Views > April 8, 2008 > Web Only

In Praise of Reporting Reality—And The Truth

By Bill Moyers

Ron Ridenhour, who brought the My Lai massacre to the light of day, was courageous. To get the story out, he had to defy the whole might and power of the United States government, including its war machine.

Back then, in 1969, I was publisher of Newsday, having left the White House some two years earlier. Our editor Bill McIlwain played the My Lai story big, as he should, much to the chagrin of the owner who couldn’t believe Americans were capable of such atrocities. Our readers couldn’t believe it either. Some of them picketed outside my office for days, their signs accusing the paper of being anti-American for publishing repugnant news about our troops. Some things never change.

A few years later, I gave the commencement at a nearby university, and when I finished the speech, a woman who had just been graduated came up to me and said, “Mr. Moyers, you’ve been in both government and journalism; that makes everything you say twice as hard to believe.” She was on to something.

After my government experience, it took me a while to get my footing back in journalism. I had to learn all over again that what is important for the journalist is not how close you are to power, but how close you are to reality. Over the last 40 years, I would find that reality in assignment after assignment, from covering famine in Africa and war in Central America to inner-city families trapped in urban ghettos and middle-class families struggling to survive in an era of downsizing across the heartland. I also had to learn one of journalism’s basic lessons. The job of trying to tell the truth about people whose job it is to hide the truth is almost as complicated and difficult as trying to hide it in the first place. We journalists are of course obliged to cover the news, but our deeper mission is to uncover the news that powerful people would prefer to keep hidden.

Unless you are willing to fight and re-fight the same battles until you go blue in the face, drive the people you work with nuts going over every last detail to make certain you’ve got it right, and then take all of the slings and arrows directed at you by the powers that be—corporate and political and sometimes journalistic—there is no use even trying. You have to love it and I do. I.F. Stone once said, after years of catching the government’s lies and contradictions, “I have so much fun, I ought to be arrested.” Journalism 101.

So it wasn’t courage I counted on; it was exhilaration and good luck. When the road forked, I somehow stumbled into the right path, thanks to mentors like Eric Sevareid, Fred Friendly, Walter Cronkite and scores of producers, researchers and editors who lifted me to see further than one can see unless one is standing on the shoulders of others.

The quintessential lesson of my life came from another Texan named John Henry Faulk. He was a graduate, as am I, of the University of Texas. He served in the Merchant Marines, the American Red Cross and the U.S. Army during World War II, and came home to become a celebrated raconteur and popular national radio host whose career was shattered when right-wingers inspired by Joseph McCarthy smeared him as a communist. He lost his sponsors and was fired. But he fought back with a lawsuit that lasted five years and cost him every penny he owned. Financial help from Edward R. Murrow and a few others helped him to hang on. In the end, John Henry Faulk won, and his courage helped to end the Hollywood era of blacklisting. You should read his book, Fear on Trial, and see the movie starring George C. Scott. John Henry’s courage was contagious.

Before his death I produced a documentary about him, and during our interview he told me the story of how he and his friend, Boots Cooper, were playing in the chicken house there in central Texas when they were about 12 years old. They spotted a chicken snake in the top tier of the nest, so close it looked like a boa constrictor. As John Henry told it, “All of our frontier courage drained out of our heels. Actually, it trickled down our overall legs. And Boots and I made a new door through the hen house.” His momma came out to see what all of the fuss was about, and she said to Boots and John Henry, “Don’t you know chicken snakes are harmless? They can’t hurt you.” Rubbing his forehead and his behind at the same time, Boots said, “Yes, Mrs. Faulk, I know, but they can scare you so bad you’ll hurt yourself.”

John Henry Faulk never forgot that lesson. I’m always ashamed when I do. Temptation to co-option is the original sin of journalism, and we’re always finding fig leaves to cover it: economics, ideology, awe of authority, secrecy, the claims of empire. In the buildup to the invasion of Iraq we were reminded of what the late great reporter A.J. Liebling meant when he said the press is “the weak slat under the bed of democracy.” The slat broke after the invasion and some strange bedfellows fell to the floor: establishment journalists, neo-con polemicists, beltway pundits, right-wing warmongers flying the skull and bones of the “balanced and fair brigade,” administration flacks whose classified leaks were manufactured lies—all romping on the same mattress in the foreplay to disaster.

Five years, thousands of casualties, and hundreds of billion dollars later, most of the media co-conspirators caught in flagrante delicto are still prominent, still celebrated, and still holding forth with no more contrition than a weathercaster who made a wrong prediction as to the next day’s temperature. The biblical injunction, “Go and sin no more,” is the one we most frequently forget in the press. Collectively, we don’t seem to learn that all it takes to transform an ordinary politician and a braying ass into the modern incarnation of Zeus and the oracle of Delphi is an oath on the Bible, a flag in the lapel, and the invocation of national security.

