Taking the Lapdog Press to Task on Foreign Policy Reporting
2023-02-27 · Guest: Ted Galen Carpenter (Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute) · 52:46
Media subservience to government foreign policy narratives
Bob Zadek interviews Ted Galen Carpenter about his book Unreliable Watchdog, which critiques the American press for its subservience to government foreign policy narratives. They discuss the transition of the media from an independent watchdog to a “lapdog” that simplifies complex global conflicts into moralistic melodramas while collaborating with federal agencies.
Topics: Foreign Policy, Freedom of the Press, First Amendment, Espionage Act, Media Ethics, Government Propaganda, National Security State
Speakers:
- Bob Zadek: Host
- Ted Galen Carpenter: Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute and author of Unreliable Watchdog
Introduction [00:00]
Bob Zadek: Hello friends, I’m Bob Zadek, host of the country’s longest-running libertarian broadcast, nationally streamed at 8:00 AM Pacific Sundays on the 860 AM app. The archives of my Bob Zadek Show podcast hold 15 years of major discussion and is the ideal resource to revisit our country’s prior missteps since so many seem to reappear. I promise you in-depth content on social, political, and economic issues that really matter. Always with the ideal guest, accessible and entertaining. Our standard: ideas, not attitude; information, not talking points.
Today’s guest, Ted Galen Carpenter, exceeds those standards. Ted is a senior fellow in defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute and has written 13 books and more than 1,100 articles on international affairs. He’s a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Strategic Studies. Of particular relevance to today’s show, he has just written Unreliable Watchdog, a book which draws our attention to the empty promise of freedom of the press which is embodied in the First Amendment to the Bill of Rights. Our founders could not have imagined that such freedom would be squandered by such a large segment of the press so as to become little more than an unquestioning and gullible mouthpiece for the political establishment. Ted, welcome to the show. And before we proceed, was my opening unfair and too harsh, or does it set the right tone for today’s show?
Ted Galen Carpenter: It very much sets the right tone, Bob, and thank you for having me on your show. I chose the title of the book, Unreliable Watchdog: The News Media and U.S. Foreign Policy, quite deliberately because I truly believe that the press is supposed to be the public’s watchdog with regard to public policy. And when officials, elected or appointed, engage in misconduct—even if they’re not outright crimes, just unethical behavior—the watchdog needs to call the public’s attention to that.
And a more subtle but equally important mission is that if you have incompetent policies—officials may mean well, but if the policies they’re adopting damage the American people, damage the United States—then they need to be calling the public’s attention to that as well. And unfortunately, the track record’s not very good and it’s getting worse. There are two things that they’re doing that to me are especially problematic. One is, as you’ve suggested, they too often, instead of being investigators, independent journalists, they’re stenographers who just write down official government propaganda and maybe rephrase it and circulate it as supposed news stories. The other, with respect to foreign policy, is they repeatedly compare complex world events to very simplistic melodramas. And we have horrible villains on one side and angelic advocates of freedom on the other. The first ones are always the party that the United States government doesn’t like, is opposing, and on the other side, the angels are always the factions the U.S. government is supporting, even though those angels may have tarnished halos or no halos at all. So those two are the problems, the twin diseases of the news media.
The “Supposed” Duty of the Press [04:15]
Bob Zadek: Now, you said in your introductory comments that they are “supposed to be,” I think that’s the phrase you used, and then you went on to explain the ideal for the freedom of the press. I think you used the phrase “watchdogs,” and we have expectations for them. Now, when you say “supposed to be,” where does the “supposed to” come from? Who said that’s what they’re supposed to be? And Ted, before you—I’m not picking a fight because I’m teeing up an issue I want to discuss—but before you answer, let’s remember that going back to the founding era, the press was understood to have taken sides. Thomas Jefferson had his guys, and Adams had his guys, and everybody knew when you picked up one broadsheet or one newspaper, this was a Jefferson newspaper, and you expected to read praiseworthy comments about Jefferson. And the same was true with the Adams faction. So both the founders themselves and the public, which is the audience for the media, didn’t have the expectations that you said a second ago they were supposed to have. Where do you find the beginnings of that duty?
