Empire of Illusion - Chris Hedges [95]
MOYERS: The Cheney office didn’t leak to you that “there’s gonna be a big story”?
RUSSERT: No. No. I mean, I don’t have the—this is, you know—on Meet the Press, people come on and there are no ground rules. We can ask any question we want. I did not know about the aluminum tubes story until I read it in the New York Times.
MOYERS: Critics point to September 8, 2002, and to your show in particular, as the classic case of how the press and the government became inseparable. Someone in the administration plants a dramatic story in the New York Times. And then the Vice President comes on your show and points to the New York Times. It’s a circular, self-confirming leak.
RUSSERT: I don’t know how Judith Miller and Michael Gordon reported that story, who their sources were. It was a front-page story of the New York Times. When Secretary [Condoleezza] Rice and Vice President Cheney and others came up that Sunday morning on all the Sunday shows, they did exactly that. My concern was, is that there were concerns expressed by other government officials. And to this day, I wish my phone had rung, or I had access to them.
Moyers then told the audience, “Bob Simon didn’t wait for the phone to ring,” and returned to his conversation with Simon of CBS.
MOYERS [to Bob Simon}: You said a moment ago when we started talking to people who knew about aluminum tubes. What people—who were you talking to?
SIMON: We were talking to people—to scientists—to scientists and to researchers, and to people who had been investigating Iraq from the start.
MOYERS: Would these people have been available to any reporter who called, or were they exclusive sources for 60 Minutes?
SIMON: No, I think that many of them would have been available to any reporter who called.
MOYERS: And you just picked up the phone?
SIMON: Just picked up the phone.
MOYERS: Talked to them?
SIMON: Talked to them and then went down with the cameras. . . .
Walter Pincus of the Washington Post suggested that Russert’s failure indicated a larger failure of many media figures: “More and more, in the media, become, I think, common carriers of administration statements, and critics of the administration. And we’ve sort of given up being independent on our own.”7
Russert, like Cramer, when exposed as complicit in the dissemination of misinformation, attempted to portray himself as an innocent victim, as did New York Times reporter Judy Miller, who, along with her colleague Michael Gordon, worked largely as stenographers for the Bush White House during the propaganda campaign to invade Iraq. Once the administration claims justifying the war had been exposed as falsehoods, Miller quipped that she was “only as good as my sources.” This logic upends the traditional role of reporting, which should always begin with the assumption that those in power have an agenda and are rarely bound to the truth. All governments lie, as I. F. Stone pointed out, and it is the job of the journalist to do the hard, tedious reporting to expose these lies. It is the job of courtiers to feed off the scraps tossed to them by the powerful and serve the interests of the power elite.
Cramer continues to serve his elite masters by lashing out at government attempts to make the financial system accountable. He has repeatedly characterized President Obama and Democrats in Congress as Russian communists intent on “rampant wealth destruction.” He has referred to Obama as a “Bolshevik” who is “taking cues from Lenin.” He has also used terms such as “Marx,” “comrades,” “Soviet,” “Winter Palace,” and “Politburo” in reference to Democrats and asked whether House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is the “general secretary of the Communist Party.” On the March 3, 2009, edition of NBC’s Today, Cramer attacked Obama’s purported “radical agenda” and claimed that “this is the most, greatest wealth destruction I’ve seen by a president.” Statements like these from courtiers like Cramer will grow in intensity as the economic morass deepens and