There is no such thing as an objective news story. from the start to “ create a fiscal crisis,” Moynihan said, and use that crisis to force the country against its will to reduce “ social spending” for years to come. The indictment was truly grave: an American president conspiring to deceive the American people in order to achieve goals he would never have dared avow. The would-be source was impeccable: a prominent senator, respected, reflective, and uncommonly eloquent. Yet Moynihan’s indictment never became news, not even in the spring of 1986, when David Stockman’s astonishing memoirs substantiated that indictment in dense and vivid detail. Instead of turning the former budget director’s memoirs into momentous news, Washington’s press corps attacked Stockman for writing them. “ In all this torrent of comment about the book,” noted James Reston of the Times, “ there is very little analysis of his indictment of the methods and men who are s t i l l deciding the nation’s policies.” The press fled from the story, Moynihan said, because “ the political class cannot handle this subject.” Against a political estab lishmen t resolved to keep dreaded knowledge from the country, not even an eminent senator can make that knowledge news on his own. For eight years the Democratic opposition had shielded from the public a feckless, lawless president with an appalling appetite for private power. That was the story of the Reagan years, and Washington journalists evidently knew it. Yet they never turned the collusive politics of the Democratic party into news. Slavishly in thrall to the powerful, incapable of enlightening the ruled without the consent of the rulers, the working press, the “star” reporters, the pundits, the sages, the column ists passed on to us, instead, the Democrats’ mendacious drivel about the President’s “Teflon shield.” For eight years we saw the effects of a bipartisan political class in action, but the press did not show us that political class acting, exercising its collective power, making things happen, contriving the appearances that were reported as news. It rarely does. n May 8, 1969, the Times reported, none too conspicuously, that President Nixon was bombing a neutral country in Southeast Asia (Cambodia) and making elaborate efforts to conceal the fact from the American people. The Democratic Congress ignored the story completely, and without a congressional news license, perforce, it “ dropped out of sight,” as Wicker notes. The entire party establishment had tacitly rallied around a president who harbored dangerous ambitions. That was what had happened, but it wasn’t news. Instead of revealing a would-be tyrant in the White House and his congressional allies, the news showed the American people nothing. Think of it: nothing. Our divine right to dreaded knowledge of our rulers, faY from being indefeasible, could scarcely have been said to exist. Three and a half years later, the same congressional leaders decided to delve into the Watergate scandal, almost certainly to check Nixon’s careening ambitions. Yet how many Americans know that a bipartisan political establishment had actually made such a decision, wise and prudent though it was? All too few. How many Americans believe that an “ imperial press” had taken it upon itself to drive a president from office? All too many. And how many Americans have the faintest idea that “ the earliest and most serious blow to Carter’s credibility,” as Broder recently recalled, “ came from the way Democrats in Congress had described to reporters their early disillusionment with the President”? The fact of Democratic hostility would have been dreaded knowledge, indeed, in 1977: an “outsider” president, newly inaugurated, is assailed at once by his own party’s “ insiders.” But that, too, never became news. Instead, the press reported the hostile jibes of Democratic leaders as if they were impartial judgments rather than blows struck in a political struggle. The “ insiders” probably altered the course of our history but thanks to a servile and subjugated press, we scarcely knew they existed. So it has continued day after day, decade after decade. Our rulers make the news, but they do not appear in the news, not as they really are—not as a political class, a governing establishment, a body of leaders with great and pervasive powers, with deep, often dark, ambitions. In the American republic the fact of oligarchy is the most dreaded knowledge of all, and our news keeps that knowledge from us. By their subjugation of the press, the political powers in America have conferred on themselves the greatest of political blessings—Gyges’ ring of invisibility. And they have left the American people more deeply baffled by their own country’s politics than any people on earth. Our public realm lies steeped in twilight, and we call that twilight news. The managing editors o f the Star Tribune and Pioneer Press Dispa tch declined to respond to this piece. ’ Walter Karp’s last book was Liberty Under Siege: American Politics, 19761988. He was, until his recent untimely passing, a Harper’s Magazine contributing editor. Ann Morgan is a Twin Cities artist. Connie Baker (Gilbert) is a designer and a regular contributor to the Clinton St. Quarterly. Copyright ©1989 by Harper’s Magazine. All rights reserved. Reprinted from the July issue by special permission. 22 Clinton St. Quarterly—Fall, 1989
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