There are, fortunately, always exceptions to whatever our latest dismal collective performance yields. America produces some world-class journalism, including coverage of the Iraq War by men and women as brave as Ernie Pyle. But I still wish we had a professional Hippocratic Oath of our own that might stir us in the night when we stray from our mission. And yes, I believe journalism has a mission.

Walter Lippmann was prescient on this long before most of you were born. Lippmann, who became the ultimate Washington insider—someone to whom I regularly leaked—acknowledged that while the press may be a weak reed to lean on, it is the indispensable support for freedom. He wrote:

The present crisis of Western democracy is a crisis of journalism. Everywhere men and women are conscious that somehow they must deal with questions more intricate than any that church or school had prepared them to understand. Increasingly, they know that they cannot understand them if the facts are not quickly and steadily available. All the sharpest critics of democracy have alleged is true if there is no steady supply of trustworthy and relevant news. Incompetence and aimlessness, corruption and disloyalty, panic and ultimate disaster must come to any people denied an assured access to the facts.

So for all the blunders for which we are culpable; for all the disillusionment that has set in among journalists with every fresh report of job cuts and disappearing news space; for all the barons and buccaneers turning the press into a karaoke of power; for all the desecration visited on broadcast journalism by the corporate networks; for all the nonsense to which so many aspiring young journalists are consigned; and for all the fears about the eroding quality of the craft, I still answer emphatically when young people ask me, “Should I go into journalism today?” Sometimes it is difficult to urge them on, especially when serious questions are being asked about how loyal our society is to the reality as well as to the idea of an independent and free press. But I almost always answer, “Yes, if you have a fire in your belly, you can still make a difference.”

I remind them of how often investigative reporting has played a crucial role in making the crooked straight. I remind them how news bureaus abroad are a form of national security that can tell us what our government won’t. I remind them that as America grows more diverse, it’s essential to have reporters, editors, producers and writers who reflect these new rising voices and concerns. And I remind them that facts can still drive the argument and tug us in the direction of greater equality and a more democratic society. Journalism still matters.

But I also tell them there is something more important than journalism, and that is the truth. They aren’t necessarily one and the same because the truth is often obscured in the news. In his new novel The Appeal, John Grisham tells us more about corporate, political and legal jihads than most newspapers or network news ever will; more about Wall Street shenanigans than all the cable business channels combined; more about Manchurian candidates than you will ever hear on the Sunday morning talk shows.

For that matter, you will learn more about who wins and who loses in the real business of politics, which is governance, from the public interest truth-tellers of Washington than you will from an established press tethered to official sources. The Government Accountability Project, POGO, the Sunlight Foundation, Citizens Against Government Waste, Taxpayers for Common Sense, the Center for Responsive Politics, the National Security Archive, CREW, the Center for Public Integrity, just to name a few—and from whistleblowers of all sorts who never went to journalism school, never flashed a press pass, and never attended a gridiron dinner.

Ron Ridenhour was not a journalist when he came upon the truth of My Lai. He was in the Army. He later became a pioneering investigative reporter and—this is the irony—had trouble making a living in a calling where truth-telling can be a liability to the bottom line.

So I tell inquisitive and inquiring young people: “Journalism still makes a difference, but the truth matters more. And if you can’t get to the truth through journalism, there are other ways to go.”

The preceding essay was adapted from the acceptance speech Bill Moyers gave on April 3 upon receiving a Ridenhour Prize. Sponsored by the Nation Institute and the Fertel Foundation, the Ridenhour Prizes recognize those who have spoken out on behalf of the public interest, promoted social justice or illuminated a more just vision of society.

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• Reader Comments

  Great.  TV has made real journalism more and more difficult.  The Bush administration has put foxes in virtually all the henhouses.  Their attempt at PBS almost succeeded, but it did weaken PBS.  Where you can tell the truth, even if you know it, seems to be getting more limited.

  Posted by oxheadone on Apr 9, 2008 at 6:19 PM

  The problem is that now news divisions are regarded as little more than revenue sources for their parent conglomerates. That means they focus on market share (i.e. ratings), therefore faddish viewing habits, therefore what “interests” the public in the momentary short term whether or not it’s truly in the public interest. So, for example, celebrity foibles get more airtime than substantive analysis of economic and foreign policy issues.

  I guess the old-fashioned view that the role of the journalist (print or broadcast) is to inform, just to devotedly inform as an essential pillar of democratic republicanism, is outmoded. Now it’s about responding to the “choices” of the viewing public.

  Here’s a case in point: check out as best you can the difference between CNN’s domestic broadcast menu compared to CNN International. You’ll be struck by just how little “hard news” gets the camera as a function of the whole in the domestic version. We expat viewers get tons more “hard” reports, even with their own flaws.