Ted Galen Carpenter: I think the expectations were there, but they were very partisan in nature. As you’ve pointed out, the Jeffersonian newspapers and pamphlets had no trouble going after Adams and the Federalists and vice versa. What has happened in the intervening decades, though, is that the news media as a whole have become very much an adjunct of the government. You don’t have that much in the way of an opposition, and especially in recent times with respect to foreign policy and national security, it’s very much a bipartisan dominant narrative that’s rarely challenged. And journalists who do challenge that narrative find themselves in a lot of trouble, being not only shunned by colleagues but being harassed by the same government agencies that they have been monitoring. So that’s the danger: the shift into total collusion regardless of which party controlled the White House at any given time.
Bob Zadek: Was there ever a “Golden Age”? I want to, as we have our conversation this hour, it might be helpful if the audience could be reminded of when things were—I’ll use the word, the simplistic word—better. Has the press deteriorated from some lofty standard in the good old days? When I went back in preparing for this show, I tried to, without doing research, think back to our founding. Going back from our founding to the present: the Civil War, World War I, Vietnam War, Spanish-American War—and I’m picking foreign policy events because that’s where you bring great expertise. And I couldn’t put my finger on, as far as freedom of the press goes or objectivity, I couldn’t find any “good old days.” So can you give us a good old day or a good old month so we have a starting point to measure that against today?
Ted Galen Carpenter: Well, we’ve gone through periods where there have been dueling narratives, if you will, which is, I guess, the same as dueling biases. I’m not one who subscribes to some idealistic notion of a totally objective press. I don’t think that’s ever existed. But what we’ve seen, coincidentally as America began to emerge as a global empire, is that the press has become ever more subservient to government agencies, government leaders, who push that agenda. So matters have gotten considerably worse.
Now, we’ve had a few interludes. I pointed to one in the book: the 1970s and the 1980s, where people in the journalistic community were disillusioned by the fact that they had been flat-out lied to by government officials regarding the Vietnam War. And when that war turned to be a total failure, all that skepticism carried over onto other issues. And as in the early days of the republic, there was a pretty partisan aspect to that. The Democrats, liberals, were much more likely to criticize the Reagan administration and its policies in places like Central America. The Republicans were more inclined to defend him. But still, there were hard questions being asked, there were matters being debated. With the advent of the Persian Gulf War, that process came to an end. We kind of reverted to what we were in the two world wars and the early Cold War, where journalists regarded themselves as part of the government apparatus. They were patriots, these were patriotic policies, you don’t question patriotic policies.
The Reach of Groupthink [07:30]
Bob Zadek: When we talk about freedom of the press, because that’s going to be our topic with an emphasis and a focus on foreign affairs, but when we talk about press, the word “press” combined with other concepts such as “mainstream media,” we all sort of know what that means. When we talk about the press, my own observation, just mine, is that “press” captures everything from The New York Times and CNN to a blogger blogging on foreign affairs. Other than the number of eyeballs and ears whose attention that blogger gets, isn’t that blogger “the press”? And therefore, should we—would it be helpful if we narrowed our focus, if appropriate, to what is commonly called “mainstream media”? Or is your commentary—does your commentary apply to a broader group of the press than that? Let’s just define our terms so our audience can follow along as we have our conversation.
Ted Galen Carpenter: Well, again, that’s changed over time. Back in the early decades of the republic, “the press” meant pamphlets and newspapers. That’s about it. Magazines began to become another element. And then in our own time, radio and television joined with the print medium. And most recently, you get the blogs, you get the internet, you get the social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Well, today those definitely are part of the press. The reach, however, is still pretty much dominated by the large-scale entities in newspapers and television. That’s where the dominant influence takes place in terms of effects on policies. A blogger may have a dedicated audience, but it may well number in the thousands or tens of thousands at most. Something like CNN and The New York Times and others reach millions. And so there’s a difference in scale yet. But we have to look at the full range within the news media, within the press. And what I found is that the entities with the greatest influence all tend to have groupthink. They pretty much think alike, they pretty much see the world the same way, and they’re seeing it in the same way that government officials see it. It’s rare that you get meaningful dissent.
