We the People, We the Press
A Society Under Great Strain Needs Robust, Unfettered Journalism More Than Ever

By William Kennedy
First published: Sunday, May 23, 2004, in the Albany Times Union.

This article is adapted from an address author and Pulitzer Prize-winner William Kennedy delivered May 15 at the graduate school commencement at the University at Albany.

I remember coming to the university a few days after the 9/11 disaster when hostility to the Muslim world was white hot, and in front of me a pickup truck had a bumper sticker that read, “Nuke 'em All and Let Allah Sort It Out.'”

When war fever is running high, the zeal for justice is superseded by the zeal for vengeance, and the consequence is invariably a descent into excess. This is predictable human behavior—fear, hatred and dehumanizing the enemy. We saw it last month when Iraqi militants mutilated, desecrated and burned the corpses of American workers. We have been seeing it for the past week in the photos of our own troops zealously torturing Iraqi prisoners. And we saw it in what may have been Al-Qaeda's reaction to the torture—the decapitation of an American civilian worker on video—prime-time vengeance.

We are a people against whom a great crime was committed on 9/11, and we are trying to find and punish our enemies who committed that crime. Because we were surprised by 9/11, no politician will be optimistic about preventing future attacks, and we hear frequently from Homeland Security that there probably will be another attack, perhaps a worse one. Gen. Tommy Franks, who commanded the U.S. invasion of Iraq, has said that if terrorists with a weapon of mass destruction do attack the U.S.—or anyplace in the western world—the Constitution will probably be superseded by a military government, a frightening prospect that would end democracy as we know it.

Even now there is deep concern that the Patriot Act, which Congress passed six weeks after 9/11 to intercept terrorism, gave too much leeway to federal investigators over immigration and surveillance. Ninety-five percent of the nation's experts on criminal justice think the Patriot Act passed too quickly, and 74 percent think it violates individual rights. One provision of it lets the FBI order an individual's personal records from libraries, hospitals and universities, and the librarians will be jailed if they refuse, or if they notify the individual who is the target of the request.

Some provisions of the act expire next year, and civil libertarians, librarians, booksellers and members of Congress are poised with amendments to rein in some of the controls that encroach on our constitutional rights. Some 300-plus U.S. cities and counties, including the city of Albany, have passed resolutions about their concern over civil liberties in regard to the Patriot Act. President Bush is campaigning to keep the Patriot Act exactly the way it is, and his administration is also preparing amendments to even extend its reach.

The press is also under stress in this new world. Secrecy is pervasive throughout the Bush administration. Files that were declassified long ago under the Freedom of Information Act have been reclassified as secret. John Dean, counsel to Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal, when secrecy in Washington proliferated like cherry blossoms, considers the Bush administration the most secret in modern history. Bill Moyers, the TV journalist and filmmaker who was a keeper of presidential secrets as press secretary to Lyndon Johnson, said on radio that the success of President Bush's secrecy policy has negated the Freedom of Information Act that was created during Johnson's presidency; and Moyers added: “We are now living in a closed society.” That's the first time I ever heard anyone say that about this nation.

The press is now polarized in patterns that mirror the nation's political life. Harsh media critics of the President can be damned as anti-patriotic enemies. Rightist commentator Ann Coulter actually accuses all Democrats and liberals of treason—of being terrorists who hate democracy. Treason is the title of her book.

Al Franken, a comic personality and writer on the left, wrote a wildly satiric book, attacking Coulter and others of the right, and titled it Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them. Both Coulter's and Franken's books became bestsellers. This is the political clown show; but at the level of serious discourse there is equivalent polarity, with heavy pressures on the press to suppress bad news.

