Exposing Our Secretocracy

Calling for a Secrecy Beat

The real intent of the First Amendment was to prevent national suicide by making it difficult for the government to operate in secret, free from the scrutiny of the press.
--I.F. Stone, October 3, 1966

"Reporters should be writing about the emerging 'secretocracy' that threatens to profoundly alter our entire system of governance, neutering oversight efforts and marginalizing citizens. Journalists should be writing not just about the secrets they can uncover, but also about the information that has been denied...."

"...We [journalists] have tended to overlook one of the more significant stories of our lifetime-an emerging 'secretocracy' that threatens to transform American society and democratic institutions. Systemic or indiscriminate secrecy involves the calculated use of secrecy as a principle instrument of governance, a way to impede scrutiny, obscure process, avoid accountability, suppress dissent, and concentrate power. The tendency to abuse secrecy is as old as power itself, but prior to 9/11 it was usually checked, and even its abuses were cyclical."

But since 9/11

"...secrecy has migrated well beyond the historic reservoirs of national security as the nation's entire infrastructure has been considered a potential terrorist target. All the state, county and metropolitan authorities that intersect with those sites-as well as the private industries that operate them-have increasingly come under the mantle of secrecy."

--Ted Gup, Neiman Watchdog. Gup is a former Washington Post and Time magazine investigative reporter.

Lens Contents

The First Amendment

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

--The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

The Role of a Free Press

"The role of a free press is to be the people's eyes and ears, providing not just information but access, insight, and most importantly context."

--Jon Stewart, host, Comedy Central's "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart," 2004

What's Wrong with the Media

Bill Moyers, 2003

"Broadcast journalism came wrapped in an entertainment medium and was compromised early on because of it. The conflict's just become more pronounced through the years with one merger after another, so that Harold Evans [former editor of The Times of London] says: 'the problem that many media organizations face is not to stay in business, but to stay in journalism.'

I'll give you a very recent example, one read in the Washington Post. Seems the NBC affiliate in Tampa is selling segments on its morning 'news' show. You pony up $2,500 and get four to six minutes of what is in fact an infomercial. I'm not making this up. One of the show's hosts confessed: 'You pay us, and we do what you want us to do.' So Wendy's restaurant chain paid to have a chirpy co-host tout the company for its awards program for young football players who perform community service. According to the Post, the conglomerate that owns WFLA, Media General, wasn't at all embarrassed by the disclosure. The Post went on to say that stations in Washington and Baltimore are running health segments featuring hospitals and medical centers that pay for the pieces. Whether we're being pushovers or prostitutes, it's a sad day for what used to be called 'a free and independent press.'

There's a price for this, and democracy pays it. Somewhere around here I've got a copy of a study The Project for Excellence in Journalism that examined the front pages of The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times, looked at the nightly news programs of ABC, CBS and NBC, read Time and Newsweek, and found that between 1977 and 1997 the number of stories about government dropped from one in three to one in five, while the number of stories about celebrities rose from one in every 50 stories to one in every 14. More recently the nightly newscasts gave four times the coverage to Arnold Schwarzenegger's campaign in California than to all gubernatorial campaigns in the country throughout 2002.

Does it matter? Well, governments can send us to war, pick our pockets, slap us in jail, run a highway through our back yard, look the other way as polluters do their dirty work, slip tax breaks and subsidies to the privileged at the expense of those who can't afford lawyers, lobbyists, or time to be vigilant. Right now, as we speak, House Republicans are trying to sneak into the energy bill a plan that would prohibit water pollution lawsuits against oil and chemical companies. Millions of consumers and their water utilities in 25 states will be forced to pay billions of dollars to remove the toxic gasoline additive MTBE from drinking water if the House gives the polluters what they want. I can't find this story in the mainstream press, only on niche websites. You see, it matters who's pulling the strings, and I don't know how we hold governments accountable if journalism doesn't tell us who that is.

On the other hand, remember during the invasion of Iraq a big radio-consulting firm sent out a memo to its client stations advising them on how to use the war to their best advantage -- they actually called it 'a war manual.' Stations were advised to 'go for the emotion' -- broadcast patriotic music 'that makes you cry, salute, get cold chills....' I'm not making this up. All of this mixture of propaganda and entertainment adds up to what? You get what James Squires, the long-time editor of the Chicago Tribune, calls 'the death of journalism.' We're getting so little coverage of the stories that matter to our lives and our democracy: government secrecy, the environment, health care, the state of working America, the hollowing out of the middle class, what it means to be poor in America. It's not that the censorship is overt. It's more that the national agenda is being hijacked. They're deciding what we know and talk about, and it's not often the truth behind the news."

--Bill Moyers, October 28, 2003 interview with Buzzflash.com

Troop Coffins

Suffering of Iraqis

Censor War

"Some news is too important to report. People might get upset, and the smooth functioning of our democracy would be jeopardized. Thus the media has collectively done the responsible thing, and refrained-at great cost to themselves."

--Josh Mitteldorf, teaches statistics at Temple University and is a volunteer at USCountVotes.org. Although he was referring to significant voter discrepancies in the 2004 election, his quote could also apply to US war reporting from 2003 to the present.

Melting Polar Ice

Censor Science

Commercial and government interests have allied themselves to limit access to information on matters of national and global importance on a wide range of issues, such as: global warming, the environment, governmental fraud and malfeasance, food and product safety, health care, etc.