The Business of Media and Government Collusion [09:15]
Bob Zadek: In the beginning of the show, I pointed out that you use the phrase or the word “supposed to,” in that the media is “supposed to be.” Now, media is, at its core, for the most part, a business, like any other business in America. And all businesses in America have only a duty to obey the law. That’s the duty which we can find in our governmental system. Since we are born with the understanding that the press is special—they have a duty, a public service if you will, that Amazon or Microsoft doesn’t have, they only have a duty to obey the law and if they don’t, they’ll be punished—is the media afforded any special benefits under our system of laws that in exchange for their duty to behave in a different way? Or are we just assigning to one group of businesses a duty that we’re not assigning to other groups of businesses?
Ted Galen Carpenter: Well, in this case, of course, it’s a self-proclaimed duty. Journalists insist that that’s their job: to be watching the policymakers, to be reporting to the public, to be watching out for whatever they define as the public interest. Well, if that is your self-declared mission, then I think it’s entirely proper to judge whether the performance has been up to that declared standard. And my conclusion was it doesn’t even come close when it comes to defense and foreign policy and international issues.
And given the kind of simplistic propaganda that dominates the airwaves, dominates the news pages, dominates social media in our own era, I think it’s failed that self-proclaimed mission rather spectacularly. So what you’re saying is the media starts with this aura of authority, which we are just as American citizens—it’s ingrained in us. We expect the media to behave in the gauzy-eyed view of the founders embodied in the First Amendment, embodied in just our way of life. We, the press, is after all the “Fourth Estate,” if you will. Almost royalty, the word “estate” presupposes royalty. The press is special. And I think what you are saying is, if you in your occupation choose to enjoy the benefits of this status we are giving you because of the profession you have chosen, you are abusing that status, you are diluting it, you are ruining it, if you will, by not behaving in a way that we would have assumed you behaved if you want to call yourself a journalist. Is that a reasonable starting point for today’s conversation as we examine who is doing what wrong and how do we measure the improper behavior of the press writ large?
Ted Galen Carpenter: Especially when the press proclaims itself as being essential to a free society, that it is the institution that prevents huge abuses of power, prevents the emergence of a dictatorial regime. It’s kind of hard to do if you are constantly allies and obedient servants of government institutions that are acquiring ever more power, engaging in ever more secret behavior, and ever more abuse of basic civil liberties. And that to me is what the press failure has been most notably with foreign policy and national security issues, but hardly confined to those two.
The Velvet Glove and the Iron Fist [12:15]
Bob Zadek: In your book, you mention, you give many examples of where the press abdicated their responsibility. Go back over some of the many examples you have given in your book so the audience has a tangible, clear example of the type of behavior that prompted you to write your book. Just so the audience has something to focus on, tell us a story, if you will, of the press misbehaving by your standard.
Ted Galen Carpenter: One example was uncovered by the Senate Investigative Committee in the 1970s led by Senator Frank Church. One of the things it discovered is that over 250 prominent journalists in the United States were on the payroll of the Central Intelligence Agency. Not just that they were sympathetic to that agency, not just that they cooperated with that agency; they were paid shills of that agency. And that’s a lot of journalists, many of whom were some of the most prominent journalists in the United States and the world at that time. So to me, that is a complete dereliction of duty.
You’ve got the developments in the early 1990s with the Persian Gulf War, where the press just totally repeated government propaganda about trying to portray Iraq’s Saddam Hussein in the most vile terms. The man was pretty vile, I’m not going to dispute that. But they had stories about Iraqi troops pulling infants out of incubators in Kuwait. Total lie. And yet the U.S. government had endorsed it, and that was enough for most of the main publications.
The stories about leading up to the Iraq War: how Iraq was involved in 9/11, how Iraq had weapons of mass destruction—both of which were absolute lies. And yet the news media happily repeated them. We have seen other examples more recently, where the Nord Stream pipeline right now, I think, is probably a perfect example of that, where the government of the United States sold the story that this was done by Russia, the bombing of the Nord Stream pipelines. And media never bothered to ask any meaningful questions. For example, why would Russia do this, damage its own infrastructure, when it would lose revenue doing that? And if it really wanted to shut off the gas flow to Europe, it simply turned the valve closed on its own end of the pipeline. Why go through the bother of bombing the pipeline? You had another suspect that should have been the prime suspect: that was the United States. The United States leaders opposed the building of any natural gas pipelines from Russia to Western Europe from the very beginning, the 1980s. They tried to pressure Germany to back out of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline arrangement just months before the Ukraine war began. And the United States, along with Norway and the United Kingdom, Great Britain, would be alternative suppliers of natural gas once the pipelines went down. Now, how is that not just circulating government propaganda instead of doing their job, really investigating, questioning official assertions, and exposing deception when they encounter it? They have not done that. Most of the participants in the business of media, in the business of information, are for-profit corporations who are given money by their shareholders for the sole purpose of providing a return that’s acceptable. And of course, there are exceptions, but for the most part, the media is occupied by for-profit businesses.
