The struggle for truth

Daily Texan, October 27, 2008, p. 4A.

by Robert Jensen

When I announced that John Pilger was coming to UT to lecture, a student who had read a critique of the U.K.-based journalist asked, “Is he objective?”

“Oh, heavens no,” I said. “He’s interested in the truth.”

My lighthearted response was meant to suggest that “objective journalism” often obscures as much as it reveals.  

If “objectivity” is defined as a commitment to being honest and open-minded in the pursuit of knowledge, then objectivity is a good thing — for journalists, scholars, preachers, politicians and everyone else.

But if “objectivity” is a synonym for the newsgathering practices in corporate-commercial journalism as it’s typically practiced in the United States, such objectivity can be dangerous, trapping journalists in the conventional wisdom of the status quo and limiting what we learn. 

“Objective” journalists from conventional media outlets routinely defend themselves from criticism with an assertion of their neutrality, and indeed the vast majority of reporters and editors do a relatively good job of bracketing out — to the degree possible — personal views as they report. But the way that powerful people in government and business so often shape the news and provide the majority of the sources for conventional journalism means that those allegedly objective practices actually bias the news in favor of the views of the powerful. This is as true of FOX as CNN as MSNBC. 

In that conventional sense, Pilger is not objective. He not only investigates the specific claims that the powerful make but contests the larger framework they try to impose. For example, conventional journalists eventually did report on whether Bush administration assertions about weapons of mass destruction and terrorism that were made to justify the invasion of Iraq were true. Pilger not only questioned those claims before the invasion but also analyzed the more likely reasons the United States went to war and critiqued the way in which powerful countries routinely manipulate and/or ignore international law. His 2003 film, “Breaking the Silence: Truth and Lies in the War on Terror,” offered information and analysis that the conventional news media wouldn’t report until much later, if ever. 

But Pilger is neutral, in the sense that his skepticism about the powerful is applied to liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats. His reporting on Clinton administration foreign policy was as harshly critical as that on the Bush administration. 

His 2000 film, “Paying the Price: Killing the Children of Iraq,” provides in-depth analysis of Clinton’s policy that devastated Iraq through the harshest economic embargo in modern history, something that conventional reporters mostly ignored. 

In his most recent book, “Freedom Next Time,” Pilger trains his critical eye on the powerful across the globe, detailing how: 

• The British government lied to the people of Diego Garcia in the process of handing the island over to the United States for a military base. 

• The Indian government’s media campaigns have highlighted the successes in the high-tech industries and downplayed the mounting problems of the poor. 

• The deals at the end of white political rule in South Africa allowed many whites guilty of apartheid-era crimes to avoid responsibility during the truth-and-reconciliation process, as the promises of a more egalitarian society evaporated.  

He also continues to bring that same scrutiny of power to the screen. His latest film, “The War on Democracy,” shows how the United States’ commitment to democracy in other parts of the world masks a strategy rooted in the familiar goal of economic dominance.  

In modern democratic societies, the role of journalists is to provide independent information, analysis and opinion to citizens to help us understand the way power really works. Journalists who do that honestly with an open mind — in other words, objectively, in the best sense of the term — inevitably must confront the ways in which the political and economic systems that dominate our world have concentrated wealth and power, and how ordinary people around the world have suffered but also resisted that injustice.  

By the standards of contemporary corporate commercial journalism, Pilger indeed may not be objective — because he is holding himself and other journalists to a higher standard.   

Pilger will speak on “Journalism and the ‘War on Terror’” on Tuesday, Oct. 28, 2008, at 7 p.m. in WCH, Room 1.120. The free event is open to the public. 

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Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center. His latest book, All My Bones Shake, will be published in 2009 by Soft Skull Press. He also is the author of Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity (South End Press, 2007); The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege (City Lights, 2005); Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity (City Lights, 2004); and Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream (Peter Lang, 2002). Jensen can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu and his articles can be found online at http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/index.html.