Jeffrey Cavanaugh
In another sign that organized capital is slowly usurping democracy here in the United
States, two un-news items came across the wire this week that raise disturbing questions about the incestuous relationship that exists between Corporate America and our elected officials.
“Un-news” is the operative doublespeak term here because the government has effectively
decided that reporting on them, despite that pesky First Amendment, is forbidden.
Yes, you heard that right; Big Brother is not only colluding with Big Business, but
subverting freedom of speech and freedom of the press in order to cover up corporate crimes, too. If that doesn’t scare the bejesus of you, it should, because such efforts to make reporting on corporate malfeasance a crime represent a new and frightening development in American politics.
Consider, for instance, the case of the recent oil spill in Arkansas that resulted from a
fractured underground oil pipeline owned by ExxonMobil that occurred on March 29. The
spill, which caused an unknown, but by all accounts huge, amount of oil to flow down the
streets of Mayflower, Ark., is a proverbial journalistic gold mine – especially given the
controversy surrounding the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline.
This pipeline would allow Canadian tar sand oil to flow to markets as far south as the Gulf of Mexico, and has been a focal point of conflict between the oil industry and its opponents in the environmental movement.
With the BP Gulf oil spill barely out of collective memory and the stakes involved over the
Keystone project, one might think a river of oil flowing through Small Town, USA like a gushing river might make for a good story.
ExxonMobil calling the shots?
It appears that ExxonMobil thought so too, which is why they have worked with local
law enforcement to shut down or otherwise hamper reporting on the disaster by media
representatives. Journalists, for instance, have been denied access to the spill response
command center and been told, by the local sheriff’s department, they face arrest for “criminal trespass” if they were found investigating the spill site on their own. When reporters attempted to do so, sheriff’s deputies rolled up and informed them that ExxonMobil “didn’t want them here.”
Nor were reporters able to determine just who, exactly, was was calling the shots in the
command center. The White House, for instance, has insisted that EPA representatives were
on the ground in Mayflower, but locals in the know have said the show was being run by Exxon.
Indeed, Mother Jones magazine has even reported that the phone number listed on the town’s website for the Mayflower Incident Unified Joint Command’s (the organization ostensibly running cleanup operations from the headquarter reporters were denied access to) Information Center is actually for an ExxonMobil public-relations office located in Fairfax, Va.
If that wasn’t enough, Salon reports that the Federal Aviation Administration has
declared the airspace above Mayflower to be a “no fly zone” until further notice – making it
effectively illegal to take aerial photos of the spill or clean-up efforts unless specific permission is granted to do so. Who does one ask for permission? Well, according to the FAA, ExxonMobil – which has been given complete control of Mayflower’s airspace by the FAA. Lucky for us, at least one intrepid reporter was able to take some aerial video of the spill before the FAA lockdown.
Affront to freedom of the press
All this is especially troubling because, as of yet, there is no clear indication of the size,
scope or ultimately the potential hazard posed by the spill to Mayflower’s human residents,
let alone its flora and fauna. What we do know, however, is that ExxonMobil has contracted
out environmental damage assessment to a firm known for consistently using bad science
to underestimate claims of environmental harm.
As for government officials, they are tight-lipped, with Arkansas’ Attorney Genera only willing to indicate publicly that the spill was “substantially larger than any of us initially thought.”
As if closing down media access to an ecological disaster site isn’t bad enough, the
promulgation of so-called “Ag Gag” laws are a direct affront to the freedom of the press. As
recently reported in The New York Times, undercover video footage of factory-farm practices – often taken by activists attempting to uncover animal welfare violations – have been pivotal pieces of evidence proving egregious violation of federal and state laws by farm and ranch operators.
The ability to take and distribute such video, however, is now being targeted by
corporate lobbyists who are seeking to see this muckraking journalism made illegal.
Already, they have succeeded in several agricultural states across the country. Now, in
places like Iowa or Missouri, activists that dare to take undercover footage could face fines,
prison time or even the listing of their organization as a “terrorist” entity on state and federal
law enforcement watch lists.
This crackdown, blatantly unconstitutional, has had an obvious chilling effect on the reporting of abusive practices at factory farms, and has led some activist groups to pull out of reporting on animal abuse in some states altogether. Whistleblowing journalism, it seems, is not something the proprietors of factory farm operations are willing to put up with any longer.
Troubling indicators
These two examples, mere data points that they may be, are nonetheless troubling
indicators of where the future may be heading. Recall, for instance, that secrecy surrounded
the 2008 bailout of Wall Street financial institutions. Indeed, it was so well shrouded from
public scrutiny that the public, to this day, is still largely ignorant of what went on.
Then, the argument put forth for denying the public information was that doing so might make the crisis worse. Now, there seems to be little legitimate excuse except the obvious one – this is a power grab by corporate America aimed at keeping the public in the dark and accountability at arm’s length.
A well-informed electorate, or at least one that has some idea about what is going on,
is a basic requirement for the proper functioning of democracy. Of course, the American public has never been as informed or knowledgeable about issues as many theorists of democracy would like, but it never used to be against the law to raise awareness via the power of the press. That the guaranteed right of journalists to tell a story is now in question in the land of the free and the home of the brave is perhaps the most dangerous development in decades.
It is, quite frankly, much more threatening to democracy than warrantless wiretaps, indefinite
detention, drones or Washington gridlock for the simple reason that without the press, these
other issues would never come to light.
When asked about what the delegates to our Constitutional Convention had wrought
way back in 1789, Benjamin Franklin famously replied “a republic, if you can keep it.” Those
words are as true today as they were way back when we had just shucked off the tyranny
of King George III.
It would be a pity if, after all these years, we were to lose that hard-won
republic due to the machinations of corporate plutocrats and their paid stooges in our two-
party system. Of course, if we did, given the way things are going, we probably wouldn’t hear
about it anyway.