Bob Zadek: How do you motivate—here you have the media, the targets of your unhappiness in your book—what’s the incentive for them to spend time performing a public service if they determined, “Yes, that would make us patriots, if you will, but it wouldn’t make any money”? And the old saw in the media, “If it bleeds, it leads.” Let’s do the salacious stuff because that’s what we are hired to do. So how exactly do you—and you, of course, I will presume, we have never discussed it, but I’ll make an assumption, you, of course, with the deepest parts of your heart and mind support free enterprise, support our economic system—so what do you say to somebody who says, “This is an example of the system working. Media executives are not hired to have a strong, powerful soul and patriotism, but to produce return for their shareholders”? How does the media who is listening to the show say to you, or when they say to themselves, “Hey Ted, we will get fired if we do what you do because we are allocating resources to the public good, which we agree is a public good, but it doesn’t produce revenue”? How do you balance the two? I get stuck with that. I support everything you said, and then for myself—it may sound like a confession—I get stuck with that issue, whether I feel like a scold towards the head of mainstream media or whether I understand it and I’m torn.
Ted Galen Carpenter: We’ve gone through a number of cycles, and the profitability of media outlets has varied a lot. The old school, the newspapers and everything, it’s very hard for them to make any kind of meaningful profit unless they’re in a national chain and they’re able to generate enough sales that way to get a profit. There you tend to get the bland sameness of the messages in the media. The shift to political bias, though, was not just political and ideological bias, not just a matter of pursuit of profit. In fact, in some cases, it seemed to be going on that path despite the erosion of profits. I think we’re now finding some who are so tired of the dominant narrative and see a financial opportunity. I think that was Elon Musk’s motive in acquiring Twitter. He was offended both by the authoritarian political correctness that dominated that corporation like many of its other competitors, and he saw a way of creating a new niche and making a good profit off of that. Now, we’ll see if his calculation is correct.
There’s one other factor that we have to take into account, though. Again, these are not just private entities. That’s been one of the biggest changes too. Many of them are getting subsidies from government, they’re getting inputs from government, they’re also getting threats from government if they don’t cooperate. Just one example with Twitter: the U.S. government, specifically the Justice Department and the Central Intelligence Agency, were paying $3.4 million a year to Twitter just so they could meet with Twitter officials and push to exclude certain individuals, certain points of view. Now, that’s a corruption. That is not a private entity acting purely as a private entity anymore. That’s a collusion that is very dangerous.
Advice for the Diligent Citizen [15:00]
Bob Zadek: I was so much hoping you would take my question and go in the exact direction that you went, because I think that one of the important policy issues that result from the dynamic you highlight in your book is: is the media reacting to what might be intense governmental pressure, misconduct, and the like? And we’re going to come right back to Twitter and the FBI in a moment, and also the Centers for Disease Control and Twitter and the like. In the conversion, if you will, or the dilution of the press as the Fourth Estate, as a watchdog, there is—you have to have in the conversation, I think, whether or not that is the reaction to government using its power to sort of force them in that direction or provide either incentives or vague threats, guidances. So help us understand—we’ve been talking so far and demonizing, not unfairly, the press, but let’s change our focus because the result is the same. Let’s change our focus to the role of government and various statutes—we may be discussing the Espionage Act of 1917—various statutes and the guidances and the subtle behavior of the government in influencing the independence of the press. You mention that in your book quite a bit, and the audience would benefit from your sharing your knowledge of that.
