We Need More Journalists Like Seymour Hersh

Way back in the late 1970s when the acrid stench of Watergate still filled the air, New Yorker investigative reporter Seymour Hersh spoke at my college. I was just a wet-behind-the-ears sophomore who found it hard to believe my government would lie to me, wondering what the hell I was going to do with my life.

I found my life's pursuit in Hersh's inspirational message: "It is the government's job to keep secrets; it is my job to find them out." There are many events that compelled me to join the largely thankless, low-paying-for-most, hypocritical business of journalism, but that hour of listening to Hersh - who has exposed numerous government secrets, including the 1968 My Lai massacre of hundreds of Viet Nam men, women, and children by U.S. troops - talk about how he unearthed such secrets ranked right up there. I saw journalism as almost missionary work, as a way to right wrongs, to expose injustice, to help the needy, to speak truth to power. When I read English novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton's words, "The pen is mightier than the sword," I believed, brother.

Little did I know I was merely entering a harsh Fantasy Island. Once the boat left, reality was quite different from the brochure.

More than two decades later, I can only shake my head in wonder. How can we spend so much time and energy covering O.J. and Condit and the latest clothing trends, and miss the really important stories - the government secrets - like the details of exactly how the Republicans stole the 2000 election and how we've killed more civilians in Afghanistan than those who died here on Sept. 11? Speaking of Condit, why have we ignored the story of Lori Klausutis, an aide to former U.S. Rep. Joe Scarborough, R.-Fla., who was actually found dead in the congressman's district office in July 2001 amid rumors of an extramarital affair, the resignation of Scarborough, and questions about cover-ups?

How can we magnify Clinton's and Gore's shortcomings to the point we're repeating bald-faced lies without even checking them, yet let Bush - who rarely has a press conference because his handlers are afraid of what he might say or mangle when not giving prepared remarks - off the hook and even compare him to Franklin D. Roosevelt? How can we let the Republicans convince us that the Democrats were equally tied to Enron and it was more of a business scandal, when the Bush administration spent the last year falling all over itself to help its friend, Kenny Boy?

The answers lie in money and myths. Let's just scratch one myth right off the bat: The media is no more liberal than Bush is sincere. Many reporters and editors might have been liberal in the Watergate days. But these days most are either moderate or lean to the right, based on my observations of working in the media for more than two decades. And the ones who call the shots - the corporate media bigwigs - are mostly true conservatives. Just review federal election records, and you will find the names of big media executives like Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch giving money only to Republicans. You won't find many who gave to Clinton or Gore.

That's why a study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a group organized by Columbia University and others, concluded that overall Bush was twice as likely to receive positive media coverage as Gore in the last weeks of the 2000 presidential campaign. Another study by that group found that more than three-quarters of the campaign coverage of Gore cast him as someone who lied, exaggerated, or was tainted by scandal. Meanwhile, most coverage of Bush carried the theme that he was a "different kind of Republican."