I first noticed access journalism rearing Hydra heads during Reagan's run for the Presidency against Carter. Rather than question his nonsense, the press seemed to accept his upbeat attitude and pronouncements of anti-government paradigms that were more fantasy than reality. Actually,I was mildly aware of the syndrome during a stint as a cub reporter for the Lincoln Journal in the Vietnam era.The managing editor, Joe Seacrest, had inherited a newspaper and was keen to use its voice as a public relations tool for country-club cronies and politically reactionaries of every stripe. The standard method of dealing with controversial subjects was to interview the administrators in the first few paragraphs and then give a sop to those who were dealing with the problems. The administrators inevitably said that these lower level voices were those of people with grudges about salaries or other grievances rather than valid complaints.The term "objective journalism" was employed to spay and neuter the profession. We were to be the eunuchs in the harem. As now, on occasion some egregious scandal would erupt, and a business/government cozy deal would be uncovered and trotted out to make it seem that the newspaper was not in cahoots with business. These stories were in spite of, rather than because of the policy of self-censorship. When a professor was selected as a sacrificial lamb to the right-wing after he expressed an inappropriate level of respect for his betters in negotiations over appropriate ways to express resistance to the insanity that was Vietnam, our paper decided to editorially support that professor's expulsion using Nixonian rhetoric and pet phrases such as "let us make one thing perfectly clear" to disguise the process of making public policy perfectly dirty. After students at the University of Nebraska took over the ROTC building for a night of fun and negotiations, I wrote a story detailing the chronology of events from the point of view of the students. Although the same chronology was held up at the faculty senate meeting the day after the event as the most accurate account of the night, our paper did not publish this account, choosing rather to publish stories that ran through all the administrators' and student leaders' second-hand accounts of the events. In those days, as now, you are either with them or against them, and if against them, you are silenced. Small wonder that voices like Molly Ivins and Hunter Thompson became few and far between. So the main cause of all this sucking up to the powers that be was and is economic. Rather than tell truth to power as only comedy channels, Imus, and PBS presently do, most media outlets worry themselves into submission. Actually, the popularity of voices such as Imus, Stewart, Colbert, and others prove there is an economic advantage to speaking frankly and in some cases insensitively. (The notion of insensitivity is, however, a whole nuther problem even though it has contributed to muzzling the press's traditional function of muck-racking, gadflying, and shouting about naked emperors.) Even though the American people enjoy lampooning their leaders in cartoons, satirical editorials and the like, managing editors from coast to coast routinely muzzle their reporters ostensibly to be unbiased, but in fact to protect vested interests they are comfortable with and wish to promote.

There is a fine line here, quite obviously. I agree that CNN definitely compromised ethics and objectivity by failing to speak the complete truth of Sadam. However, what kind of boat would they or any other network or paper be in if they burned their bridges and were barred from a nation that needed to be reported from? Furthermore, and more importantly, what kind of boat would the world be in if reporters weren't watching and writing things they saw? The best way to get a story is by actually seeing what is happening. Though details were glossed over, there was no question that what Sadam was doing was wrong. Last time I checked, everyone in the U.S. knew what kind of horrible violence was going on in Iraq. It isn't as though we were completely in the dark. In dangerous, war-ridden countries, what else can anyone do? Give up everything, or bend slightly to at least see something? I agree that the ethics of objective journalism are completely eroding, but in some cases, in a world of politics and "anything goes" it would be very naive to believe that anyone could be completely objective and unremorseful.