good that they have been retrieved from obscurity.

The power of the press is not underestimated. For the newspaper is in all literalness the bible of democracy, the book out of which a people determines its conduct. It is the only serious book most people read. It is the only book they read every day. Now the power to determine each day what shall seem important and what shall be neglected is a power unlike any that has been exercised since the Pope lost his hold on the secular mind. Its quality affects the quality of the political process. The present crisis of Western democracy is a crisis of journalism.

How free is a democracy in which the flow of information is controlled by special interests or moulded by bias? The work of reporters has thus become confused with the work of preachers, revivalists, prophets and agitators. The current theory of American newspaperdom is that an abstraction like the truth and a grace like fairness must be sacrificed whenever anyone thinks the necessities of civilisation require the sacrifice. To Archbishop Whatleys dictum that it matters greatly whether you put truth in the first place or the second, the candid expounder of modern journalism would reply that he put truth second to what he conceived to be the national interest.

It is not difficult to document instances in which some in the Indian media, print and electronic, tailored the news to accord with their conception of the national interest (read: jingoism or chauvinism).

The task of liberty falls roughly under three heads protection of the sources of the news, organisation of the news so as to make it comprehensible and education of human response. Lippmann suggested that publishers should be made more accountable and journalists more professional. The news columns are common carriers. When those who control them arrogate to themselves the right to determine by their own consciences what shall be reported and for what purpose, democracy is unworkable. Public opinion is blockaded.

Steel places the essays in the context of Lippmanns thoughts and his career in those times. Blumenthal relates them to the present in a devastatingly documented critique of the servility of the very best in the American media to the Bush administration, citing specific cases. Jingoism became a criterion for presentation of news.

The censure has a contemporary ring. Our media behaved little better in similar crises. Bob Woodward disgraced himself by his book Bush At war. The Central Intelligence Agency was ordered to cooperate with him. Through Administration packaging of high-level contacts and carefully chosen classified material, the imprimatur of the famous and trusted journalist was stamped on stereotypes favourable to the administration.

Eric Boehlert has written an excellent book on this subject, Lapdogs; How the Press Rolled over for Bush (Free Press, New York). Indian journalism has not suffered for want of this breed.

Blumenthal is hopeful. Journalism may yet be revitalised. Lippmann suggested the basics of reform. Each generation must develop them in the light of its own needs.