Free Speech Zones

Censor Dissent & Debate

Although a majority of Americans are against the war in Iraq, anti-war protests and opposing opinions on any major national issue are routinely silenced, not reported, minimized or distorted. Eight out of ten Americans believe there is something fundamentally wrong with our country. But rather than focus on substantive issues, such as the war and the dismantling of our constitutional framework, the news cycle is dominated by inane, manufactured scandals over such "serious" issues as flag pins.

Jeff Gannon, prostitute & "White House reporter"

Produce Fake News

"New reports indicate that the Bush administration's use of fake 'news' to promote its agenda appears more widespread than previously understood - and that the administration is thumbing its nose at Congress by ignoring Government Accountability Office findings.

Media Matters has extensively followed the administration's controversial use of government-produced video 'news' reports, payments to conservative pundits, and involvement in 'Gannongate.' Read more about the administration's use of fake news - and the participation of some media outlets."
--Media Matters, March 14, 2005

Rep. Henry Waxman [D-CA]

Restrict Oversight & Information

"The Bush Administration has an obsession with secrecy," says Representative Henry Waxman, the Democrat from California who, in September 2004, commissioned a congressional report on secrecy in the Bush Administration. "It has repeatedly rewritten laws and changed practices to reduce public and congressional scrutiny of its activities. The cumulative effect is an unprecedented assault on the laws that make our government open and accountable."

Former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman

Target Opponents & Don't Report It

CBS aired its long-awaited feature on the prosecution and imprisonment of former Alabama Governor Don E. Siegelman this evening at 7:00. In a stunning move of censorship, the transmission was blocked across the northern third of Alabama by CBS affiliate WHNT, which is owned by interests of the Bass Family [Bush fundraisers at the Pioneer level].

If you were able to watch it, the CBS exposé disclosed "...that prosecutors pushed the case forward and secured a conviction relying on evidence that they knew or should have known was false, and that they failed to turnover potentially exculpatory evidence to defense counsel. The accusation was dramatically reinforced by the Justice Department's failure to offer a denial. It delivered a fairly elaborate version of a "no comment," and even that came a full twenty-four hours after it had conferred with the prosecutors in question. The gravity of the accusations made and the prosecutors' failure to deny them further escalates concerns about the treatment of the former Alabama governor.

"...Attorney General Woods [Republican co-chair of McCain for President leadership committee] has this to say about the Bush Justice Department's prosecution of Siegelman: 'I personally believe that what happened here is that they targeted Don Siegelman because they could not beat him fair and square. This was a Republican state and he was the one Democrat they could never get rid of.' "
--Scott Horton, Harper's, February 28, 2008

What's At Stake

Should we fight for more accountability?

Fetching blurbs now... please stand by

Yes, we're talking about our democracy

punkerkas says:

There's something fishy going on in our country and I want to know what. I no longer pay much attention to the news because there's no real content and I know I won't learn anything of substantial value either.
The constitution was written for citizens to be able to overthrow the government if the government was turning into a monarchy or totalitarian state.
I wonder how much longer it'll take before all American's get fed up enough to change this?

Posted May 21, 2008

Mark says:

It's embarrassing to be an American anymore. The land of the "free" yeah right, whatever it's sickening. I'm so tired of our citizens acting like sheep, with the wool being pulled over their eyes. Keep planting your seeds and they will grow in time to big trees that shade us from the sweltering heat of big government.

Posted May 21, 2008

talkingpoints says:

We certainly should!

I remember reading the book, "The Open Society" by the celebrated philosopher, Karl Popper. (It used to be required reading in many college courses in government.) This book strongly defended the liberal democracies and their use of social criticism which help to make such democracies flourish.

The liberal democracies in those days included the United States.

Unfortunately, the U.S. seems to be fast becoming a "closed society" where a multitude of things are now classified as "secret." Is the U.S. becoming a more authoritarian or even a totalitarian state?

by Joseph L. Galloway
Once upon a time, it was wid more...0 points

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War Inc.

War, Inc.

Recreating his role as a hitman, John Cusack gives a hilarious performance in War, Inc., a political satire set in Turaqistan, a Country occupied by an American private corporation run by a former U.S. Vice President (Dan Aykroyd). In an effort to monopolize the opportunities the war-torn nation offers, the corporation's CEO hires Hauser (Cusack) to kill a Middle Eastern oil minister. Now, struggling with his own growing demons, the assassin must pose as the corporation s Trade Show Producer in order to pull off this latest hit, while maintaining his cover by organizing the high-profile wedding of Yonica Babyyeah (Hilary Duff), an outrageous Central Asian pop star, and keeping a sexy left-wing reporter (Marisa Tomei) in check.

Release Date: 10/14/2008

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brave and important lens

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Posted May 21, 2008

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Posted May 21, 2008

tdove

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Calling for a Secrecy Beat

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Lens Contents

The First Amendment

The Role of a Free Press

What's Wrong with the Media

Bill Moyers, 2003

Censor War

Censor Science

Censor Dissent & Debate

Produce Fake News

Restrict Oversight & Information

Target Opponents & Don't Report It

What's At Stake

Should we fight for more accountability?

Yes, we're talking about our democracy

punkerkas says:

Mark says:

talkingpoints says:

No, I'm not worried

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