19 March 2005: Note, that while I'm leaving this entry on my blog, the accuracy of this interview with Philip Bennett has been challenged by Bennett. In an email to Hugh Hewitt (www.hughhewitt.com) Bennett states that his statements were almost entirely corrupted and misconstrued in the published piece. As I noted in the original post, The People's Daily certainly has an agenda, and, as essentially a government run propaganda machine, is not to be trusted. Bennett states in the email that he has a tape recording of the interview. It would he helpful, if Bennett released the entire transcript of the interview. It seems that Bennett would use his own paper to publish an accurate transcript of the interview since a lot of what was attributed to Bennett not only damaging to him personally, but damaging to the overall integrity of the paper.
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ORIGINAL ENTRY
As someone who thought of entering journalism as a career at one time, I am fascinated by the spiraling decline into irrelevancy that the American media, particularly the print media, seems bent on taking, particularly in the last decade or so. Across the board subscriptions are down at alarming rates, the distinction between personal opinion and the objective reporting of fact has gone the way of the dodo bird and I continually wonder if the people who write the story headlines are required to read the actual story.
Today The People's Daily, the Chinese Communist newspaper published an interview with Philip Bennett, the managing editor of the Washington Post today where all of the reasons that the print media is on a steady decline were exemplified in one fell swoop. The article carries a quote from Bennett that serves as the headline I Don't Think the US Should be the Leader of the World. Now, as a note, I have not seen Bennett anywhere else in print affirm or deny the statements in this interview. And clearly The People's Daily does have its own government-driven agenda.
What Bennett says in this interview is almost too much for a single blog entry to handle. This is a paper that lives in the past, what the introduction calls, "the glory of Watergate." The Post and its reporting were, in large part, responsible for exposing the Watergate scandal and forcing President Nixon into resignation. Of course that was nearly 30 years ago and amazingly, the Watergate story is mentioned multiple times in this interview. This is a paper, like the New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, and a host of others, that has allowed its thinking and editorial direction to slide so far to the left on the spectrum, while thinking they are simply objective centrists, that they have lost touch with reality and have lost connection with the overwhelming majority of the American public.
Here are some samples of Bennett's rather odd thinking.
Early in the interview he affirms that, "The internet is a US -centric device that has made English much more influential in the world." Of course this matches a recent contention of the Chinese government that called for international control of the Internet, claiming that it is a tool that the US has monopolized for its own purposes. China is a government that does not want its people to be informed as to the truth or even exposed to diverse opinions. The Internet is one the driving forces that the communist regime has been unsuccessful in either controlling or shutting down. Of course, the Internet is equally a "burr in the saddle" of the American media, who are only now beginning to realize what the Chinese government already knows, the ability to quickly and effectively spread information will cripple the influence of any "pre-digested" form of news; whether that news comes from an oppressive government or an agenda-driven media. Read Hugh Hewitt's Blog: Understanding the Information Reformation for a thorough examination of this concept.
When asked in the interview if the "world order should be democratic" Bennett is amazingly unable to give a direct answer. He says, "Democracy means many things. How do you define democracy? As a Chinese journalist, you may have your own definition of democracy which corresponds to your history and your way of seeing the world. I may have another definition. Someone else may have their own definitions. Democracy means a lot of different things." He quotes Winston Churchill who called democracy, "'the least bad system" of government. He stated, "So democracy is not a cure that could turn everything bad into good." He lauds the Chinese government at one point stating that they, "have economic development which has put more people out of poverty over a short period of time than any other country in the world in human history." One of those wonderfully vague and entirely unsubstantiated assertions that seem to be the core of a lot of what passes for reporting these days.
It is clear that every system of government has within itself the seeds of its own destruction. This is because imperfect and fallen people are running whatever system may be in place. Biblically it is also true that whatever form of government exists in any given place, it is there at that moment in time because God established it (Romans 13). But for a top media executive to adopt an entirely postmodern construct rendering him either incapable or unwilling to even defining democracy in absolute terms is another reason that mainstream media is falling into further disrepute and disrepair.
He makes interesting and self-contradictory claims in this article. At one point he presents the standard print media mantra, "We don't have any political point of view that we are trying to advance. We don't represent any political parties, we are not tied to any political movement. On the news side of the paper we try not to give opinions." He then goes on to say, "Major American newspapers endorse Democratic candidates every time. I think that endorsement means nothing. I don't think people will vote according to that endorsement. It is just an old tradition which really doesn't have a lot of meaning any more today." So, political endorsements, which are nothing more than the expressed written opinion of the editorial board and the publisher of the paper, are essentially meaningless? The question then is, does anyone care about anything on the editorial page of the paper, or is it just political endorsements that are meaningless? When the paper writes any editorial is that just, "an old tradition which really doesn't have a lot of meaning anymore?" Why does Bennett bother to participate in the editorial meetings, as managing editor why doesn't he just do away with "an old tradition" he does not think means anything?
He makes another interesting observation:
Furthermore, there is a mood of great suspicion about the media. Every time when we publish a story about Iraq that suggests the war is not going well for America, I get lots of messages from people saying that we the Post are not patriotic and we are reporting negatively on the war only because of our political bias against the Bush administration. I think there is a perception among some of our readers that we are hostile to the Bush administration or representing our own political point of view in our news coverage. I think it is impossible to make that perception go away. Over the time it could damage the reputation of a newspaper.
This is a fascinating admission. Earlier in the interview he states that, "Most big, metropolitan and urban newspapers were built in a strong democratic tradition because they came from urban environment and traditionally voted for the Democratic. So they tend to, on the editorial side, [to] support Democratic views." A simple point here is that the "editorial side" runs the newspaper. These are the leaders and the ones who ultimately give assignments and promote those who work on the "news side." This notion that there exists, to use a legal phrase, a "Chinese Wall" between the news and editorial side of a paper is utter nonsense. Reporters know where there bread is buttered and if they want to promote and get choice assignments and become regularly bylined reporters, they see where the editorial board is heading and they go there. That is human nature, pure and simple.
He does admit that in the area of religion that the mainstream media is "out of touch." He admits that they do not cover religion "very deeply and extensively." But he offers no indication that he has taken any steps to change this, at least in his own paper.
The People's Daily interviewer asked an interesting question of Bennett, "Do your correspondents have difficulties in getting access to information [from the Chinese government]? Bennett amazingly replied, "Yes, but we have difficult[ly] in the access to the information here in Washington DC too. I don't expect the Chinese government to completely open up just because American journalists want them to become more open." To compare the freedom of the press in both gathering information and reporting stories in American and China and drawing these kinds of parallels just demonstrates how skewed Bennett's views are. Of course, I'm sure he also does expect the US government to be entirely open and transparent on every issue, simply for the very reason that he and other journalists want them to.
The entire interview is an interesting read, and there are some startling admissions from a managing editor of one of the nation's important newspapers. If they cannot define what democracy is, it is no wonder that they don't see it emerging in Iraq and Afganistan. If they don't see democracy as the best means to improve the lot and lives of people, it is little wonder that their stories will be suspicious and terpid towards the president's goals in foreign policy. Here is a suggestion for a journalistic experiment. Let Bennett and his counter-part at the People's Daily switch jobs for about six months. After those six months would Bennett be in prison and would his counterpart actually want to go back to China?
Posted by Narnia3 at March 13, 2005 9:36 PM | TrackBack