Marc Felt recently revealed himself to have been the character known as Deep Throat in Woodward and Bernstein’s exposure of the Watergate scandal.
Ever eager to polarise issues and people into convenient, bite-sized chunks of good and evil for the unthinking masses to digest, the American media have largely painted Felt as a latter-day hero for his part in bringing down Nixon. Few sources seem interested in also examining the deeds that comprise the rest of Felt’s career with the FBI.
Doug Ireland recently published an interesting article on Felt’s involvement in COINTELPRO, a constitution-usurping campaign of terror on the left wing of the day. Felt was even convicted of conducting illegal break-ins, but later pardoned by Reagan. These details are conveniently left out of the articles written by those who would paint Felt as a brave and selfless bastion of good, rather than a self-serving figure with a grudge against Nixon.
I don’t know the truth, of course, and this posting should not be mistakenly interpreted to indicate that I’m a fan of Nixon or, by extension, Republican politics. I’m just someone who finds it predictably lamentable that shades of grey are, as always, missing from journalism in this country.
Newspaper and television journalism in the US seem not intended to promote and provoke thought, but to present a sequence of pre-deliberated bullet points, so that the busy reader, whose modern lifestyle allows precious little time for deliberate thought, instantly knows where he or she should stand on a given issue.
The trouble is, who is to say what conclusion the hapless reader would reach on his own? Is it not the job of the media to present the facts, which may then be carefully weighed by the reader, allowing him or her to reach his or her own conclusion?
That’s how it still is where I come from and I like to think the US must once have been like that, too. These days, however, as many facts are omitted as are presented, and the conclusion is happily provided by the opinionated reporter, as having to reach one’s own conclusion has become yet another time-consuming inconvenience, along with manual transmission cars, cooking for oneself and getting up off one’s arse to change the television station.
