ON THE CORNER OF 32ND street and Broadway in New York City, not far from where once a year floats and inflated Bart Simpsons roll down the street for a parade, near an area known as Herald Square, lies a dark green satute of a an old man with spectacles on, leaning back in a chair, his arms slouched over the armrests of the chair. The average passerby certainly has no idea who he is, disregards the statue, sees it as little more than a stoop for birds.
If they cared -- and they certainly would not care -- to inspect its base, they would find that it is a statue of Horace Greeley, an icon of 19th Century American journalism. And his roller coaster of a life is a lot more interesting than the boring statue he got.
Herald Square is an interesting Memorial point for Horace Greeley, who was the former editor of the newspaper the New York Tribune. He couldn't stand the New York Herald, and spent a good chunk of his ink attacking down that paper's editor, William Bennent. Nor did the Herald love him back, with Bennent refering to him in his pages routinely as a "wretch" an "ogre." Yes, this was good old fashioned objective journalism in the 1850s, with all the professionalism of the WWF.
Greeley's paper supported the Whigs, then later the Republicans. Politically, Greeley's tribune was for a protective tarrif. And very much abolitionist. Personally he had socialist view; he was concerned about the slums and bettering the average working people of New York City.
If you know one quote of Greeley, and that is 'Go West Young Man!' which was not the celebration of Manifest Destiny that it might be seen as today, Greeley did not really mean to call America to explore her interior from ocean to ocean. It was his exhoration to the working poor he saw around him and suggestion on how to improve their lot -- by getting out of the city and getting land west. But he didn't want it to be an empty promise. He also argued successfuly for a Homestead Act to provide free land for the downtrodden western newcomers.
Greeley argued against the Mexican War which he spoke of in terms its doubtful few published newspapers would refer to the Iraq conflict today. Greely called the Mexican War a "fatomless abyss of crime and absurdity..." The fact that it was a war we were easily winning did not detur Greeley. He called President James Knox Polk the Father of lies, and blared headlines across his paper Sign Anything, Ratify Antything Do anything to end the guilt the bloodsheed and the Shame!!
In 1848 Greely himself was appointed by Whig leaders to Congress, and he railed against abuses in that body. He at once saw injustice in a law that compensated legislators at a $8 a mile, getting a reporter to track the average congressman's route compared to the postal routes and finding that most were padding (with the exception of a young congressman named abraham lincoln and 11 others who he found were actually owed money). He took the hosue floor "I know you know not of saving, he decried the members. ''Your gentlemanly work is Spending, Taking, Distributing.' His fellow members did not change the compensation scheme and threatened to expell him, later allowing him to end his unlected term.
Greeley's paper was influential and important, his comments were often reprinted in other papers, which was a common occurance at the time - paper exchange and reprint was kind of like an early World Wide Web -- and he played a role in the founding of the Republican party and later was very influential in drumming up support for Abraham Lincoln.
Greeley was impatient and impuslive, and his newspaper reflected that. Prior to the Civil War, Greeley resisted calls for peace with the South or war with the South, saying simply, let them leave. But after Fort Sumter, Greely became a war monger...put a headline in the paper for a solid week, saying Forward to Richmond, in huge block letters.. Forward to Richmond, the rebel Congress must not be allowed to meet there on the 20th of July! By that date the place must be held by the National Army. With words Greely sought to order an army, and some blamed Greeley for inciting public opinon and encouraging the Lincoln Administration into hurrying a show of force at the battle of Bull Run, which ended with Union forces in disarray. Greeley was devestated when that battle didn't work out.
So powerful was Greeley's paper that when he addressed an open letter to Abraham Lincoln asking for emancipation, the man in the White House actually felt the need to reply to this editor. That is the quote you may have heard where Lincoln said 'if i can preserve the union by freeing the slaves ...if i can preserve the Union without i would..."--that was a letter to Greeley. Greeley backed the Commander in chief when he issued the emancipation proclomation, syaing GOD BLESS ABRAHAM LINCLOLN, but then the next year said he feared there could not be a good war or bad peace...
He later became an annoyance for the 16th President...Gideon Wells supported the war but wanted it fought more aggressively. leading Lincoln's secretary John Hay to quote Lincoln as saying Greely was an
old shoe that was useful no more.
Greeley attempted to work out a peace deal with confederate agents who were operating out of Canada. After the war, the one time great abolitionist called for mercy for slaveowners of the Confederacy and a pardon for Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee.
