Nowhere was this mindset more vividly displayed than in a 1987 installment of the series Ethics in America, hosted by the late Fred Friendly, former president of CBS News. Each program in the series featured a moderator and panel of experts discussing ethical issues in business, medicine, or what have you, and the topic in one episode was ethics in the military. Harvard law professor Charles Ogletree was the moderator, and among the well-known panelists were retired General William Westmoreland and media heavyweights Peter Jennings and Mike Wallace. (Hadley Arkes wrote about the series in the June 16, 1989, issue of National Review. The series is available on video here.)
Ogletree asked the panel to imagine a war between the hypothetical countries of North and South Kosan. The United States was backing South Kosan, and indeed American troops were deployed in the field alongside South Kosanese forces. The North Kosanese offered to allow Jennings and a crew to film them behind their lines. Would Jennings go? Of course, he answered.
Then Ogletree introduced the ethical dilemma: While filming the North Kosanese, you see they are setting up an ambush for an approaching column of American and South Kosanese soldiers. What do you do? Would you stand by and film as the North Kosanese opened fire on the Americans?
Jennings pondered the question. "Well, I guess I wouldn't," he said finally. "I am going to tell you now what I am feeling, rather than the hypothesis I drew for myself. If I were with a North Kosanese unit that came upon Americans, I think that I personally would do what I could to warn the Americans." He went on to say he would warn the Americans even if it meant losing the story, even if it meant losing his life.
But this admirable display of patriotic duty was short-lived, for he was then upbraided by Mike Wallace.
"I think some other reporters would have a different reaction," Wallace said. "They would regard it simply as a story they were there to cover." Wallace was "astonished" at Jennings's answer, and he began to lecture him as he would an errant schoolchild.
"You're a reporter," Wallace scolded. "I'm a little bit at a loss to understand why, because you're an American, you would not have covered that story."
Didn't Jennings have a higher duty, Ogletree asked Wallace, than to roll film as American soldiers were being shot? "No," Wallace said. "You don't have a higher duty. No. No. You're a reporter!"
Properly chastened, Jennings backed down. "I chickened out," he said. He had lost sight of his journalistic duty to remain detached from the story.
Unbelievable.
As Jeff Larkin from FFT points out...
They actually believe this shit. Life is just another episode of Lou Grant.
Objective journalism is one thing, but putting a story above the lives of American soldiers is just plain detestable. Yet are we not seeing this very same attitude exemplified today?
Media outlets like the New York Times have, in recent times, repeatedly put their interest in breaking a big story above the national security interests of Americans by repeatedly exposing the confidential details of government anti-terror programs. And look also at how Americas enemies in Iraq and elsewhere are routinely put on the same moral standing as our troops. As though the head-chopping, suicide-bombing terrorists were simply troops of another sort not really all that different from our own troops.
It's tiresome. It's disgusting, and yet it happens over and over again all because these journalists are so drunk on the "power of the press" that they've forgotten that there are a few simple truths in this world that no amount of objectivity can do away with. Like the fact that we are the good guys in the war in Iraq and the war on terror. And the fact that the lives of our soldiers and the safety of our citizens are more important than some story.