Does (real) journalism really matter or make a difference?

Answer: A few times in the past it did and, hypothetically I guess, this could happen again.

Seymour Hersch: What a REAL journalist looks like.

Substack publishes content produced by more than 50,000 citizen journalists. Writers produce articles on just about every conceivable subject.

However, I’d argue that only a tiny percentage of these 50,000 content creators are producing articles with the potential to save lives or significantly improve the state of the world.

(Journalism that matters would be articles that expose shocking crimes and scandals and hold villains accountable, a result that would cause officials and misery-producing “leaders” to be purged from positions of power, thus creating a deterrent for future leaders to abstain from engaging in nefarious activities.)

For important journalism to matter, it first has to reach large numbers of people. Next, any jaw-dropping revelations need to resonate with the majority of the population, citizens who, one assumes, might become disturbed or outraged by previously-concealed facts and then demand their leaders take actions to change policies.

Individuals responsible for misery-producing actions would be prosecuted or at least disgraced and lose their previous positions of power.

That is, real journalism - seen by enough civically-engaged and morally-decent people - can, in fact, change the world and the course of future events.

Conversely, when real journalism doesn’t occur or doesn’t reach enough people, sinister events are much more likely to occur and sociopaths or serial liars are much more likely to remain in positions of “leadership” and power (where they’ll no doubt engage in activities that make even more disturbing events possible).

Bill’s contrarian opinion: The only watchdogs who matter are journalists ….

I differ from most people in that I believe members of the Fourth Estate work in a profession which possesses the greatest potential to prevent or expose atrocities and deter or stop tyrannical trends.

(Most people think politicians or “public servants” are the citizens with the greatest potential to stop injustices, but, per my observations, such public servants act only when “public opinion” has significantly changed and every-day citizens demand that their elected leaders and officials do their jobs.)

In genuine democracies, the “people” actually do possess great power, but only if the people are fully engaged (and have become irate and mobilized), something that will only happen IF real journalists have performed their most important job (e.g. “exposing the truth” and/or holding corrupt or wrong leaders accountable for their crimes and misdemeanors).

A few examples where real journalism made a difference and, for a period of time, changed the direction of future human events.

In my lifetime, America’s tragic involvement in the Vietnam War might be the best example.

While this war should never have been fought in the first place and lasted far too long, eventually real journalism did play a major role in bringing it to an end. Also, for a few decades, “lessons from Vietnam” prevented similar quagmires and mass-casualty, treasury-depleting, regime-change conflicts from occurring.

The signature journalism events that expedited the end of this tragic “conflict” would include Life magazine running a cover photo of a crying, naked Vietnam child whose village had just been napalmed by the U.S. military.

Walter Cronkite, America’s most trusted journalist, traveling to Saigon and filing a report where he essentially said this war was un-winnable.

The publication of The Pentagon Papers, which proved government officials were lying throughout the war.

Later, one dogged, real investigative journalist, Seymour Hersh, exposed the atrocities of the My-Lai Massacre.

It’s also noteworthy that many journalists were embedded with troops in the jungles and rice patties of Vietnam. These journalistic dispatches revealed, portrayed or hinted at messages that didn’t jibe with the official narrative.

Over the course of years, tens of millions of Americans (including large numbers of college students and influential celebrities) became disillusioned by the true story of Vietnam and massive protests occurred in cities across America and the world.

Significantly, these protestors were protesting because of the real journalism they’d consumed.

The protests eventually caused a powerful U.S. president, Lyndon Johnson, to decide to not run for re-election and led to the election of Richard Nixon, who campaigned on a pledge to get America out of this conflict (“peace with honor.”)

Of course, even with numerous examples of powerful and significant real journalism, virtually no official responsible for the Vietnam War ever suffered major consequences. (Lt. William Calley was prosecuted for war crimes, but even he was later released from prison).

The most significant cumulative effect of this journalism is it caused, probably, the vast majority of American citizens to belatedly admit this war was a terrible and tragic mistake. Millions of citizens who once enthusiastically supported this war admitted to themselves (and others) that they were wrong and something like this should not happen again.

Because of this expanding consensus view, America went almost 30 years before our government leaders ordered a repeat of Vietnam in Iraq and then Afghanistan.

(It is true that President George Bush, who didn’t “go wobbly” when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, did launch a war against Iraq in 1991. However, the “lessons of Vietnam” still resonated with him and his advisors and American troops did not follow-up by invading Iraq.)

A decade later, when president Bush’s son was president, America did invade and occupy Iraq and Afghanistan - two conflicts that were supposed to last a few weeks but both, like Vietnam lasted approximately a decade. (Historical lesson: Historical lessons have an expiration date of about two to three decades.)

By 2002, post 9-11, the changes in journalism were striking.

For example, the circulation and influence of Life magazine had declined by probably 95 percent. Still, the magazine’s editors never published a cover photo of crying Iraqi or Afghan children who’d lost their parents … or both legs and an arm.

The equivalent of The Pentagon Papers might have occurred when Julian Assange’s citizen journalist website WikiLeaks published documents showing civilians (and journalists) being massacred by American helicopter attacks (as well as atrocities in POW prisons).

However, unlike with the Pentagon Papers, news organizations did not rally to the defense of the publisher who disseminated these true documents.

Indeed, the government - sending a new message - hounded, arrested and ultimately imprisoned Assange (whose mistreatment was highlighted not by Bono, The Boss or Jane Fonda but by an actress who was once a swimsuit model on “Bay Watch.”)