During Grant's presidency, Greeley was upset by the corruption in his administration and tired of Union troops in the South and joined the 'Liberal Republican' movement of 1872 and joined the Presidential race as the anti-Grant candidate, accepting the support of the Democratic party that he had trashed his entire editorial career... He was ridiculed as a turncoat and a crazy man. which turned out to be somewhat true. Following his defeat on election day, he checked into a sanitarium, and he died before the electoral votes could be counted in the Presidential race.
Objectivity: Where did it Go?
With todays confusing morass of cable channels and radio, with opinon makers like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity and moral crusaders like Bill O' Riley and Glen Beck filling our airwaves, with revelations of papers carrying stories of the administration, it may lead us to question - when did the media lose its bipartisanness, its objectivity? But the question may be, when did the media have objectivity? When did media start to get involved in politics. In Horace Greeley, we have but one example that if you are looking for objectivity in the history of American media, you certinaly will find a strange variety of it in early America. Greeley's strange changes in opinion may have been the closest you got to a kind of objective viewpoint.
If the fact that Greely ran for congress while being an editor seems shocking, it was not so at the time. His rival Raymond was the chairman of the republican national committee and ran Lincoln's re-eleciton, all while remaining editor of the NY Times. Later in the century both names associated with tabloid journalism -Pulitizer and Hearst would both serve in congress at different times, with Hearst also running for New York governor and new york city mayors, both realizing they had more power in ink than in office as one vote of hundreds.. Joseph Medill, the publisher of the Chicago Tribune and another Lincoln backer, later became Mayor of Chicago. Two of our Presidents, William McKinley and Warren Harding were newspaper editors prior to running for office. When Harding ran for President, he faced off against Governor James M. Cox of Ohio, who had also build up a name that remains today in the newspaper business, making the 1920 election a battle of newspaper publishers.
Newspapers and politics mixed easily, as Old Greeley would have wanted. He had not interest in a profession of 'newspaper men' Newspaper men came from the bar, the pulpit or the street Greeley had famously said.
Before the American Revolution, there were thrity seven newspapers in the colonies and many one off phamlets and leafeleats...newspapers were an important part of colonial life Newspapers first spread outrage about the the Tea Tax and stamp act. During the Revolution, newspapers were important to spreading the patriot cause, and the Continental Congress asked for people to save their rags so it could be made into paper. washingotn insisted ont eh printing of the New Jersey Gazzette while the troops were in Valley Forge.
Later when the Articles of Confederation that the new American nation chose proved ineffective and there were calls for a new central government. After the 1787 meeting in Philadelphia in which the constitution was proposed, it had to be sold to the states. In New York there was stiff oppostion. Leaders Hamilton, Madison and John Jay published a series of papers defending each aspect of the Constitution, and they went to a pro-Constitution paper called the New York Independent Journal to publish what is now regarded as one fot eh best pieces of american writing, the Federalist Papers. Opponents of the Constitution and its sweeping governemnt powers were also active in the newspapers... The fight was so contentious in the new york newspaper word that the New York Journal, an opponent of ratification, suffered his press being destroyed The battle over ratification of the constitution set up the scene for the two parties.
In the beginnings of the nation, just as the founding fathers quickly chose sides between the two major parties- the Federalists of Hamilton and the Anti-Federalists of Jefferson, so did the nation's newspapers. It was just simply understood that papers represented a party. Politics were interesting to that sgement of the population that read papers. Political parties represented large groups of motivated and literate people. If a paper started out wihtout a party just for commercial interest, it quickly found itself linkikng to one. Newspaper names today that contain the words 'Republican or Democrat' reflect the partisan nature of newspapers at our country's founding. Though dont' be fooled, the Republican in papers sometimes refers to the Jeffersonain rather than Lincoln republianism.
Noah Webster, prior to creating a respected American dictionary as a patriotic action..was a lawyer and early newspaper writer who urged the changing of the Articles of Confederation then supported the new Constitution.. Later he was tapped by the Federalists to print a newspaper, and his Minerva The Newspaper gave an excellent defense of the Washington Administration during the Jay Treaty negotiations which England which were unpopular with most of the country. The Columbia Centenial of Boston supported the Federalist viewpoint as asked that Washington be called 'the chief magistrate' at all times. Meanwhile the Boston Indpendent and The Albany Argus were republican papers, supporting the emerging anti-Federalist party and its leader Thomas Jefferson.
