Surely it is a fundamental axiom of any news service besides an open and unashamed propaganda outlet that, when in doubt, the government is always wrong.
Isn't this the way it should be?
Essentially, the media is the only way for the population to keep tabs on its government, unless you happen to live within easy commuting distance of your capital and enjoy spending your days nodding off in a stuffy public gallery during filibusters (or insert your own geographically appropriate quirky yet beloved parliamentary practice here). The odds are good, though, that you have better things to do. Much, much better things. We elect representatives so we can foist all that crap off onto them. No single person can stay on top of it all, not with the size and scope and obscenely bloated paper trails of a modern industrialised quasi-social democracy. That's why press coverage is so vitally important. No matter what the ideological position of a paper or channel, it is vitally important that they attack the government at every opportunity. Whatever they say, their readers or viewers will, unless they're terminally stupid, take with a certain grain of salt, knowing the source's ideological bias. Any attack on the government will be weighed accordingly. Spurious attacks will, hopefully, averaged over the entire population, be disregarded. But if the news outlets make no attacks at all, how is anyone ever to know anything is wrong? And something will be wrong; something is always wrong. If no-one criticises, nobody knows where to look. If everyone criticises, people can seek out the eigencriticisms, compare notes, work out what might be plausible and what's probably hysteria. It's this relentless criticism that stands between a vaguely representative system of government and a secretive self-interested oligarchy manipulating the populace through its tamed media outlets for its own venal gain (not unlike the Bush administration).
It is infinitely better to be critical on a hair-trigger than it is to give the government the benefit of the doubt. Isn't it?
This is exactly why I think the BBC was right to stand by Andrew Gilligan's story, despite its qualms about his intemperate language. If a journalist sees any significant possibility that their government is behaving abominably, it's their job to report it. That's what journalists are for, in some sense. They are our, the people's, tools for monitoring their, the government's, activities.
If you think the government is always on our side, and that 9-11 changed everything and that criticising the regime is unpatriotic and antisocial and that now is the time for all good men to rally round the banner and mangle their cliches...Then you're probably stupid.
If you give the Powers That Be a free pass, you get the PATRIOT Act.
Posted by aloysius at August 15, 2003 02:44 AM | TrackBack |