MGG Pillai Commentary View

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Bush is in trouble, as Nixon was 33 years ago, with journalists going in for the kill

PRESIDENT BUSH IS IN trouble. Mrs. Cindy Sheehan is to his politics what the National Guard killing undergraduates at Kent State University in 1970 was President Richard Nixon's. The Watergate scandal was the immediate cause of President Nixon's resignation. There is no way that the controversy over the CIA leak would go away soon, and could well force President Bush to resign. The actions of the two men are similar. President Nixon was on eight months into his second term when he abruptly resigned, the first president ever to do so, when it became clear he would be impeached. But he did what President Bush now does. He offered officials in his regime much as President Bush now does. The latest to go is "Scooter" Libby, chief of staff to Vice President Cheney. Karl Rove, who planned President Bush's election, is next. President Nixon had the man who secured him the presidency, John Haldeman, to the baying crowd, and eventually went to jail. President Nixon's Attorney General, John Mitchell, went to jail as the Watergate scandal touched the White House. But Congress went on regardless, and was all set to impeach President Nixon, when he abruptly resigned. The man who succeeded him as president was Mr Gerald Ford, the Republican leader of the House of Representatives, instead of Vice President Spiro Agnew, who resigned to save the president. What we see now is the President making sacrificial offerings to save his skin, but it would not save him. The Republicans, his party, are mired in scandals, and the conservative wing to which he anchored his politics are split whether to support him. More officials will be offered for public opprobrium as he tries to wriggle out of his predicament.

But it will be difficult. The journalists are up in arms. They have been fed lies lies during the Bush years. They had written favourable stories to justify the United States going to war in Iraq. They have found too late that the reasons for it are not there. There are no weapons of mass distruction and Saddam Hussein did not have a nuclear programme. No one in the main media questioned it; they were in fact cheerleaders for the invasion. Now these journalists are unstuck. And they are mad. The news coverage in the tail end of the Nixon presidency was helped by ubiquitous "Deep Throat"; the reporting now is dictated by the jailing of a New York reporter, Judith Miller. She deserved it for going along with all the Administration's lies. The Bush team allowed her to be jailed, when it became evident that the journalist who broke the CIA scandal got free because he made a deal. Now the journalists want to find out what other stories based on Administration briefings are false. From poodles, they have become barnyard dogs. Journalism schools will get a fillip, as it did after the Watergate scandal. But would it provide a government which does not tell the truth?

Journalism depends today on reporting facts. But facts, as you can see, is flawed. What are facts today is given the reporter by an official who could not be telling the truth. As the Bush imbroglio makes clear. When does the journalist trust his judgment and say the facts fed him are wrong? He does not for fear of other journalists, and Administration officials, attack him for lack of sources. We know, in Malaysia, it allows officials to do what they like. Journalism is to report what the government of the day wants it to report, and find creative ways to support it. But that is what do journalism schools teach these days. I did not go to a journalism school, as many of my ilk did not, and I insisted that my son who is a journalist took other than journalism at university. But education these days is becoming fractured because employers, at least in Malaysia and Singapore, will not employ a graduate who had a degree in other than the work he is applying for. A religious graduate in journalism is, to put it mildly, a pig in a poke. And since newspapers, in Malaysia certainly, are adjuncts of individual parties in the National Front, the reader is given a false picture of what happens in his country. They look to alternate information, in the Internet for those who can afford it, is universal.

In Malaysia, where almost all the sources of information is official, as it must be when putting out news that offends authority usually means the sack, people do not bother. One told me he buys the paper out of habit; another told me his wife gets it in school under a scheme to push the newspaper sales, and he reads only the advertisements, and depends on the Internet for news and views. So when a cabinet minister or civil servant is attacked, because those in government want him to, newspapers can be as critical of them as they like. It is so in Singapore too. There is no difference in newspapers in Malaysia, Singapore, Myanmar or Vietnam. Journalists the world over assume the press in Myanmar and Vietnam are not free, because of its politics, but the press is not free either in Malaysia and Singapore, as it is not free in London and the United States. When the Prime Minister of Malaysia makes a tour overseas, he takes with him a bevy of reporters. But then so does the president of the United States. It does not matter that one is paid for and the other is not. The intention is the same: to get favourable of the tour back home.

But reporters in the United States (and Great Britain) can act when they know they are fed untruths. They are mad at the deception, and they want to prove to the public that they are independent at a time when they are increasingly not. Gone are the days when rural newspapers are run independently; today, they are part of chains, with even editorials written in corporate offices and sent to all newspapers in the chain. They are worth holding if it makes more money than expected. But the journalists are conversely more agitated when officials feed them lies, as in the United States and Great Britain. Journalists will not have their copy published if it contains their feelings on the matter. In the editorial page, the columns can have their say, but it would mean nothing since the other pages are full of official news, written by reporters who depend on officials for news. And hovering over the journalists are their owners, corporations or, in Malaysia, political parties, to make sure the news is sanitized. I was asked by a politician in a rural state why the newspapers in Malaysia did not report it. The newspapers in Malaysia report only urban events where it mattered to the authority, now even in Sabah and Sarawak. I knew more about events in Kuala Lumpur when I travelled to Sabah and Sarawak.

These corporations in the United States go along with the journalists now in attacking the government for they need them to retain their "independence". President Bush is alone as his officials are attacked, for their wrongdoing and by the press, and he can do nothing about it. His own supporters follow the press, and even attack him. His administration makes mistakes, which the press in anger writes about. In the past, they did not for they were in bed together. The Watergate scandal was dismissed as a police story by reporters in the White House in much the way as Mrs Sheehan is dismissed now. The attack is more vicious now, because joining the reporters is their owner, a commercial corporation. The Emporia Gazette, in Kansas, was read eagerly in Washington in the 1930s, but it was owned by one man in a rural community, and official Washington read it, as the next best thing to find out what happened in the rural community. It is now part of a chain, and it carries the same editorial and columns as the urban paper in the chain. But would the removal of President Bush makes any difference? I do not think so. The corporations, and the journalists, having played their role in the "freedom of the Press", would go back to the role they play best: as handmaidens to authority and power. Things will not change in the United States just because a president resigns. Which he would once it is clear to him, as it was to Richard Nixon, that he would face an impeachment.

M.G.G. Pillai
pillai@streamyx.com