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November 2008

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Guest Column

Have We Become a Pandering Press?

By Roy H. Williams , Author, Secret Formulas of the Wizard of Ads

Embedded journalists are nothing new. Pulitzer and Nobel Prize-winning authors Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck were two of the original embedded journalists back in World War II.

Celebrating always the cult of manhood and danger, Hemingway lived in a masculine fantasy world of battles, bullfights and boxing. When the Allies liberated Paris in 1944, Ernest was there with his pistol, his cook, his photographer and his public relations officer, covering the war for Collier's magazine. Upon his arrival in Paris, Hemingway personally liberated the bar in the Ritz hotel. It did not require the use of his pistol.

Steinbeck covered the war for the New York Herald Tribune. When his dispatches were compiled and published in 1958 as a collection entitled, Once There Was A War, one critic delivered a particularly acidic assessment: ãThey are period pieces, the attitudes archaic, the impulses romantic, and, in light of everything that has happened since, perhaps the whole body of work untrue and warped and one-sided.ä

That critic was Steinbeck, himself. ãThere was,ä he wrote, ãa huge and gassy thing called the War Effort. Anything, which interfered with or ran counter to the War Effort, was automatically bad. If you were to believe these reports, men were no longer capable of venal sins once they were at war. There could be no exploration of cowardice, though examples abounded. No commander could be cruel or ambitious or ignorant. And the young men in the armed forces no longer hungered for the company of women.*ä

In other words, we lose all sense of objectivity when we are engaged, even vicariously, in mortal combat. We cheer for the home team until we are hoarse from shouting. This is how it should be, I suppose, and perhaps itâs even one of the things that makes America great. But during our recent invasion of Iraq, did it occasionally seem to you like we were watching a sporting event?

Lest you dismiss me as just another ãanti-Bush whiner,ä let me share with you that my wife and I received a personal invitation to George W.âs inauguration. No, my comments arenât directed toward the president. They are directed at you, the media.

Are todayâs journalists as easily swept along in the rush of public opinion as the good Mr. Steinbeck describes? During the Iraqi invasion, where was the dissenting opinion, the view from another perspective? Is the press so terrified by what happened to the Dixie Chicks and Susan Sarandon that they have lost their will to be the conscience of the nation?

FOX News is currently winning the battle for TV ratings. But an advertising and marketing professional**, I recognize FOX News as the propaganda that it is. Is this the new definition of ãgood journalism?ä Obviously, the other TV networks canât objectively criticize a direct competitor, but where are the newspapers of America?

Iâm a conservative Republican, but Iâm also enough of a thinker to know that when government, business, and the press combine, the result can only be fascism. If we stay on our current track, weâll soon be creating new cabinet positions like ãSecretary of Homeland Securityä and talking about making all ballots electronic ãto guard us from electoral tampering.ä

Where are the watchdogs? Have they lost their teeth?

God save us if they have.

* Steinbeck research courtesy of David Folkenflik of The Baltimore Sun

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Mr. Williams is The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal best-selling business author of Secret Formulas of the Wizard of Ads. 

Roy H. Williams, Inc.

Roy@WizardofAds.com 

www.wizardofads.com

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