Disclosing the gay-bashing preacher who hires his own rent-boy is a satisfying feeling on a purely personal level; all cultures have a special distaste for the hypocritical and two-faced, especially by the intolerant.
On a more professional level, it is even more gratifying when journalists uncover the nation’s policies that clash and contradict. In these cases, they range from the absolute hypocritical to the simply inept.
Whether the two front-page reports in The New York Times in recent weeks will have any lasting impact remains to be seen, but they revealed how our ostensible allies in the Kurdish region of Iraq are supplying oil to Iran in contravention of American calls for an embargo. The Times noted with interviews and photos that this trade is not a surreptitious activity but a daily caravan of more than 1,000 oil tanker trucks traveling U.S. protected roads that are helping Iran sustain itself against the embargo.
On another topic that is even more directly contradictory, the Times reported that the IRS allows tax deductions for religious groups that are funding Israeli settlement activity in the Palestinian West Bank, contrary to U.S. declarations, agreements and policy interests in the region. Whether the interests are political or religious, The Times’ story showed interest groups can find support and work around policy despite the nation’s expressed intentions.
You might uncover dozens of examples of such policy contradictions but finding the journalists and the institutions willing to fund that type of international reporting is becoming more difficult. Sure there are inspector general reports and there is at least some congressional oversight, but without independent eyes and ears paying attention to hypocrisy and two-faced policy, it will be a lot easier to get away with it.
Finally, it’s not that the press comes through unscathed by its own hypocrisy and contradictions: A study conducted by students at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University looked back at reporting during several years of the Bush administration and detailed how the most influential print news media generally stopped using the word “torture” after administration officials insisted on using the euphemism “enhanced interrogation techniques” to describe waterboarding prisoners.
Officials, from President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney on down, were adamant that waterboarding was not “torture.” Almost overnight, according to the study, the nation’s largest newspapers changed their language. Almost as soon as it was challenged by the administration’s political supporters, the media stopped using the word “torture” supposedly because they didn’t want to “take sides” in the debate. Of course, as Glen Greenwald of Salon and other commentators have pointed out, that is taking a side, the administration’s side. Never mind that the media have used the word “torture” for decades to describe the same painful and frightening interrogation technique. It was correct to call it that from the Middle Ages to Japanese treatment of American POWs in World War II, but not between the years 2004-2008.