Ted Galen Carpenter: In an earlier book that I wrote on this topic, A Captive Press: Foreign Policy Crises and the First Amendment, back in 1995, I described the government’s two favorite tactics as the “velvet glove” and the “iron fist.” And things like threatening journalists under the Espionage Act, that’s obviously the iron fist. The velvet glove is more subtle and to me a more insidious and equally dangerous tactic. And that is making it very clear to press outlets that things will go much better for you if you cooperate with us. You want juicy stories that benefit our agenda? Well, we’ll give them to you if you cooperate, if you do other things that we want. We will provide contracts for independent analysts, we’ll pay them, you don’t have to pay them to come on your show and comment even though they’re big names. We’ll pay them, and they can be portrayed yet as independent analysts even though they’re taking all sorts of financial goodies from the government. If you are recalcitrant, you can forget about those exclusive stories that you need to generate readers and listeners and eyeballs. If you don’t cooperate with us, if you tolerate the presence of a maverick journalist, some iconoclast that embarrasses us, well, our cooperative relationship is just not going to go very well.
Throughout the COVID pandemic, the White House justified its input with various news media to silence “disinformation”—one of the most dishonest labels ever created—by saying that “we were just making suggestions to these media outlets.” I commented on that. I said that a government agency making a suggestion to a news media outlet is very much like Michael Corleone or Tony Soprano making a suggestion. It’s not a suggestion. There is an inherent menace behind it. The government knows that that is a menacing tone, and they know that that usually is enough to intimidate any journalists that are inclined to resist the government’s message. Most of them you don’t even have to make a suggestion. They’re willing ideological prostitutes and they’ll be quite happy to play the game. But the ones who resist, there are ways to bring them to heel, and the government uses all of those means.
Bob Zadek: On the word “suggestion” that Ted used—of course, it’s radio so you didn’t see the air quotes when Ted used the word “suggestion”—my listeners will recall a show I did oh, maybe three or four weeks ago, when we discussed education policy at higher education, and I reminded the audience about this famous 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter, which was a guidance from the Department of Education dealing with Title IX and sexual harassment on campus. And the Department of Education said with feigned wide-eyed ignorance, “What are you talking about? We just gave a suggestion.” Well, the suggestion is, when coming from the government, especially an agency that dispenses goodies—and that may describe every agency, pretty much—so they dispense goodies, and when they say, “We have a thought, we can’t direct you to do something, but we’d be 10% happier if you did the following,” that’s a message that everybody understands. It’s tantamount to the choice of “your money or your life.” Not quite a choice.
And this became evident and relevant to our discussion today—and Ted, this is a lead-in for you to supply the color commentary to my headline—we remember again picking social media broadly and Twitter specifically, we remember the CDC telling Twitter what the government believed to be information and disinformation and how unhappy the CDC would be if they published contrary commentary. And remember President Biden saying famously, “Twitter is killing people.” Remember that quote from Biden. So Ted, that’s an invitation to you to expand a bit on how government is a major contributor to the societal ills highlighted in your book about how the media is letting us down. And to some degree, I’m giving them a little bit of a fig leaf by saying it is mighty hard to behave in a WikiLeaks kind of way and just stand up to government irrespective of the consequences. So tell us a bit more about the tools that government uses to diminish the independence and objectivity of the media.
Ted Galen Carpenter: Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, can testify just what happens when you dare to embarrass the national security establishment. They hounded and hounded and hounded; they’re determined to put him in prison for the rest of his life for simply exposing a lot of their lies and outright misdeeds. To show you some of the tactics that government agencies use: a colleague and friend of mine, James Bovard, who’s a columnist for the New York Post among other places, also a columnist for USA Today. Well, Jim has managed to be a burr under the saddle of government bureaucrats for a long time, both on domestic and foreign policy, especially the latter. And a few years ago, he had published a piece that particularly infuriated officials in the administration. One of the top officials of the Justice Department called up Jim’s editor at USA Today and, again, didn’t order him to be fired, but strongly suggested that it would be in the USA Today’s best interest if they parted company with Mr. Bovard. Fortunately, his editor told the government official that he wasn’t about to be intimidated that way. But how many others have succumbed to that over the years, over the decades? I’d be willing to bet there are a lot of them. We’ve had quite a number of prominent journalists who have sort of faded from the scene after they started voicing strong criticisms of government policy, again, especially the policies of the national security agencies, the national security state. I don’t think that’s coincidental that so many of them have faded into obscurity or near obscurity. I would be willing to bet most of those episodes followed input, suggestions from the government.
