by Dan Rather
The war destabilized a region that was already unstable. In the intervening years, we have seen Iran rise in power, Syria descend into a horrific civil war, and ISIS and other terrorist groups emerge. The Iraq War cost roughly forty-five hundred American lives, with thousands more severely injured, not to mention those lives lost by our allies and the large numbers of Iraqis. Estimates put the financial cost to the United States at around $2 trillion. It is a troubling lesson about the dangers of unintended consequences. And the press played a part in turning a blind eye to the government policies that were responsible for the tragedy.
In wartime, the American people tend to give an administration a lot of latitude in waging the fight, and for good reason. Wars are difficult affairs, and it is easy to be an armchair general. It is not the role of the press to suggest military strategy or to actively undercut the commander in chief. Our job is merely to ask questions, and if the answers are unsatisfactory, it is our responsibility to follow up with more questions. However, in times of strong patriotic fervor, asking a question can be spun as unpatriotic. And the Bush administration, along with its allies in the conservative press, were not hesitant to hang a “bias” sign on those who were seen as confrontational or even skeptical of the story line the administration was putting out. It wasn’t overt, but there was a feeling that we shouldn’t be making too many waves. Were we really going to say that the administration was playing games with reports from the intelligence community? After all, it was plausible that Saddam Hussein did have weapons of mass destruction; he had used chemical weapons in the past. Were we really going to ask too many questions about the tenuous links between Iraq and the terrorists who struck on 9/11? Wasn’t Hussein a mass murderer and an avowed enemy of the United States? And when American troops are fighting in foreign fields, do you want to stand accused of not supporting them?
These are not excuses, but simply an effort to explain—however feebly—what much of the press was thinking as the Iraq War started and progressed. It must be noted that while there was wide press failure in these times, some reporters and outlets stood firm with investigative reporting that called the entire rationale for war into question. They faced tough criticism at the time, and they deserve our unmitigated appreciation.
The problems with the press leading up to and during the early years of the Iraq War were also fueled by the changing economics of the American media landscape. The business models that had sustained journalism—primarily print journalism, but also electronic media—began to crack under the stress of new technology. At the time of the Iraq War, news outlets that had already been contending with shrinking revenues, job layoffs, and general uncertainty now faced the challenges posed by the Internet. The rate at which this digital revolution has upended the model of journalism cannot be overstated. And as journalistic operations were consolidated into large corporations, reporters increasingly felt the pressure not to pursue unpopular story lines that might incur the wrath of the administration and thus harm the bottom line and shareholder value.
The technological challenges to a sustainable business model for journalism have only grown since the early years of this century. There is a lot of good, detailed scholarship on this subject, but suffice it to say that all sectors of the media have been hit hard. We have seen how online advertising has proven elusive and disappointing, and efforts such as paywalls have not proven generally effective, as consumers can readily find news online for free. Newspapers in particular have suffered. Many of the reasons that people had for maintaining their subscriptions to a paper—to check the weather and stock quotes, to get box scores and read about their favorite teams, to get a sense of the big headlines—can now all be found elsewhere, instantaneously, and also, of course, for free. Meanwhile, cash cows like classified advertisements, which used to generate billions of dollars in annual revenue for newspapers, have largely dried up thanks to sites like Craigslist. And if this environment weren’t hard enough, the rise of social media as a primary news source has put further pressure on bottom lines. All these trends are important and worthy of study by those who understand the world of business far better than I do. But most important, our evolving media landscape has made it more difficult for television news networks and newspapers to have the resources to employ editors and reporters. And that has had a seismic effect on our democracy.
Simply put, we have more people talking about news and less original reporting. Whether on television or online, there is no shortage of analysis. But analysis is only as good as the information that supports it. The deep cuts to newsrooms in print and electronic media have resulted in far fewer reporters waking up each morning deciding what story they will chase. There is less investigative reporting and international coverage. At the height of CBS News, we had around twenty foreign and domestic bureaus robustly staffed. Most of those have withered or long since been shuttered. What has gotten far less attention but has perhaps been the greatest loss to our democracy is the decimation that has come to local newspapers. These were always the engines that powered much of American journalism, as great local reporting would bubble up to the national newspapers and television. Local newspapers also provided the check on local and state governments, reporting on mayors, city councils, school boards, and statehouses. This is where much of the governing of the United States takes place, but a lot of it now occurs with little or no coverage. It is as if public meetings are happening behind closed doors. And with no coverage, no one is keeping the people who work for us—on those school boards or city councils—accountable.