Already suffering great economic setbacks, most news organizations couldn’t afford to send reporters to Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Libya, etc. and if any reporters did file disturbing dispatches, these failed to resonate with large numbers of U.S. citizens.

As a result, the military could wage its wars with few citizens realizing the human toll of these non-stop missile and bomb strikes.

Lessons from Watergate …

In my lifetime, the most memorable exposed political scandal was Watergate.

In Watergate, two reporters from The Washington Post informed the world that a small group of aides loyal to President Nixon conspired to perform a series of “dirty tricks” and then spent years trying to cover-up their crimes and “extortion” efforts.

Notably, every reporter and news organization in America decided to join the effort to expose these shocking crimes.

The key historic lesson from Watergate is that the “watchdog” Fourth Estate actually can expose a political scandal if and when it sets its mind to doing this.

(As we also later learned with Donald Trump, the “pack media” can also create and incessantly hype faux scandals, revealing the “weaponization” of the Fourth Estate.)

However, in Watergate, the entire scandal involved just a few “Nixon aides” and - compared to Covid or the Epstein non-scandal - not every department and agency of the U.S. government. Also, FWIW, in Watergate, nobody died.

Still, one can observe the power of the Fourth Estate if and when its members work in tandem to expose a government scandal.

Other scandals that the press exposed, if belatedly …

I can think of a few other scandals the mainstream corporate press exposed, real journalism that saved lives and resulted in criminals or villains being outed and disgraced. For example, on the medicine/science or Big Pharma beat …

The Thalidomide Scandal.

Or even the Swine Flu Scandal, which the press first massively over-hyped, leading to a vaccination campaign where 50 million Americans got a rushed “vaccine” they didn’t need. However, to its credit, the press did report on a couple of people who may have died or suffered serious adverse events after their injections, which led to … the vaccine program being instantly halted.

Some of my younger subscribers might be stunned to learn this, but, once upon a time, “Sixty Minutes” ran stories on Big Pharma products that were killing and harming people, causing these products to be pulled from the market and companies having to pay major legal settlements and fines.

Alas, most medical scandals that were ultimately exposed were exposed years after they should have been exposed.

For example, it took almost a decade for a reporter for The Wall Street Journal to expose Theranos and its founder, Elizabeth Holmes (long portrayed as a female Steven Jobs) as a colossal scam.

It took a while, but she was exposed.

(Note: An obscure blogger or “citizen journalist” actually provided this reporter the tip that caused him to start performing real journalism.)

One or two reporters tried to expose to the world that Perdue Pharma’s oxycontin was killing thousands of people and making drug addicts out of millions of people, but it took more than a decade for most citizens to accept this (and nobody has been sent to prison).

It wasn’t a medical scam, but Bernie Madoff was ultimately exposed for running the country’s longest running investment Ponzi scheme. (For years, a whistleblower and a few ignored pundits had been providing evidence Madoff was a fraud).

One real journalist at The Miami Herald single-handedly got Jeffrey Epstein re-arrested in 2019, 13 years after he’d been arrested the first time, in a story most of the press (and even the tabloids) treated like a Nothing Burger. (Here, strangely, or non-strangely, the “Johns” were NOT a “story” or “scandal.”)

This thought recently occurred to me …

As my readers must be aware by now, for years I’ve been lobbying for just one “thermo-nuclear” truth bomb to detonate - a truth bomb that would be so shocking and scandalous that the politicians would have to “do something” (or else, risk being voted out of office).

It’s recently occurred to me that nobody alive today has actually ever seen a “thermo-nuclear” Truth Bomb detonate.

A thermo-nuclear truth bomb would produce seismic consequences and result in legions of important officials being purged or prosecuted. Once real journalists had done their most-important job, everybody would know that (figuratively) heads need to roll.

While this essay has identified a few scandals that working journalists exposed, none came close to meeting my definition of a “thermo-nuclear truth bomb.”

For example, a thermo-nuclear truth bomb would be that the government (working with too many accomplices to list) created a faux pandemic and then spent trillions of dollars to to kill or cause the deaths and misery of hundreds of millions of citizens.

I know I’m naive and idealistic, but in my opinion, THIS would, indeed, qualify as thermo-nuclear scandal.

Given that no person who works in government is ever going to expose a narrative-obliterating scandal, this job would have to be performed by real journalists.

Since no “real journalist” in the corporate mainstream press will ever expose this scandal, by default, this task would have to be performed by “citizen journalists” writing on an independent platform like Substack.

However, if real journalists on Substack don’t reach enough people, this result won’t happen either (which explains my on-going effort to highlight “Substack metric trends”).

A final thought exercise …

If Life magazine was still published and could still, potentially, be seen by hundreds of millions of citizens, a cover photo of the embalmers’ clots might produce the journalistic result I’ve been looking for my entire adult life.

Given the examples cited above and the theme of today’s dispatch, when I reach the end of a story like this and get ready to hit the send button (and reach maybe 3,800 citizens and no politicians) …

… I often channel one of the country’s great unexposed villains, Hillary Clinton, and think to myself, “What difference does it make?”

Still, for some reason, I keep hitting the “send” button.

*** (Professional salaried journalists will soon be extinct, but, still, they are paid and most receive heath benefits. In contrast, citizen journalists include little solicitations like this at the end of every article we write.) ***

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