One of the most prominent examples that I can recall: during the Obama administration, there was a newscaster on Fox, I believe, who was threatened by Obama’s then-Attorney General, I think for violation—it might have even been the Espionage Act, I’m not certain of that—but there was a very public speculation about whether or not this reporter, in merely performing at the high level—not that I’m singling out Fox, it happened to be Fox, this is not about Fox, this is about governmental behavior—but as I recall, there was a public discussion by the Attorney General about maybe this reporter ought to be indicted or a grand jury. Am I recalling that correctly, and is that yet another example of the point you’re trying to make?
Ted Galen Carpenter: Yes, as a matter of fact, the brief filed by the Obama administration named that individual, named another reporter from a different outlet, and said that the government felt that the law would allow them to prosecute these journalists as being accessories to violations of the Espionage Act. They chose not to do that, like they were doing the journalists a big favor, but they reserved the right to do it. Again, that’s inherently menacing and it’s designed to be. That’s how you silence critics. “Gee, criticize us and you might spend a good many years in federal prison.” They’ve done the same thing to whistleblowers within the agencies that have leaked information to the press. Now, if you are leaking authorized high-level information from the leaders of these national security bureaucracies, oh, that’s fine. They’re happy with that. You don’t have to worry about a thing about being prosecuted. But if you’re a whistleblower or if you’re a journalist who’s utilizing information from whistleblowers, you are taking quite a risk and it’s a growing risk. They are becoming more and more serious about prosecuting journalists and others for that offense.
The Dangers of Patriotic Propaganda [16:45]
Bob Zadek: I like to help our audience, when they give us an hour of their time, pick up along the way advice, suggestions, how they can behave better in society—not their own behavior, how they can function better in their civic role. What should they do differently? Not how they should vote necessarily, but how they behave differently, what they look for. And it seems to me that one of the takeaways that I get, both from your book and from our time together, is that there is a warning label: just because an activity is labeled as “journalism” should no longer be given any imprimatur that they are a public information authority figure. That when we need a professional—a lawyer, a doctor, an architect, or the like—we don’t just ask somebody, “Are you a doctor? Oh, you are? Okay, I will follow your advice.” You do some investigation and you make a judgment: who is the most qualified to give me what I want, to satisfy my need? In this case, being somebody who is active in civic life, the need is to exercise your rights in the most informed way. Therefore, don’t just take information from the loudest voice or the one that’s most convenient. Use the same care in selecting your source of information about what’s going on in foreign policy as you do in information about your legal rights or your healthcare. And I think, Ted, you are reminding people: don’t just assume that if something is “the press,” therefore they are for that fact alone to be believed. That there is so much going on to impair the quality of the product that you have to look deeper and you can’t just take the lazy way out, turn on any old channel or pick up any old blog, and because it’s there, that must be the truth. So I think, Ted, you are giving the audience—or inviting them to view the providers of information with the appropriate skepticism. It can be a starting point on what’s going on, but not an ending point.
Ted Galen Carpenter: Yeah, I would agree that just like doctors, journalists range a lot in terms of quality of their work. And I would urge people: have good memories. If a certain journalist has been saying something about a variety of issues, does that person have a good track record of being accurate? Do things turn out the way he or she has predicted? Does the analysis hold up, or does it look like it’s fiction or at least misleading? Also, be suspicious when you have an overwhelming consensus in the news media about a certain position. More often than not, that ends up being the wrong position, not the right. Conventional wisdom very often is not correct. And especially if they’re embracing the latest government crusade, domestic or foreign, be doubly suspicious that the journalist in question is being used as a propaganda agent, not as an independent monitor. So that kind of skepticism, it requires some work. You actually have to follow and determine: what’s the track record of this individual, and are there ulterior motives coming into play? But it helps if you’re going to be a diligent citizen, you pretty much need to do that.
