More musings on the media

Posted on | May 27, 2005 | Comments Off

Once upon a time, Newsweek published a story about internal Pentagon investigations that found mishandling of the Koran as a form of “interrogation” and intimidation at the Guantanamo Bay detention center by prison guards.

The Bush Administration found a way to discredit that report and many fingers were shaken at Newsweek for journalistic nautiness.

But now, it turns out that the Pentagon has confirmed that their internal investigation has found mishandling of the Koran at the Guantanamo Bay detention center by prison guards.

Don’t hold your breath waiting for the White House to acknowledge that its reactions to the Newsweek story were both overblown and unjust.

It’s pretty clear that this White House does its very best to (a) withhold information from the press, and (b) use its obfuscation techniques to both discredit the media and divert attention from its own misbehavior.

And I bring this up because, while The MicroEnterprise Joural could not in any way be compared to Newsweek except in the very, very basic matter of both being examples of news media, it reminds me of the way the Journal is currently being treated by the U.S. Small Business Administration.

They didn’t like something I once wrote, so now they are refusing to talk to me. On a certain level, that doesn’t matter because other people are still talking to me. But recognize the significance. A journalist absolutely depends on his or her sources. If nobody will talk to them, it becomes very difficult for that journalist to do anything more than regurgitate press relesaes.

And, if your small enough and your sources dry up, you go out of business.

If I were larger, like Newsweek, they might be trying to discredit me. Instead, they’ll try to shut me down by shutting me out. At least, that’s what it looks like from here.

Fortunately for me, the SBA shut out has not stopped me from being able to report on important issues for microbusinesses. Since the future of the U.S. economy is microbusiness, it looks on the surface as if the agency is deliberately trying to make itself irrelevant. Meanwhile, they may not be talking to me, but other people are.

And, once again, if they wonder why I am more skeptical of what they tell me than what other people tell me, I can only draw their attention to all the deception and obfuscation that comes from the other parts of the Bush Administration, and to the fact that I have no reason to believe their section of this Administration would be any different.


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Category: Journalism


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Dawn Rivers Baker, microbusiness journalistDawn Rivers Baker, aka The Journal Blogger, is the editor and publisher of The MicroEnterprise Journal, and the self-proclaimed Socrates of the small business blogosphere. See her official bio to learn more.


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