The whole world is watching

By María Eugenia Guerra

The spinning of the news for public consumption in America has had no greater refinement than what you read, see, and hear today about the pending war on Iraq. Sadly, almost everything that is written and broadcast these days endorses the need for war. Rare is thoughtful dialogue that examines both sides of the very serious pre-emptive move to decimate a sovereign nation, an act that I believe will forever change America's role in the history of the world.
For the moment, and as has been the case for some time, we respond viscerally to the speciously patriotic and overplayed media hooks of the Axis of Evil, Weapons of Mass Destruction, and the War on Terrorism. Once the war begins and we are knee-deep in blood and grief, perhaps our own, we will become inured to those battle cries. For the moment, however, it seems (and if it doesn't yet, someone will soon tell you it is) un-American to voice an opinion contrary to that of the government.
Speaking for myself, a lefty who sprouted her training wheels for the right to dissent during the Vietnam War era, I do not follow our government's thinned and nearly transparent thread of logic from the tragic events of September 11, 2001 to laying waste to the nation of Iraq. I do not make that leap, and in exercise of my rights guaranteed by the Constitution, I commit that thought to paper. I fought against our country's war in Vietnam on Congress Avenue in Austin and at the dining room table of our home in Laredo where my father was by presidential appointment the chair of the Selective Service Committee, the draft board.
On my daily 45-minute commute in and out of Laredo and via the satellite radio in my truck, I surf simulcasts of CNN, Fox News, and C-SPAN. I hear in the voices of those who make the claim "the spin stops here" the collective and fetid roar to move to war. I hear in the voices of broadcasters who believe they are informing the public the pathetic regurgitations of mimes, lackeys, and cheerleaders for the government, broadcasters who believe you and I are not evolved enough intellectually to decide for ourselves. What I do not hear is balance. Most of the media seems to acknowledge only one side of the issue of war with Iraq: that war is right. Fox's Bill O'Reilly and White House press secretary Ari Fleischer are interchangeable talking heads.
For all the years that I have been a news writer, I have understood and taken seriously what is taught early in journalism school: write a balanced story by presenting both sides of an issue; let the reader decide.
Many consider CBS anchor Dan Rather an oldie whose best days as a broadcaster are behind him, one who no longer has the verve to present news that shapes public perceptions. Yet it was Rather, dean of the old school of news gathering, who scored the journalistic coup of the new decade with an interview with Saddam Hussein. Speaking of that interview, I heard Rather recount to Larry King that it's the media's job to broker information to the public but not the media's job to decide for the public what is right or wrong. Rather also said that CBS denied the Bush Administration's wish to respond point by point with the substance of Rather's interview with Hussein.
Do not minimize the significance of CBS saying no to the Bush Administration. In that token of media resistance and in Rather's clear thoughts about news and ideas presented unfettered by the filter of national policy, I found hope, hope that it is important to some of us in media to be heard, that some of us still believe that the media should be an unbiased source of information.
When spin-driven headlines and broadcasts across the country have failed to engage the public or hold its interest, the spin evolves in substance and direction, covering all bases. First it was the war on terrorism, then destroying the tyrant Hussein and his arsenal of weapons, then establishing a democracy in Iraq, and now all of the above woven with fears for our own well-being and humanitarian concerns for the Iraqi people -- all intended to convince the American public that this war is right, to justify the need to fire missiles and drop bombs on the populace of a country ruled by a despot. (Inarguably Saddam Hussein is a despot.) The headlines do not say that half of the citizens of Iraq are under the age of 15, children as young or a few years younger than our own children. Imagine your child or even yourself as collateral damage in a fusillade of bombs, and imagine those left behind trying to make sense of their decimated hearts.
I imagine those things and many more, and I try to fathom the machinations of our government and the kind of fear-based information it proffers through a media all too willing to do its bidding. There emerges from the airwaves in that vast void of straight news a surreal scenario of duct tape and plastic sheeting as a first defense for terrorism and the jarring footnote that the insurance industry has announced that it will not cover claims for damage from nuclear bombs. Who would be left to make a claim or to take one?
Just as bunting on my vehicle after 9/11 fell short of how I felt about why we on American soil were the target of so heinous an act of terror, I believe we are rushing to war on a wave of dissonant sound bites helved at us by a media in lockstep with this administration.
I would not presume to ask you to follow me or to think as I do.
As the world watches us move to a war that will in its early and uncertain lines of demarcation break old trusts with longtime allies and in the worst case invite retaliation on our own soil, I ask you to think and to exercise your constitutional right to ask questions of your government and to dissent if your heart so moves you, respectful always of those who do not agree, for they, too, have the same Constitutional rights of expression.

(María Eugenia Guerra is the founder and publisher of the monthly newsjournal LareDOS, which has been in print since 1994. She lives in San Ygnacio, TX.)