Bob Zadek: I found myself, in preparing for this show, I found myself thinking back to a part of our recent history that doesn’t appear to have much to do with today’s topic, but it really does. There has been a fair amount written and some entertaining documentaries about the role of Hollywood during World War II. Hollywood was committed to produce one after the other of patriotic movies supporting our troops and our point of view in World War II. Demonizing the Japanese, demonizing the Germans. Now, in terms of foreign policy, appropriately. But there was Hollywood producing entertainment or propaganda in the form of entertainment. And that was, as I think back, I find nothing wrong with it. I don’t think Hollywood was deceitful. I have no problem with it. And part of the ills, the misbehavior that you’re pointing out, is media being supportive of the government. What about those who say, “Well, my goodness, isn’t that patriotic?” Or as the entertainment, as Hollywood was during World War II, they were patriotic on steroids. That was a good thing. Anything they can do to support the purchase of war bonds and motivating people to sacrifice was a good thing. It helped us. So help us analyze what you and I and many people find distressing—help us analyze that against the patriotism, if that’s the right label, of the entertainment media in World War II.
Ted Galen Carpenter: I’d be careful even about that precedent. A lot of the movies and other entertainment did not just demonize the Japanese government and the Nazi government in Germany. They demonized the people in those countries. That was not helpful. And it especially was not with respect to the Japanese, because that was one of the factors that justified the imprisonment of Japanese and Japanese-American citizens in concentration camps. So that’s how patriotism in the media can get out of hand. In terms of more recent times, it’s one thing to give the government the benefit of the doubt. “I’m an American, I will give the U.S. government the benefit of the doubt.” But not when episode after episode of misconduct, of lying, of atrocities—all of those things continue. I cannot, as a good citizen, continue to just look the other way, much less climb on board the supposedly patriotic bandwagon and support those efforts. What the United States did in Vietnam was wrong. What it did in Iraq in overthrowing a government and creating chaos was wrong. What it did in Libya, unleashing unbelievable chaos by getting rid of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, was wrong. Helping to empower Sunni Islamic extremists in Syria, again, against the government of Bashar al-Assad, as bad as Assad is, was wrong. And the ham-handed policies that the U.S. government created, including expanding NATO to Russia’s border, was a major trigger for the tragedy that we’re seeing in Ukraine. U.S. conduct was wrong, and it’s up to Americans and the news media to call out officials on that and not just be mindless lemmings and follow that leadership.
Repealing the Espionage Act [18:15]
Bob Zadek: Is there any statute or behavior in government that is so offensive to you contributing to the problem that you would wish a statute would be passed to do the following, a statute that does the following should be repealed? Is there anything that elected officials could do to make this conversion of the press into a propaganda machine—is there anything that can be done other than by a whole lot of citizens making independent decisions that over time will change?
Ted Galen Carpenter: Congress can and should repeal the Espionage Act of 1917.
Bob Zadek: Tell us what that act—we’ve referred to it—tell our audience, because believe it or not, Ted, there may be a few people out there who may not be able to recite the statute from memory. So fill us in on what the Espionage Act of 1917 is. It’s pretty gosh-darn offensive, so just explain it to our audience.
Ted Galen Carpenter: Yeah, and it’s a related statute, an update of that too, the 1918 Sedition Act. And essentially, it criminalizes any criticism of U.S. policy during a period of national emergency. The government can classify any document that it wishes, and if you disclose that document, you’re in violation of the Espionage Act. Over one billion documents have now been classified, including the luncheon menu at the Central Intelligence Agency. So when you have over a billion documents classified, that’s designed to conceal all government activity from media scrutiny, from public scrutiny. That thing needs to be repealed. It has been abused again and again and again. That’s one thing that needs to be done immediately.
I would like to see a Supreme Court decision explicitly overruling Korematsu v. United States. That was the decision that approved Franklin Roosevelt’s executive order imprisoning Japanese and Japanese-American citizens on the basis that they might pose a security threat on the West Coast states. Dishonest at the time, politically motivated, unnecessary, and a deep, deep offense to the liberties of the American people and setting a horrible, horrible precedent that could come back to haunt us at any time. Those two things.
Third thing: need to have Congress again get serious about if we go to war as a country, we need to follow the constitutional process. That means a declaration of war from Congress, an end to presidential wars. That’s absolutely essential.
