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[A]s somebody who comes out of the dying tradition of reporting, I think the notion that ... what television celebrities do is equate-able with journalism, has been very detrimental to the health of the news gathering industry within the United States.
... I often feel, especially as we watch newspapers just sort of implode from the inside, that the skills that go into making a good reporter – and you know I was abroad for almost 20 years, most of them with The New York Times. I certainly interviewed heads of state ... when I was in the Middle East ... but that’s a very small part of what it is to be a reporter or to be a journalist, that ... it’s a trade. It’s not a profession. And I think that when you look, especially in Washington at how celebrity journalism is practiced on commercial television, ... I think courtier is the right word. I think that they are courtiers.
They feed off of their access to the powerful and the famous. And you know I.F. Stone was right. All governments, it really doesn’t matter what their ideological stripe or what party they you know they come from, lie. And it’s the job of a reporter to ferret out those lies, to shine a light on areas that without that journalistic endeavor would remain dark. And good journalists, people like Sy Hersh, for instance, are very unpopular figures and people in power don’t like them.
And ... I really here fault commercial television which has stopped gathering news, largely, I think ... news is judged solely on its entertainment value... [T]here’s been a terrible, terrible corruption in commercial news ... and I’ve watched it.
...[W]hen I began covering the war in El Salvador in the early 1980s, all of the networks had bureaus. They would have reporters and producers. They went out with us. I was working as a print reporter for the Christian Science Monitor and National Public Radio. They gathered stories. They produced them. They reported them. That’s that. It’s all gone.
[I]t’s become trivia and celebrity gossip and chatter ... [T]he noise pollution that emanates from television I find deeply disturbing. And I think that that equation of ... the world of power and access to power and with journalism itself has been as destructive to the health of our democracy as the equation of Christianity to the Demagogues who dominate the religious right, people like Pat Robertson, for instance, or Rod Parsley.
LAMB: Define courtier.
HEDGES: Well, a courtier is somebody who has a kind of parasitic attachment to centers of power. I think that’s the article where I described Washington as a Versailles. And that’s what Washington’s become.
And the courtiers extend beyond the press. I think most people in the democratic party could be defined as courtiers in the sense that ... since the democratic party has taken control of the Congress since 2006, they have done little to nothing to defy the desires and projects propagated by the Bush White House, although they were clearly elected to do so.
And that’s what courtiers do. Courtiers ... they’re a new class of eunuchs. And you can find them in the halls of Congress and you can find them strutting around the bureaus of the big Washington networks.
LAMB: You also write, ”Being a courtier - and Obama is ... one of the best – requires agility and eloquence. The most talented of them can be lauded as persuasive actors. They entertain us. They make us feel good. They convince us they are our friends. We would like to have dinner with them. They are the smiley faces of the corporate state that has hijacked the government and is raping the nation. When the corporations make their iron demands, these courtiers drop to their knees where – to placate the telecommunications companies that fund their campaigns and want to be protected from lawsuits or to permit oil and gas companies to rake in obscene profits and keep in place the vast subsidies of corporate welfare doled out by the state.”
What do you think of Mr. Obama? I mean, explain what your relevance to him is.
HEDGES: Well, that sort of summed it up. You can’t run for president of this country unless you play that game, unless you allow yourself to become a commercialized product. And Obama’s very good at it. He’s – you know one of the things that was fascinating to watch in the primaries was how he out-Clintoned the Clintons.
But substance. There’s no substance. You know watching – listening to an Obama speech is like watching a Pepsi commercial. There’s nothing there. It’s – you know it can be moving. It can be eloquent. But you know when you reach out to grasp anything hard, it slips through your hand.
And ... I think that ... one should not pay much attention to what politicians say in an election cycle in a campaign. One should look at their voting records.
And when Obama went and supported this FISA reform act, that was a clear indication that he was, and is, beholden to the corporate interests who are our shadow government. You know we live in a corporate state. And when you live in a corporate state, you undergo what we have been undergoing which is a coup d’etat in slow motion.
We are being stripped as citizens daily of power. The FISA bill would be a perfect example of that. You know, however inept or clumsy or dysfunctional government may be, it is the only institution citizens have to protect their interests, to safeguard their interests, whether that’s through regulatory agencies, whether that’s through public education, whether that’s setting mine and safety standards, clean water acts, et cetera.
And when that’s taken away from you, when government works at the behest of corporations, then you as a citizen are completely disempowered. And I think that when you look at the voting record of Congress, you see how – you know it doesn’t matter what we want. ... 70-something percent of Americans want to end the War in Iraq.
But there are many people, many corporations, Haliburton and ... Lockheed Martin, the list goes on and on and on, who for all in this war is a good business. And they don’t want it stopped. And the voices of the citizens are irrelevant because the entire election cycle, the entire campaign process, is hostage to corporate dollars, 35,000 lobbyists descending ... like hyenas on Capitol Hill.
And when you look at ... Barack Obama’s voting record on many, many, many issues going back and looking at his two years in the Senate, is one that pleases corporate backers. And I think that taking a hard look at his stances and where he stands – he’s talking now, of course, about expanding the war in Afghanistan as if you know Afghanis want to be occupied any more than Iraqis.
I am ... in a bit of despair over where we’re going. And until we break the stranglehold of the corporate state, you know there are already a lot of people suffering in this country and you know much of my own family comes from the working class. NAFTA and you know let’s be fair, the democrats have been as bad as the republicans on this. Clinton’s administration was a disaster for the working class in this country.