In New York, the America's capital in 1789, the offical Federalist paper was John Fenno's Gazette of the United States, which saluted the Washington Administration and his treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton. When the capital was moved to Philadelpha the paper followed. But when his circulation of 1,000 did not carry over with the move, he appealed to Hamilton for a loan. Jefferson, becoming the leader of the quiet opposition in Washington's ostensibly non-partisan government, decided the capital needed a paper espousing his views and picked a fellow with a conicidently close-sounding name Phillip Freneau created the National Gazette, which attacked Hamilton and the Federalists for siding wiht England and Creating a new monarchy. While he didn't give Freneau a loan, Jefferson got Freneau a small job at the treasury.
Washington complained to Jefferson directly about Freneau's paper, not only for attacking him for wanting to be Emperor of the World but for sending Washington three of his papers 'as if I am to be the distributor of his paper!' When Jefferson decided to resign as treasury secretary Freaneau lost his free job, and the paper died to.
The slack was picked up by Benjamin Franklin Bache, a grandson of Benjamin Franklin, and his Aurora newspaper. Bache had no problem criticising the President ones. At the end of Washington's term, weeks after he issued his Farewell address. "If a nation was debauched by a man, the American nation has been debauched by Washington. If a nation was ever decieved by a man, it was deceived by Washington, let it be said that no man is an idol. " Wow, today's audience of media says.
Still Federalist papers outnumbered Jeffersonian Republican ones, and when Jefferson became President vile attacks continued: should the infidel Jefferson be elected to the Presidency, the seal of death is set that moment on our holy religion said the Palladium and reprinted severla newspapes including the Hudson Bee. In New York, smarting from the loss of power for his Federalist Party, Alexander Hamilton spent 10,000 to set up a Federalist Organ, the Evening Post, which is direct anscestor to the New York post of today.
Jefferson in effect created his own newspaper, the National Intellegencier, and suggested its owner Samuel Harrison Smith move to Washigton on the promise it would be the government's organ... Friends of Andrew Jackson created the United States Telegraph after he lost a contentious election to John Quincy Adams, and Zachary Taylor created the Republic for his short lived presidency. It was common for Presidents to desginate a paper for the administration. Andrew Jackson gave at least thrity five jobs to newspaper reporters, presumably for good press. Filmore used the Whig Paper the National Intellegencier, Democrats like Pierce or Buchanan spoke through the Washington Union.
New York in the Civil War Era
Greeley's tribune was one of 17 papers in Civil War New York City, reflecting a choice of media only to be matched by cable television. In additon to the Tribune there was the reliably pro-Lincoln New York Times. Then there was the Democratic two-cent eight page paper the Daily News, owned by
Benjamin Wood who was the brother of Democratic Mayor Fernando Wood. The Daily News reflected the majority opinion in a city that was Democratic and voted against Lincoln 2 to 1, and against his re-election by an even greater margin. The and the News reflected thinking in a New York that was at best ambiguous about Lincoln's Civil War all the while supporting its soliders which were heavily supplied by new York's Irish and German areas.
It was an organ of Democratic anti-war Tammany Hall. decried the 'emptyness of this war upon our brethren.' Up until the time of Lee's surrender. The New York Daily News continuously blasted New Yorkers with headlines that said the South was going to win the war. Then there was William Bennet's New York Hearld, which supported the war but wanted someone other than Lincoln to lead it. That was until in 1864 the paper supported Lincoln's reelection - suspicously before Lincoln offered the editor Bennet an ambasadorship to France.
It is after the civil war that the first sign of freedom from party control newspapers when several papers the NY Times, the evening post the philadelphia times, the Springfield Republican and Harper's Weekly -- all Republican Papers all went against Ulysses S. Grant and supported Greely for President.
Whitelow Ried, Greely's successor at the Tribune wrote: "Indpendent journalism!" That is the watchword of the future of the profession. An end of concealments because it would hurt the party, end an d of one-sided extortsions...
Of course Whitelow Ried's comments would pack more punch if he hadn't turned the Tribune into a solid Republican Party organ, obtained the job of minister to France by Benjamin Harrison, and ran for Vice President with Harrision as his vice presidential candidate in 1892.
Papers became less partisan during these times as they appealed to much greater audiences, especially women who did not have the vote. Advertising surged duiring the later half of the 19th century especaily from large deparent stores. Though America's literacy was increasing, its interest in public affairs was not. So rather than papers appealing to those most interested in politics, sensational news stories began to be the focus. The most famous names among these of course was Pulitizer and Hearst. When Hearst bought the New York World in 1890's it touched off a newspaper war and a battle of so-called yellow journalism, a term coined by another newspaper who never cared to explain what exactly it meant. Hearst and Pulitzer are heavily associated with the naton's involvement in the Spanish American War. But by and large these papers were not partisan. Certianly Hearst favored William Jennings Bryan, but he also did more to publicize William McKinley's splendid war to keep him in office. Hearst woudl later advocate for FDR, though most papers in teh contry did not.