The promise that came with the digital age is that we would have more access to information, and that is undoubtedly true. We can read journalism from around the world, we can easily share articles with friends, and we can search for both breaking headlines and the archives of the past. But to create all this content, especially important coverage like investigative journalism, isn’t free, nor is it cheap. Investigative reporters can dig for months and come up empty. Yet that is the kind of journalism that keeps our democracy honest.
I don’t profess to know how to fix the business model, but I am encouraged that long-form journalism is flourishing online, from traditional outlets like the Atlantic, which has adapted to the digital age, to innovative, new news sites like Vox. And we have seen individuals with deep pockets get interested in journalism, like Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who bought the Washington Post, and eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, who has given money to investigative journalism. There are many who believe that a benefactor model could be one solution, but it comes with its own vulnerabilities. I hope we can find a sustainable means to better support online journalism, perhaps through micropayments or bundled subscriptions. And we have to connect the explosion in the consumption of news on social media to the funding of the outfits that actually do the original reporting. Anyone who cares about a free press should play a part. If you value quality journalism, support it through donations and subscriptions.
In recent years, too many of those who covered politics in Washington fell into a Beltway mindset of coziness with politicians of both parties and reporting that succumbed to false equivalence, as if every issue had two sides of equal worth. This helped pave the way for our current political situation. But I have been heartened that the press is emboldened with a newfound resilience for investigative journalism and truth-telling. There is an almost daily competition for blockbuster headlines among the New York Times, the Washington Post, and many other print and electronic outlets. This is how we have learned about cover-ups, shady dealings, bad policy, and outright lies from our elected officials. The responsible press has been hit with the ludicrous mantra of “fake news,” but I believe these insults will only strengthen journalists’ resolve.
Imagine where we would be today without the press working with dogged determination to hold those in power accountable. We are seeing living proof of the wisdom of our Founders, who conceived of the First Amendment as a check on tyranny—an accountabili
ty that was missing in Orwell’s vision in 1984. But while these may be heroic times for journalists, the outcome of the battle between propaganda and deception on the one hand and unbiased reporting on the other is far from clear. No one has a monopoly on the truth, but the whole premise of our democracy is that truth and justice must win out. And the role of a trained journalist is to get as close to the truth as is humanly possible. Make no mistake: We are being tested. Without a vibrant, fearless free press, our great American experiment may fail.
COMMUNITY
Inclusion
When I was growing up, every woman who raised me, taught me, guided me, and loved me was born into a country that did not trust her with the right to vote. African Americans were being lynched and subjected to state-sponsored segregation and disenfranchisement. Members of what we now call the LGBTQ community were nearly always referred to by the vilest of slurs, and the vast majority of them remained hidden—to society and often to themselves. People with physical challenges were pitied, but there was no systematic effort to change public buildings, transportation, sidewalks, or anything else to make the world easier for them to navigate. Jews were barred from many corridors of power. At colleges and universities, there were all sorts of restrictions on race and religion, never mind gender. Some of these were explicit and some were just understood.
America was a place where the privilege conferred on white, Protestant, straight, nondisabled men was not even questioned. This privilege remains strong today, but it now must compete with a growing chorus calling for a fairer, more inclusive nation. Legally and socially, we have made great progress, even if the summit of true equality and justice remains distant.
We often hear about how we need to be more tolerant: to make room for people, ideas, and actions with which we may not agree. This is a prerequisite for a functional democracy. But tolerance alone is not sufficient; it allows us to accept others without engaging with them, to feel smug and self-satisfied without challenging the boundaries within which too many of us live. A society worthy of our ideals would be a much more inclusive one, a more integrated one. It would be a place where we continually strive to create a better whole out of our many separate parts. This is a sentiment that itself stretches back to our founding. Our first national motto was E pluribus unum, “From many, one.” From many states, we are one nation. And from many peoples, we should be one society. Under this framework, building tolerance is a worthy way station to a much grander destination of inclusion. This is a journey that is in our power as a nation to make. I know this to be true, because a journey from intolerance to tolerance to inclusion is one that many have made, myself included.
Back in my childhood, the idea of an African American or a woman as president was a concept so completely implausible that my peers and I never even bothered to talk about it. By the 1960s, however, the tectonic plates of American society were shifting, and I remember reporters, over adult beverages, occasionally debating whether the United States would ever have a black or female president. The consensus was a very slight maybe, some time, but none of us expected to live to see the day. It still seemed unlikely or at least in a distant future, sort of like colonizing Mars. As I look back now, it strikes me how these conversations were almost always conducted by white males only, as we made up the vast majority of the working press at the time. But in the 1960s and into the 1970s, that started to change as well. And with it, the idea of an African American or female president began to seem even more tangible. Familiarity is a necessary ingredient for acceptance.