The head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff persuaded CBS' “60 Minutes 2'” to withhold, for two weeks, the photos of the torture of Iraqi prisoners. Word then came that The New Yorker was publishing Seymour Hersh's report on the photos, and CBS exploded the story of America's shame world-wide, and it is now being called the story that lost the war. Hersh is a major investigative journalist of high seriousness, who personifies what H.L. Mencken, the great newsman and social critic of the 1920s and '30s, said was the proper stance for a journalist: to be querulous and bellicose. Press coverage of the outrageous acts of torture generated national outrage; but also, predictably, from administration loyalists by the end of the week, came “outrage at the outrage,” and the press quickly became the enemy for carrying the message.

When Ted Koppel on ABC's “Nightline” televised the names and photos of 721 members of the American military killed in Iraq, Sinclair Broadcast Group of Baltimore, which owns 62 television stations, blacked out the show on all six of the ABC-TV stations it owns. Sinclair had sent camera crews to Iraq to report not on negative facts, such as death, but to focus on the good news out of the war. This is a sweet gesture but truly fatuous. No news may be good news but good news is no news.

Television is at or near the bottom of a long slide into soft news of sex and celebrity journalism—the O.J. Simpson trial, Michael Jackson's problem, J-Lo's split with Ben Affleck, Gary Condit and his dead girlfriend—which represent a triumph of triviality over substance.

The news the world demands, whether it likes it or not, is disaster, mortal conflict, politics, death and the other dark developments that rightfully monopolize our front pages. And the war and its dead are pre-eminent. Do you remember how many times we recounted the 9/11 victims?

The body count in Iraq, as the resistance grows, has magnified the anti-war rhetoric, even from the political right. William Buckley wrote that Iraq's readiness for democracy was misjudged. Three-time conservative presidential candidate Pat Buchanan wrote, “How much blood and treasure are we willing to invest in democracy in Baghdad and for how long?” An essay in Buchanan's magazine, the American Conservative, called for complete withdrawal of our troops by the end of this year.

Even the military offered its own downbeat assessment: The commanding general of the 82nd Airborne Division said this week that we may be winning battles at the tactical level but strategically we're losing the war.

I worked as a journalist even after I became a novelist. I think it's impossible to overrate the importance of the press to a free society, and then I consider a recent statistic—that 25 percent of the age group to which students graduating here today belong, do not pay much attention to the press, which is deeply depressing, and dangerous. The press can be trivial, yes, and it's not always trustworthy, as we know from recent scandals over reporters faking stories and getting away with it for years. But despite fakery, plagiarism, distortion, lies, government secrecy and media stupidity, there is an ongoing communal drive in the American media—print-press and broadcast—to ferret out the truth. This is the single most valuable thing we can do to preserve a free society—protect the right to know what's going on in our world—argue for it, insist upon it, work for it.

This nation was built on a system of challenges—to the president, to the Congress, to the courts—always a pitched battle among adversaries; and the press has been a parallel gladiator through our history in the struggle for abolition, for women's suffrage, in the McCarthy era, the Vietnam War and during Watergate. The press's adversarial role with the Bush White House only extends the tradition, though the White House has a different view.

Ken Auletta, who writes about politics for The New Yorker, quotes Bush's chief of staff, Andrew Card, on the press: “They don't represent the public any more than other people do. In our democracy, the people who represent the public stood for election...I don't believe you have a check-and-balance function.”

But the press is those “other people;” the press is all the people, including those who stand for election. How else do candidates become visible except through the press? And that check-and-balance function is central to a democracy. No checks and balances by the press ever existed in the Soviet Union, or in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. And the consequence was the tyrannical victory of silence and secrecy.

There is a great discontent abroad in this country, and many people, including me, want to find a way out of the war. How? What can we do? What can I do?

There is a feeling also that the upcoming presidential election will be the most important of our lifetime. The discontent runs deep. Are we moving, perhaps willfully and with great hubris, toward our own decline and fall? Never before have I been forced to envision America as a finite society. Right now I still trust our future to behave itself, but only if I can trust the press to do the same, and to fend off any enemy who wants to suppress or diminish my voice, our voices.

We said this purposefully a long time ago: “We the people ...”