It could probably said that in the twentieth century most newspapers represented Republican viewpoints, though not always in a strong way. But the influence of newspapers waned. Despite only a third and a fourth of newspapers supporting them directly, FDR and Truman were elected to office in the 40's. In closer elections, the Republican preference in newspapers mattered, and John F. Kennedy sought to avoid the influence of the newspapers by challenging Nixon to a series of television debates, and as President later avoided the big newspaper editors by taking small beat reporters by inviting small reporters to get unprecedented access. Johnson offered the Houston publisher a generous bank approval to get good coverage in his page.. These actions were echos of the old days of Jefferson buying off journalists. asking a small publisher to be the President's paper.
Watergate: Is it What we Think?
But if there is a crowning moment of objectivity in the press, a moment where it seemed like the truth won over politics, it is Watergate. Michael Schusdon author of Watergate in American Memory, This is a myth of David and Goliath, of powerless individuals overturning an institution of overwhelming might. It is high noon in Washington, with two white-hatted young reporters at one end of the street and the black-hatted president at the other, protected by his minions. And the good guys win. The press, truth its only weapon, saves the day." And it is true that jorunalists, and certinaly the Washington Post played a key role in rooting out the activities of a President. But it might be useful to throw a little water on this theory. It has to be remembered that not all newspapers covered Watergate with the ferocity of the Woodward and Bernstein...the story was barely covered by most of the media until months after the two city beat jorunalists woodward and bertstein had first broken the story. "fewer than 15 of the more than 430 reporters in Washington ... worked exclusively on Watergate."
the Post published some 200 news articles about Watergate, more than double the number of its nearest competitor, the New York Times. "Many of the Washington Post stories were carried on page one," Liebovich found, play that occurred "only occasionally" in other newspapers after the initial publicity about the break-in died down. In addition, Post stories were more often investigative in nature and "revealed new details about covert activities directed by the White House," while other news organizations "rarely carried their own enterprise stories." On TV, there was no investigative coverage to speak of.
Especially troubling for the media is that few challenged the Nixon White House's version of events during the pivotal first months of the scandal, the breakin had occured just as American voters were going to select a President. It's forgotten that the break-in and the intial post stories broke before the 1972 election in which Nixon was about to be win in a Landslide. The McGovern campaign attmepted to make use of Watergate in teh 1972 campaign, but the attempts fell on deaf ears as only the post was running stories and there wasn't much media support for the theory that Nixon had something to do with a burgulary at the Headquarters of his opponent's party.
"Too many people in the press bought into the assumption that there was a 'New Nixon,'" Bernstein remembers, Woodward however, always thoguht it was too strong to say that the media denied the media brought down a President. he says. "The press always plays a role, whether by being passive or by being aggressive, but it's a mistake to overemphasize" the media's coverage.
"As more documentary materials are released," Kutler wrote, "the media's role in uncovering Watergate diminishes in scope and importance. Television and newspapers publicized the story and, perhaps, even encouraged more diligent investigation. But it is clear that as Watergate unfolded from 1972 to 1974, media revelations of crimes and political misdeeds repeated what was already known to properly constituted investigative authorities. In short, carefully timed leaks, not media investigations, provided the first news of Watergate."
"At best," wrote author Edward Jay Epstein, "reporters, including Woodward and Bernstein, only leaked elements of the prosecutor's case to the public" a few days before it otherwise would have come out anyway. Without any help from the press, Epstein wrote, the FBI linked the burglars to the White House and traced their money to the Nixon campaign – within a week of the break-in. Woodward and Bernstein "systematically ignored or minimized" the work of law enforcement officials to "focus on those parts" of the story "that were leaked to them," Epstein charged.
But Woodward comes somewhere in the middle, saying that the reporting din't bring down the president but did have an effect... the late Sam Ervin, chairman of the Senate Watergate Committee, "called me and asked questions, and his work grew out of the stories that we did." Woodward also says that after Nixon's resignation, the presiding federal judge, the late John Sirica, told him "flat out" that the Post's stories influenced him to crack down on the Watergate conspirators. "Judges don't decide to get tough in a vacuum," Woodward says. "Senators don't decide to investigate in a vaccuum." Both were influenced by the press, Woodward says, because "the process wasn't uncovering the abuses. It's that simple."
