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Until last year, I was the news editor at a midsized daily newspaper, a paper owned by one of the larger newspaper chains. I was the news editor at this paper when Bush* took office, and I stayed there through 9/11, the runup to war, and the war. I, too, would like to see heads roll over what the media did in that time, but it's not that easy.
Day after day, I'd see the crap coming across the wires, and I'd have to decide whether to put it in the paper, and if so, where to play it and what headline to put on it. Every time, without fail, if there was anything on the wire that supported the Bush* administration and we did not run it prominently and "favorably," the very next day, we would get a stream of phone calls from angered conservatives who railed on and on about the "liberal media." These calls, not surprisingly, registered in the offices of our senior editors ("news editor" is not a "senior editor," by the way), and those editors -- who feared for their own jobs if they pissed off readers and lost circulaton -- insisted that we present the news in a way that was favorable to the administration's position.
Indeed, after the first few days of the Iraq invasion, our corporate offices put out an advisory that their "research" was showing that readers were "tired" of news from Iraq, and that we needed to switch back to local news, quickly, relegating nearly all Iraq news to tiny spaces inside the paper.
Nonetheless, I was able to get stories into the paper that were appropriately skeptical. Those stories appeared periodically, and the Washington Post has already atoned for their repeated sin of burying such stories on Page A17 and beyond when they came up. That caused no end of pain at my paper, when senior editors would see the next day that stories I had placed on the front page were buried inside the Post. We were showing inappropriate bias against the administration, they argued -- after all, if it's not important to the Post, why should it be important to us?
A year after the invasion (oh yes, we steadfastly refused to call it "war" for as long as we could; it was an "attack," not a "war), the nonstop drumbeat of pressure from senior editors -- caused mostly by the nonstop drumbeat of pressure from readers -- I finally decided that my stress level was getting way too high, and I had to bail.
I'm still in newspapers, but I'm not on the hard-news side, at least for now. But I have three years of front pages on PDFs sitting here on CDs. When the day comes -- and I know it will -- I will be able to show that I did not fall for this administration's bullshit. And with that, I hope to someday work in real news again, when journalism in the United States is once again allowed to be journalism.
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