Op-Ed

Speaking with grace and ease, a pensive network anchor compared the America of today with the one of a year ago. His script had the ring of media truth at the start of a new season. "How different the summer is going to be for all of us," CNN's Aaron Brown told viewers. A minute later, he added: "Summer life is going on. It's just different. Everything is."

Such assertions have repeated endlessly in media circles. They make sense if dictionaries are now obsolete and words don't really need to mean anything in particular. "Everything" is "different" for "all of us" only when the preposterous can be rendered plausible.

As a practical matter, virtually closed loops often dominate major news outlets. The result is what we could call "monomedia." When similar noises keep filling echo chambers, they tend to drown out other sounds.

July Fourth gives us an opportunity to pause and reflect. This holiday commemorates a revolution that made possible the extraordinarily important First Amendment. These days, in theory, just about everyone in the country has freedom to speak. But freedom to be heard is another matter.

Many Americans feel under siege from advertising that insults intelligence and helps to degrade the nation's cultural environment. While serving the interests of advertisers, the daily ad-mania makes us sick -- sometimes quite literally. What can we do about it?

No easy solution is in sight. The ad craziness has gotten extreme in a context of greatly centralized economic power afflicting nearly the entire media landscape. "The bottom line is that fewer and fewer huge conglomerates are controlling virtually everything that the ordinary American sees, hears and reads," independent Rep. Bernie Sanders wrote recently in The Hill newspaper. With probably undue optimism, he added: "This is an issue that Congress can no longer ignore."

AUSTIN, Texas -- "Jaw, jaw," said Winston Churchill, "is better than war, war."

I bring up the not-often-contested notion that peace is better than war only because it seems the Bush administration is incapable of grasping the self-evident. According to The New York Times, President Bush has directed his top security people -- a happy nest of neo-con hawks -- "to make a doctrine of pre-emptive action against states and terrorist groups trying to develop weapons of mass destruction." This means, we declare war first. This dogma "will be the foundation of a new national security strategy."

Let's see, we already have our military in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Georgia and the Philippines. We are also deeply into Colombia as part of the Drug War and have fairly regular deployment by special ops in Somalia, Iraq, Syria and Yemen.

EL PASO, Texas -- - Tony Sanchez, Democratic candidate for governor of Texas, made an effective speech at the state convention here. Some of you may not recognize this as a "STOP THE PRESSES!" moment, but that's because life has not forced you to listen to his previous efforts. Entire audiences have been stunned into immobility by the awesome mediocrity of Early Sanchez Oratory. Congratulations to the voice coach, the drama coach, the speechwriters and the candidate -- it's clear they've all been working hard.

It was a peppy crowd of Democrats whooping it up in Sun City -- evidence that they think have a shot at the statewide offices this year. The D's appear to be way more revved up than the R's were in Dallas a week earlier, though sometimes it's hard to compare the parties -- since R's, on the whole, spend more time at prayer breakfasts, while the D's drink more beer. The D's Irish-American Caucus met daily when the bar opened.

American journalism has devoted massive attention to reporting on business in recent years. Overall news outlets are enthralled with efforts in our society to maximize corporate profits and personal wealth. Top executives and shrewd investors are good bets to emerge as media heroes, unless or until they appear to be headed for prison. Insatiable avarice -- always pushing for more, more, more -- is unlikely to cause bad press. In fact, journalists are apt to cite enthusiasm for boosting "net worth" as evidence of sturdy character.

Half a century ago, sociologist C. Wright Mills warned of "a creeping indifference and a silent hollowing out." In the United States, he observed, "money is the one unambiguous criterion of success," and behind the obvious fact that people "want money" lurked the more unsettling reality that "their very standards are pecuniary." A few years later, author Vance Packard asked a key question: "By encouraging people constantly to pursue the emblems of success, and by causing them to equate possessions with status, what are we doing to their emotions and their sense of values?"

Thirty years have passed since Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein began to cover the Watergate story. The investigative journalism that they did back then still stands out as exceptional. Unfortunately.

For a long time after the arrests of five burglars at the Democratic National Committee's executive offices in the early morning of June 17, 1972, the conventional media wisdom was to accept the White House depiction of a minor crime without any political significance. During that summer and fall, few journalists devoted much time to probing the Watergate incident as President Nixon cruised to a landslide re-election victory in November.

"At the time of Watergate, there were some 2,000 full-time reporters in Washington, working for major news organizations," Bernstein later pointed out. "In the first six months after the break-in ... 14 of those reporters were assigned by their news organizations to cover the Watergate story on a full-time basis, and of these 14, half-a-dozen on what you might call an investigative basis."

AUSTIN, Texas -- In the Most Chilling Quote category, consider this gem from Mitchell Daniels, director of the office of Management and Budget, concerning the administration's ongoing campaign to deregulate everything in sight: "We must learn to speak the vocabulary of consumer protection."

Oooo, Grandma, what big teeth you have! The Wall Street Journal did an admiring profile this week of the "regulatory czar," John D. Graham, who works for Mitchell. Graham, you may recall, was the subject of a peppy confirmation fight on account of he founded Harvard's Center for Risk Analysis. The center is heavily funded by business and industry groups and by individual businesses. You will be amazed to learn that the center often criticizes regulations disliked by the very people who give it money! Graham once claimed that government regulations kill 60,000 Americans a year, a figure that turned out to be ... evanescent.

DALLAS -- The world will little note nor long remember what was said at the Republican state convention last weekend. Nevertheless, the shindig had its moments. (I first saw the Lincoln quote applied to some political event in the Boston Globe a while back, but I can no longer remember who wrote it.)

A supremely nostalgic moment occurred during the convention's recognition of Sen. Phil Gramm for Lifetime Achievement. Gramm responded graciously, as befits a retiring pol making his final appearance, thanking all and sundry, giving us his fondest memories of public service: "I had the honor to be a storm trooper in the Reagan Revolution," he declared. But then, he couldn't help himself. The old pit bull dropped the statesman pose and went for the Democrats' jugular. He started in politics as an attack dog and finished that way, too -- in its way, a glorious moment.

"Even one military move by either of these nuclear-armed neighbors," USA Today's front page reported in big type, "could set off an unstoppable chain reaction that could lead to the holocaust the world has feared since the atomic bomb was developed." The June 10 edition of Newsweek includes a George Will column with a chilling present-day reference to the Cuban Missile Crisis: "The world may be closer to a nuclear war than it was at any time during the Cold War -- even October 1962."

Yet when it comes to nuclear weapons, the mainstream American press has scant emotional range or professional zeal to scrutinize the progression of atomic perils. From the start of the nuclear era, each man in the Oval Office has carefully attended to public relations, with major media rarely questioning the proclaimed humanitarian goals.

AUSTIN, Texas -- The Securities and Exchange Commission is now investigating Halliburton -- the company formerly run by Vice President Dick Cheney -- for accounting irregularities. What took so long?

Dick Cheney's record at Halliburton is one of the most under-covered stories of the past three years. When you consider all the time and ink spent on Whitewater, the neglect of the Cheney-Halliburton story is unfathomable.

The proximate cause of the SEC investigation is an "aggressive accounting practice" at Halliburton approved by the accounting firm Arthur Andersen -- a little matter of counting revenue that had not yet been received, $100 million worth. The New York Times reports two former executives of Dresser Industries, which merged with Halliburton in 1998, say Halliburton used the accounting sham to cover up its losses. Dresser may have thought it got a bad deal in that merger because of that $100 million "anticipation" on the credit line, but the deal turned out to be much more sour for Halliburton.