A Watergate prosecutor Seymour Glanzer says that what really mattered – both legally and politically – was Nixon's failure to destroy his incriminating tape recordings, not the media's coverage: "Woodward and Bernstein followed in our wake. The idea that they were this great investigative team was a bunch of baloney." Glanzer believes that an official in the FBI's Washington field office leaked details of the Watergate probe to other reporters besides Woodward and Bernstein but that only the Post published them early on because of its larger ongoing "struggle with the White House."
Watergate may have created more of a spin on objectivity and a rigourous press after the fact. Reporters did seem to have some tenacity in looking for a scandal. Media started looking for scandals mirroring the Watergate. Iran Contra, Whitewater, Jimmy Carter's brother's messes with the Twainese Government was called Billy Gate.
Rather and Bush
On January 25, 1988 Dan Rather interviewed George H. W. Bush on a live CBS news aprogram. George Bush was vice president, and with several candidates inclding Kansas senator Bob Dole on his heels, he wasn't a sure-thing to succeed Reagan. Rather would not interview the Vice President in erson but rather a video monitor would be brought in. The image of Ratehr live with Bush in the video box and the the interview woudl become so famous that CSPAN sells copies of it on their website.
Dan Rather has always been sure there was "more than meets the eye" on Iran-contra. Rather had CBS investigate extensively into the scandal in hopes that possibly Ronald Reagan or George Bush were involved. In the interview, Dan Rather kept trying to implicate George Bush, trying to get Bush to say that he was involved in Iran-contra. Over and over again, Rather would ask Bush a question about his knowledge of Iran Contra.. When Bush wouldn't concede that he had prior knowledge, Rather would interrupt him and ask him another question about whether he knew.
Then Bush whammed Rather. Bush referred to Rather's "dead air incident" saying, "I want to talk about why I want to be President, why those 41 percent of the people are supporting me. And I don't think it's fair to judge my whole career by a rehash on Iran. How would you like it if I judged your career by those seven minutes when you walked off the set in New York?" Bush was refering to an incidident in which Rather had walked off his camera position to protest a news departmet decision to cut his coverage. Rather did not respond.
A number of CBS affiliates called the Bush campaign to apologize for the anchor's behavior. Sam Donaldson, known for his own confrontational interviews, said, Other media officials had to admit it might have been wrong. "Rather went too far." Mike Wallace, a fellow CBS reporter, said, "The style was wrong. Dan lost his cool." "Rather went too far...I don't think we [as journalists] can get to a situation where we make -- on our own authority -- accusations." according to Sam Donaldson.
"I won the battle with Dan Rather that night, but he won the war. His coverage of my campaign and presidency was consistently negative." the former President said.
Dan rather for his part said, "I thought about that time, 'Look, he was doing he felt what he had to do as a politician trying to position himself to get the presidency.' I was doing what reporters do, and that is asking the tough questions and keep pressing it either until he answered or until it was clear he wasn't going to answer."
The interview might have been the zenith of antagonistic journalism, on TV at least. While its clear that Rather planned a trap for Bush, and that he was looking to bring him down. But the interview went so well for Bush that some questioned whetehr he hadden't planned the encounter from the beginning. Indeed it seemed like he had a tasty soundbite ready. So while Rather wasn't objective in that situation, Bush it seemed, knew it and counted on it.
There was no question of how another President viewed the action.In his 1990 book In the Arena, Richard Nixon wrote: "In the 1988 campaign we saw a striking example of how helpful an enemy can be. Nothing did more to eliminate George Bush's wimp image than his televised confrontation with Dan Rather."
In 1994 a group called the Capital Research Center set up a n office in Washington. Their mission was to destroy the AARP. The lobby group that for years had protected Social Security, Medicare and other governement programs for older people. When Wyoming Senator Alan Simpson, a conservative opponent of the AARP. Newspapers like the San Diego Tribune, Albany Times, St petersburg Times, Sanfrancisco Chroncial and Atlanta Journal used some of the attacks without investigating. Sam Donaldson on ABC news questioned the PResident of AARP with Capital Resarch Centers unsubstantiated assumptions that Trudy Lieberman in her book Slanting the Story, does a pretty good job of tracing press releases from the Cato Institute attacking Head Start finding its way into news accoutns unchallenged, and a Cato spokesperson who described himself as nothign more than a jorunalism put on as a child care expert who said Head Start was a waste.
