Recently, Al Neuharth, the founder of USAToday, wrote an editorial calling on the United States to pull out of Iraq sooner rather than later. Of course, you can all just imagine what the wingnut response to this editorial was out in cyberspace. As usual, the rhetoric was caustic and ugly. Of course, this wave of nastiness didn't stay contained in the blogosphere... or talkradioland.. people actually
emailed USA Today and Editor&Publisher, who linked and ran a story on it.
The bizzare thing of it is, to Greg Mitchell, the editor of Editor and Publisher, this state of affairs is, well, something of a revelation. Apparently, the man guiding the oldest journal dedicated to closely following the trends and discourse in the Newspaper world... had no idea that dissent was attacked. Until he read what had slimed into his inbox via email.
What? The public discourse is... toxic?
I read his piece over and over, and I was astonished at... well, how astonished he was. What, exactly, has he been doing since the year 2000, and how the heck did he get his job? If this is what stands between real journalism and the right having an open propaganda spigot... no wonder its now a spigot.
Read the byline next to his picture. I mean, I read this, and I imagine that quote from 'Casablanca' from the french captain about how " I am shocked... SHOCKED... to see gambling going on here" and it being a completely dead serious line instead of a stab-in-the-dark reach to explain arresting Rick. How long has the war been going on?
On the Thursday before Christmas, Al Neuharth, former Gannett bigwig and founder of USA Today, suggested in his weekly column for that newspaper that the U.S. should start bringing home our troops from Iraq "sooner rather than later."
This hardly seemed like a radical, traitorous notion. For one thing, it appeared in an opinion column, and surely, in our country, every American has a right to his or her opinion? Secondly, it came at a time when, according to the latest Gallup poll, a majority of American believe it was a mistake to invade Iraq in the first place, and feel the war is not going well for us.
Finally, since so few in the media have called for a withdrawal, you would think those who strongly support the war would not feel unduly threatened by one man's opinion. The New York Times, for example, wants the U.S. to send more troops there.
Yet, our brief article about the Neuharth column (which did not endorse his position) got linked at numerous other Web sites, and drew more letters than virtually any story we have ever posted. We presented a few excerpts from those letters, pro and con, in a second article on Dec. 24, but we did not quote from some of the nastiest--and, believe me, there were plenty in that category to choose from.
Just to give you an idea of what's out there, in the zeitgeist, here are a few additional extracts. Sadly, they represent dozens of others in the same vein. (More letters on Neuharth appear in Wednesday's USA Today.) One should keep in mind that Neuharth, besides his professional accomplishments, served his country in World War II as an infantryman in France, Germany and the Phillippines, and won a Bronze Star.
We have faced a newsmedia that, more and more, is hostile to clueless and often reprints press releases/talkingpoints straight from the source as fact-checked news. Now, I grew up thinking of newspapermen as being pretty by the book. You checked names. You checked dates. You checked sources how many times you had to before you put your name on things. Why? Because you can't recapture your credibility once its gone. But since the 2000 election I have lost almost all faith in the print, cable, and broadcast news world... but this to me is so deflating. This guy, and his outlet, fancy themselves as the guardians at the gate watching over the comings and goings of the newspaper world... and if he is stunned to learn that, over a year and a half into the Iraq war, dissent is not tolerated by the Foxed-up masses... god what a mess. I would actually have been less disgusted by this man if he had willingly been in on respouting GOP talkingpoints as real news.
I suppose I should be happy this was a wake-up call to somebody who might start covering the suppression of dissent... but man, is he late... and he doesn't really seem all that angry about it either.