Bob Zadek: And what’s interesting is there’s so little in the media that even scratches the surface of the level of discussion even in your very last sentence. Your last sentence was not a sentence taken out of a master’s level course in foreign policy. It was so obvious, but yet in the media, the media appeals—obviously because as I said earlier, it is a profit-making enterprise—but it appeals to the lowest level of consumer of their information, not the highest level. It converts media into an entertainment function appealing to emotion rather than an information function appealing to the mind. I guess in a manner of speaking, it is that classic conflict between the heart and the mind, first written about by Socrates and then somewhat more recently by Thomas Jefferson when he was in Paris. He talked about the battle, in this case involving a woman, between his heart and his mind, and his writings were well-circulated. So it’s that battle. And the media, which our founders felt it was the guardrail, it protected us—the media now has just become an appeal to emotion because there’s money in it, rather than providing information which is essential for our democracy.
And Ted, I’m going to ask you if you agree with Thomas Jefferson—this is going to be a hard question, and I’m going to read the quote from Thomas Jefferson in 1787: “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter, newspapers without government.” Do you come down with Jefferson? Would you rather have a government without newspapers or newspapers without government, or is that a choice between a rock and a hard place?
Ted Galen Carpenter: I guess I would modify that to say I would like to see a very vigorous and diversified press and the most limited government possible. And we tend to have the opposite at this point: a massive Leviathan government and a timid, obedient, and not particularly useful press. That’s a bad combination.
Bob Zadek: In your book, you offer a few additional suggestions, thoughts, you throw out ideas for the readership to consume. As we wind down and start to reach the closing moments of our show, what are the lessons our readers can expect to learn from your book when they read it?
Ted Galen Carpenter: I suspect most readers are going to be surprised at just how compliant the press has been over the decades and especially in recent decades. How slavish so many of the journalists have been to what the government wants in the way of policies. I suspect most Americans think that the press is this feisty operation that is not afraid to take on government, is not afraid to expose misdeeds. Unfortunately, I think they’d be surprised to learn from this book that that’s very much not the case most of the time. That the press tends to be the government’s little poodle, little watchdog—not the watchdog, the lapdog.
Bob Zadek: The First Amendment of the Constitution provides separately for free speech—“Congress shall pass no law,” paraphrasing, not quoting, “freedom of speech”—and then separately, “freedom of the press.” I’ve never quite understood, and was looking forward to having you on the show to ask you, whether there is a difference between free speech and freedom of the press. That is to say, if all the First Amendment gave us was “pass no law to impair free expression of ideas,” isn’t that sufficient to totally capture freedom of the press rather than picking a subpart of freedom of the speech and identifying it separately? Is there a difference between those two freedoms?
Ted Galen Carpenter: I don’t think there’s a meaningful difference. At the time the Constitution was created, there was a sense of a distinction. Freedom of speech is you send letters, you get up on a soapbox. The press was kind of in a separate category of newspapers and pamphlets that are widely circulated. To me, there’s not a meaningful difference, though. Freedom of the expression, especially of political ideas, of ideological positions—it’s the same thing no matter in what vehicle they are expressed, what mechanism. But almost on every front, things are getting worse in terms of the ability of the government to dominate the arena of ideas and to squelch anything that is inconvenient to their agenda.
Bob Zadek: And I would say I agree with you, Ted, 100% obviously. I would just add a tiny additional thought: the press, as I said, is a business for the most part, and it’s the only business that clawed its way into the Bill of Rights. And to earn that lofty role of being the only business in America that’s specifically identified as having special freedoms, that right given in the First Amendment has, as we learn in law school, all rights have correlative duties. If you have a right, a duty comes with it. And Ted, I would summarize the very powerful lessons of your book as being: “Okay, press, you have the rights. Now how about behaving with the duties you have as well?” And that’s the lesson that’s loud and clear in your book.
This is Bob Zadek. We’ve been speaking with Ted Galen Carpenter. Ted has just written a wonderful new book, Unreliable Watchdog, where Ted has a lot of lessons that he would like the press, the media, to follow in terms of honoring their duties to us ordinary folk. Ted is active at the Cato Institute where his writings can be found. Ted, I know your time is really valuable, and I so much appreciate your giving us an hour of that valuable time for myself and for our audience. And to my friends out there, I know that your time is equally valuable, and I sure appreciate your giving an hour of it to us and hope you have found it to be content-rich and worthwhile. So long to Ted Galen Carpenter and so long to my friends out there until next week. Thank you so much.