  We didn’t get 3 straight days of obsessive focus on the saga of Anna Nicole Smith’s demise and its aftermath, for instance. What we did get was too much, but it was a fraction of what y’all had to imbibe. Every time I go back to visit, I’m amazed at the proliferation of celebrity reporter shows.

  Give me the approach of Charles Lewis over at the Center for Public Integrity. Just dig for the facts, just read the news.

  As always, it has to be asked, what agenda is being served?

  Rhetorical question.

  Posted by Kuya on Apr 9, 2008 at 6:46 PM

  Moyers is Right, Power will only foot the bill for publicity, Never for actual news, unless there is a greater power forcing its hand. The American People are the only power that can do so, but only if they are awake and aware.

  Answering the alarm bells of the past 8 years (and more) is just the first step, there is a whole lot of work to do and not much time to change course, and most folks haven’t learned to read a compass yet.

  Posted by FreeDem on Apr 9, 2008 at 7:59 PM

  I stand and applaud, Mr. Moyers, once again and as usual. Your exhortations and exposition enlighten; our courage, candor and conscience contradict careerism. Those of us whose experience in mainstream journalism confirms and verifies what you posit, remain hopeful that professors of journalism concur, that applicants to schools of journalism are not screened politically, and, most of all, that journalism’s doors might remain open to those not molded by conformity’s deformations, academically or otherwise. Politics is ever and always who gets what, why, when and how. Journalism should, as you steadfastly remind, disallow its tendency disgrace the process.

  Posted by Bud Wizer on Apr 10, 2008 at 7:32 AM

  That’s some nervy title, Bill.

  I’m afraid if one is interested in “reality”, or “truth”, one shouldn’t look to Moyers for a role model.  Moyers is little more than a left-wing hack, dressed up as a folksy sweater-wearing “journalist”. 

  They’ll seldom be a left of center scandal - and there’s plenty - that Moyers will highlight with enthusiasm, if he covers it at all.  He saves his energy for anything and everything he can dig up on the right.  Right wing Christians are an especially beloved target of Moyers’ selective wrath.

  Moyers had little regard for reality or truth a while back when he smeared and belittled a perfectly decent former government servant.  He wrongly and carelessly attributed a defaming quote to him that he never made, and broadly and inaccurately demonized millions of similarly decent Christians.

  And of course the Iraq war is uniformly awful and wrong in Moyers’ book, no question, as he tosses grenades at the effort from the safety of his comfy computer chair. Somehow I doubt he’d ever muster the courage, much less the interest, to actually go there, lest that might just force him to confront the situation as it really, truthfully is, and realize that the days of My Lai are for him, sadly over:
  

  From the Publisher

  Michael Yon changed my mind about the war in Iraq, by making me understand it for the first time.

  From the very beginning I was against the war. I thought it would be a disaster, another Vietnam. And until I had the privilege of working on this book with Michael I was always for immediate pull-out.....

  ......Michael--who is as close to totally non-political as anyone I know--showed me two things. First, because I judged by Vietnam, the war of my youth, I had radically underestimated what American soldiers could do. I knew they could blow away any regular opponent on any battlefield. But wage a counterinsurgency against an enemy with broad support in the population? Win the “hearts and minds,” to use the Vietnam era phrase that now can be used only ironically? That was asking too much, I thought.

  I was 100 percent wrong. Today’s American soldiers excel at counterinsurgency, because they excel at the most important thing: winning over the people by inspiring them with their own courage and compassion, discipline and determination....

  .....Just wait until you read the Chapter “High Noon” (my favorite), the story of the American soldiers who have to arrest a corrupt but politically popular Iraqi police chief we had put in office in the first place because he had been a real hero in fighting the terrorists. He had to be removed by Americans to show the Iraqis we really did believe in the rule of law. The whole thing could have blown up into a one-town civil war with hundreds dead on both sides. Won’t tell you how it ends, but you will be amazed and very proud....

  .....I am convinced that everything I once thought about the war was wrong. The truth is we are doing a great thing in Iraq, most of the Iraqi people really do want to be a united democratic nation and already consider America their greatest friend and ally. It would be a crime to turn tail now and abandon them now.

  I owe all that to Michael’s book, which is why I believe publishing Moment of Truth in Iraq may be the best thing I have ever done for my country.

  But the overall irony is that Moyers seriously wants us to believe that all those mere mortal journalists out there are somehow toeing some strict corporate, right-wing Republican line. But looking back on the media’s inordinate focus on all the bad from right-wing quarters, and on the good from the left-wing, one becomes a little suspicious as to the accuracy of someone of Moyer’s demonstrably often unfair, unbalanced, unreal and untrue obsessions.

  Posted by Natalie on Apr 16, 2008 at 3:53 AM

• extended discussion >>>Continued...

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