But there was one marginalized group for whom there was almost no sense of a path to progress. If you had told us back in the 1960s and 1970s that there would be legal gay marriage in all fifty states, we would have been stunned. This was a notion that probably didn’t enter even the deepest reaches of our subconscious, let alone bubble to the level of an actual concrete thought we could put into words. You couldn’t ignore that there were women or African Americans in society, but you certainly could ignore the presence of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people, who most often were closeted. That such people would one day be open members of society, living with pride and having children and legal marriages? It is impossible for me to adequately convey how utterly alien those notions would have seemed.
It may be difficult for some younger readers to imagine, but for most of my life the LGBTQ community was never discussed in “polite” company. Horrible epithets for gay people were bandied about without a second thought. The very theoretical idea of someone “like that” living in your neighborhood, let alone teaching your children, was seen as a perverted threat to society. It is hard now to think back to how much this malignant ideology crossed almost all political, religious, racial, and gender boundaries. If you had asked my younger self what I thought about gay rights, I am not sure exactly what I might have said, but I am sure I would not be proud of it today. The fact that most of my peers—and even many leading progressive voices at the time—felt the same way might explain, but does not excuse, my former perspective.
In 1967, two years before the Stonewall riots in New York City would bring gay rights to national prominence, CBS News aired a documentary hosted by Mike Wallace called The Homosexuals. It had been years in the making and was considered one of the most controversial issues a news division could touch. The report was filled with the tropes of the times: psychiatrists claiming homosexuality was a mental condition, provocative images of hustlers, and interviews with gay Americans in anonymity, including one man with his face behind a potted plant. Wallace could state without controversy that “most Americans are repelled by the mere notion of homosexuality.” He added, with a tone of journalistic certainty, “The average homosexual, if there be such, is promiscuous. He is not interested in, nor capable of, a lasting relationship like that of a heterosexual marriage. His sex life, his love life, consists of a series of chance encounters at the clubs and bars he inhabits.”
I raise this not to take particular exception with Mr. Wallace. It was brave to even tackle the subject then, and the program also included sympathetic interviews with gay men talking publicly to a national audience for the first time. But the final product did not escape the deep prejudices of the times, and sadly, this ethos continued for years. When members of the gay community started getting sick with a mysterious cancer in 1981, it didn’t gain much notice. At CBS, we were one of the first news organizations to cover it, but we were still too late. At the national level, President Ronald Reagan wouldn’t even utter the word “AIDS” for years. Our job as reporters, and the job of political leaders, is to confront hard truths without bias or prejudice. Unfortunately, the stigmas surrounding gay people and intravenous drug users, the two groups that initially suffered most, shaped the response from all of us.
We knew how big a story AIDS was, but there was an effort among journalists from all walks to “broaden” the reporting. When Ryan White, a young hemophiliac from Kokomo, Indiana, was diagnosed with AIDS after a blood transfusion, the disease took on a more sympathetic face for the press. It hurts my heart to write these words and think of all the thousands of gay men who suffered and died before and since. Many lived under a cloud of shame, shunned by former friends and family. In 1986, a team of reporters, including myself, did a one-hour special called AIDS Hits Home. It was certainly far from perfect, but it was an improvement over The Homosexuals from twenty years earlier. I remember interviewing a mother alongside the gay lover of her now dead son. You couldn’t hear the story without being moved. But as I look back now, the subtext was that America should care more broadly about AIDS because it was no longer just a gay disease. It could infect you as well. Those were the times in which we were living, and we were not sensitive. It does bring some comfort to know that no one would cover the story in the same way today.
This societal change regarding LGBTQ rights continues to our present time. It’s important to remember that as late as the Democratic primaries in the 2008 election,
neither Barack Obama nor Hillary Clinton would publicly support same-sex marriage. Either they still had to “evolve” on the issue or it was considered too politically toxic. Both are now solidly pro – gay marriage, as is almost the entirety of the Democratic Party, and even many Republicans. The key, I think—and it is not a novel or original idea—is that our progress with LGBTQ rights is due to greater inclusion with the rest of society. We know that homosexuality is not limited to any race, religion, or socioeconomic class—it is part of human diversity. Once people had the courage and support to come out of the closet, families across the country, rich and poor, black and white, rural and urban, were forced to confront what had long remained hidden: sisters, brothers, sons, daughters, best friends, coworkers, even fathers and mothers, turned out to be gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer, and transgender. Now how will you respond? Will you shun them? Many did, and do, and the trails of pain, loneliness, depression, and even suicide are long and shameful. The tally of those rejected and disowned is large, and continues to grow. But thankfully many people decided to continue to love those whom they had already loved. They made room in their moral universe not only to tolerate LGBTQ people, but also to include them.