In 1996, after a failed bid to put conservative radio commentator Rush Limbaugh on TV. Rorger Ailes was tapped by news magnate Rupert Murdoch to start a channel. Ailes carried out Republican political consulting for many candidates during the 1970s and 1980s, but returned to presidential campaigning as a consultant to Ronald Reagan in 1984, and George H.W. in 1988. Rupert Murdoch established Fox News to fill what he saw as a niche in the market for news that, according to Murdoch, was "fair and balanced". A 2004 survey of journalists by the Project for Excellence in Journalism found that Fox was "the single news outlet that strikes most journalists as taking a particular ideological stance",[5] with 56% of national journalists citing Fox News as being especially conservative in its coverage of news.
The true problem with a lack of objectivity today is that our expectations are higher than those of the American media in the early days. Americans expected from ' the press' that they were getting one point of view, the person who printed the paper. It wasn't called media, that term came later. While I'm not a total believer in linguistics being everything, using the term media expects that is a middle ground for ideas, making cases where informaton was pushed theough the media all the more sinister.
Now it may not be so surprising that with today's Accustations surrounding Judith Miller, an ambitious times reporter who had access to top government officials, some say the price for that access was carrying water for the stories.....especially for her coverage of Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq.
Miller has come under criticism for her reporting on whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMD). On September 7, 2002, Miller and Times reporter Michael R. Gordon reported the interception of metal tubes bound for Iraq. Her front page story quoted unnamed "American officials" and "American intelligence experts" who said the tubes were intended to be used to enrich nuclear material, and cited unnamed "Bush administration officials" who claimed that in recent months, Iraq had "stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons and has embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb."
Miller added that "Mr. Hussein's dogged insistence on pursuing his nuclear ambitions, along with what defectors described in interviews as Iraq's push to improve and expand Baghdad's chemical and biological arsenals, have brought Iraq and the United States to the brink of war."
Echos of Greeley's ON TO RICHMOND?
Shortly after Miller's article was published, Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld all appeared on television and pointed to Miller's story as a partial basis for going to war. Subsequent analyses by various agencies all concluded that there was no way the tubes could have been used for uranium-enrichment centrifuges. More insidious than a government starting up a newspaper to report on its own doings, a report that originated from the government was handed off to a reporter and then used as evidence for the government's actions.
The TImes case also shows how the newpsapers while beat to the news by television, still have some of the sway over Americna thought that the newspapers of colonial and civil war days. The information being in the New York Times over any other newspaper was key, as the paper had a reputation of not being warm to the Bush Administration.
Miller has also been characterized as a possible co-conspirator with the Bush Administration in the attempt to discredit former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, who openly questioned the intelligence used to justify the 2003 Invasion of Iraq. Though she did not report on Wilson, she was given information about Wilson's wife's identity as a CIA agent by Dick Cheney's chief of staff, the now convicted Scooter Libby.
In the days since Miller's release from prison and her waiver from a promise of confidentiality from her source, media observers have criticized Miller and the New York Times for not publishing her role in the Plame-Wilson leak, not even to explain why the full story can not now be revealed. The lawyer for Scooter Libby told the media that Miller was advised over a year ago that she could testify about her conversations with Libby. One columnist has reported that Miller has a pending million dollar book deal on the Plame leak story.
Miller's role in that saga may or not be revealed in upcoming trials. What is clear is that Judith Miller traded in objectivity for access. For access to exclusive newsmakers, she presented the administration's side of the news and ignored contrasting viewpoints. And while it doesn't seem comparable to the situation of Jefferson or Andrew Jackson who actually loaned money to or employeed journalists, in a modern day era where scoops and deadlines are everything, and where journalists can make a name and a multi-million dollar fortune from appearances and selling books, in today's media access to government leaders can be interepreted as another form of cash, more than ever before.
From Horace Greeley to Judith Miller, the objectivity we assign to the media may be a fiction of our own imaginations. Most media don't make their lack of objectivity easy, as Greeley did, and few would call a President a heathen or a scoundrel like early American papers did. But invariably with all medias there are biases.. As did citizens of old, Americans must sample from a wide variety of sources to get the truth. Increasingly, blogs which can hold articles up to scrutiny are playing a role. And with the internet, Americans have as many media choices as they did in the 19th century to compare and contrast viewpoints. But as with so many political developments today, we shouldn't think that we are standing at the end of all time and that the lack of objectivity in American media is a new problem.