MUCKRAKERS, PILE IT ON

"Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent,"
argued George Orwell in "Reflections on Gandhi." This maxim is even
more relevant today as society's trust in various individuals and
institutions quickly erodes.

In the last year, the American public has been bombarded by
revelations of widespread child abuse in the Catholic church,
round-'em-up-and-lock-'em-up Rush Limbaugh admitting he had an
addiction to painkillers, a reporter at the New York Times -- the
flagship of the American news media -- fired for making up stories,
former drug czar Bill Bennett confessing to compulsive gambling and
last, but not least, the administration accused of spinning
intelligence to suit its own ends.

Many people accuse the media of dwelling on these faults too much.
After all, they argue, all people have committed or said something
that could be frowned upon. The media should give them a break.

That is the wrong attitude to take. The news media are essentially the
eyes and ears of the public. Despite widespread skepticism about the
"truthfulness" of the information available, people still read
newspapers, watch TV, and go online to find out the latest breaking
news. Sure, it can do a better job of it, but the society would
definitely be worse off without the news outlets.

It has become very fashionable to bash the news media for all the
faults one can think of.

The media is apparently guilty of falsifying facts, not reporting
facts, reporting too many facts, liberal bias, conservative bias,
independent bias and everything under the sun, short of cannibalism,
though some media critics say that's not too far off in the future.

Some people in the current presidential administration think so too
because they want to take the message about the war in Iraq directly
to the public.

According to a report in the New York Observer, a 24-hour TV news
channel is in the works by the Coalition Provisional Authority that
will bring America the news about Iraq. Needless to say, the result
will be another megaphone for the administration to advance its views
on Iraq and the Middle East in general.

But what exactly is wrong with the current setup?

The main problem that people have with news in general, is that it is
sometimes too nuanced. There is no clear line demarcating the two
sides of the issue. Instead, there is a big gray area with small
specks of black and white interspersed with each other.

When, for example, the news media report on the child abuse
perpetrated by some Catholic priests, the knee-jerk reaction of a
significant proportion of the population is disbelief, followed by
anger at the messenger. Because the Roman-Catholic Church has done a
lot of good over its 2,000-year-old existence, people think that it
and its component parts are infallible.

Thus, even though the stories might be factually accurate, the public
shouts down the facts with accusations of journalistic bias. Only
after a certain time period does the majority slowly come around to
see the truth.

A recent report from Toledo Blade, a newspaper in Ohio, profiled Tiger
Force, an elite Army unit fighting in Vietnam in the seventies. Its
members committed many war crimes -- including numerous murders of
Vietnamese civilians -- with some massacres exceeding the proportions
of My Lai. Yet the truth was buried in military archives for thirty
years, rediscovered only recently by the reporters. Some may see this
as another attack on the armed forces by members of liberal media,
others as a meaningless release of ghosts from the Vietnam closet. Yet
the report told the truth about what the Tiger Force did, and the
public is a lot better off for knowing about it.

Another example of that phenomenon is the Watergate scandal. When the
first stories by two young Washington Post reporters, Bob Woodward and
Carl Bernstein, started connecting a bungled burglary of the
Democratic National Committee headquarters to high-level
administration officials, people did not take them seriously enough.

Only after the higher-ups in the administration started resigning en
masse, culminating in the resignation of President Nixon himself, did
the public finally believe the allegations.

The same events are happening now with the Michael Jackson
controversy. A significant portion of the population does not want to
believe that he did anything wrong. And the news media take flak
because they merely report on allegations. Apparently, that makes them
biased against Michael and they are out to get him.

Now, I am not insinuating anything about Jackson's guilt or innocence
in this case. The courts are a much better judge of that than the
public or the media. But it is news media's job to inform the public
of the charges and developments in the case.

People who think that Jackson or any person or institution should get
a free ride from the media are deluding themselves. The truth is
sometimes a bitter pill that's hard to swallow, but you will feel a
lot better in the long run.

All of the above does not excuse the media from sometimes taking
things too far. Charges and accusations need to be substantiated and
supported with evidence, something that has been sorely lacking in
some reports recently.

But ultimately, the news media in this country provide a variety of
views on every subject conceivable. A couple of those just might get
close enough to the truth.

In those cases, people would do well to remember Orwell's tenet.
Saints are human and therefore almost always a lot dirtier than they
appear. The muckrakers deserve credit for exposing them for what they
are.