Reviews and Essays

Anthony Lappé and Stephen Marshall, True Lies (Plume Books, 2004)

“My job isn’t to assess the government’s information and be an independent intelligence analyst myself,” said Judith Miller, the reporter who promoted the Bush administration’s fallacious case for war in Iraq, to the New York Review of Books. “My job is to tell readers of The New York Times what the government thought about Iraq’s arsenal.”

Miller’s words serve as a painful reminder that the establishment media has become an innocuous middleman in the business of information, devoid of any investigative drive or willingness to scrutinize.

In their new book True Lies, Anthony Lappé and Stephen Marshall – founders of the Web-based independent media outlet Guerrilla News Network (GNN) – provide countless examples in which mainstream journalists like Miller have failed the American public by parroting the words of those in power. They report on stories that corporate media outlets have excluded from the “national consciousness”. While much of their reportage will hardly be revelatory in this golden age of Web-based media and political documentaries, Lappé and Marshall shed light on underreported stories that are of unquestionable importance to the integrity of U.S. democracy.

Readers learn that General Mahmoud Ahmed, director of Pakistan’s intelligence agency, met with high-level congressional and intelligence officials on Capitol Hill during the week of September 11, 2001. While foreign intelligence officials often meet with Washington insiders, the Indian media reported that Ahmed had allegedly wired $100,000 to Mohammed Atta, the ringleader of the 9/11 attacks, prior to September 11.

Ahmed’s proximity to high-level government officials at least deserved superficial scrutiny in light of these claims. But only an Indian journalist was willing to raise the question during a May 2002 White House press briefing. Afterwards, the journalist’s question was scrubbed from the official White House transcript and marked as “inaudible” on CNN’s transcription of the same briefing.

With the 2004 presidential election now weeks away, the most alarming story here relates to what is called black box voting. While the media focused on problems with paper ballots during the 2000 election, electronic voting machines in Florida’s Volusia County installed by the Diebold Corporation “subtracted 16,022 votes from Al Gore, and…gave 4,000 erroneous votes to George W. Bush later that night.” Further investigation by GNN financially links executives from the two electronic voting companies that “will play a role in approximately 80 percent of all votes cast in the 2004 United States election” to a far-right Christian movement.

Although Lappé and Marshall identify instances in which corporate powers directly pressure mainstream newsmakers, they recognize that this “does not explain how the political, social, and economic biases of corporate owners impact the news-making process on a direct, day-to-day level.” Here, Lappé and Marshall ask a difficult question: what compels the media to act “monolithically” and complacently when corporate leaders aren’t directly prevailing upon them?

The GNN team turns to cognitive psychology to answer this question. Unfortunately, they fail to rigorously engage with the theories that they employ. As a result, readers leave True Lies armed with countless examples of big media’s unwillingness to criticize but uncertain of what Lappé and Marshall believe are the underlying causes of this behavior.

True Lies offers readers something akin to a progressive media manifesto in its concluding chapter, which although slightly rhetorical, is praiseworthy as an exercise of self-scrutiny: “Clearly, we are in a crisis. Not just because corporate media has become an unofficial outpost of State propaganda, but also because the progressive, independent media have not found an adequate and powerful method of translating the values of their message to mainstream America.”

Independent media needs to appeal to mass audiences, according to Lappe and Marshall, by incorporating sexier MTV generation–friendly designs and focusing on less alienating messages. While GNN’s Web site gives evidence of their technological savvy, one wonders if GNN itself—the Guerrilla News Network—is up to the second task.

The GNN team’s nonpartisan reportage is at times marked by a rare tone of objectivity and a notable evenhandedness, as when they highlight the Indian government’s undeniable interest in linking the Pakistani government to 9/11. However, in other instances, it is all too apparent that they are partial to the theories of whistleblowers and skeptics, which will do little to bridge any political divides. For example, when reporting on the evidence behind the LIHOP theory—that 9/11 happened because the government strategically Let It Happen On Purpose—Lappé and Marshall do not incorporate the opinions of credible LIHOP skeptics.

Nonetheless, True Lies’ critique forces those of us who work for the progressive media to ask an important and often-avoided question: how do we write and report in a way that speaks to people who have different political beliefs and come from different communities and classes? In other words, how can independent journalists do more than just preach to the choir?