Sometimes the Best Journalists Aren't Journalists

Sometimes the best journalism is something else. It doesn't fit into the usual categories. It doesn't report on breaking news or appear on a page as analytical reportage. Nor does it pass the muster for sound bites or long-form televised discourse as historic events unfold.

In times of epoch-changing turmoil, the traditional modes of journalism can render real service. Sometimes we quickly learn key facts. And, if we're lucky, some real insights are available along with the nonsense and worse.

But other times, vital factual information is scarcely mentioned, or what's asserted as fact is actually nothing of the kind — as in news reports on the Gulf of Tonkin incidents that provided a springboard for U.S. escalation of the Vietnam War in August 1964.

During this decade, the false truism of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction led to the horrors of the Iraq invasion and occupation.

In the wake of 9/11, overall, the main journalistic outlets of the United States fed us falsehoods, hysteria, self-righteousness and endless permutations on rationales for waging war in Afghanistan and Iraq. Few journalists with regular access to corporate-owned (or, in the case of PBS and NPR, corporate-underwritten) news media actually did much more than go with the flow of the warfare state's massive propaganda flood. The exceptions among journalists were either too marginalized or too mincing in their departures to make much impact.

The most prescient and insightful voices in the launching period of the "war on terrorism" included some famous writers best known as novelists and essayists. None were more prescient or insightful than Joan Didion and Norman Mailer.

Now, as we near the sixth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, reading the observations by Didion and Mailer can be chilling.

During the second year of the "war on terrorism" — which was increasingly being shortened to the even vaguer "war on terror" — both Didion and Mailer were out with books that drew on assessments they had made in essays or interviews after 9/11.

Didion wrote: "We had seen, most importantly, the insistent use of Sept.

11 to justify the reconception of America's correct role in the world as one of initiating and waging virtually perpetual war."

There, in one sentence, an essayist and novelist had captured the essence of a historical moment that vast numbers of journalists had refused to recognize — or, at least, had refused to publicly acknowledge. Didion put to shame the array of self-important and widely lauded journalists at the likes of The New York Times, The Washington Post, PBS and National Public Radio.

In effect — instead of, even in theory, being a war to end all wars - - the new U.S. war would be a war to end peace. And the war seemed, by rhetorical design, to be inherently endless.

In early 2009, we are entering what could be called Endless War 2.0 — with escalation of warfare in Afghanistan as the newest application of technological might and domestic political acquiescence.

Now, although the extreme repression of open debate has greatly dissipated since the first months after 9/11, there is an ominously narrow range of political media discourse on Afghanistan — while, we're told, the United States is on the verge of committing to double its troop deployment there to 60,000 by the end of this year.

Half a decade ago, words from Norman Mailer — published in his early 2003 book "Why Are We at War?" — were grimly prophetic. They are now all too relevant to the present moment: "This war, if it proliferates over the next decade, could prove worse in one respect than any conflict we have yet experienced. It is that we will never know just what we are fighting for. It is not enough to say we are against terrorism. Of course we are. In America, who is not? But terrorism compared to more conventional kinds of war is formless, and it is hard to feel righteous when in combat with a void, for then the action smacks of rage and relative impotence, a frightful combination that deprives warrior and citizen alike of any sense of virtue. Be it said, the sense of national virtue is crucial to waging a war."

Norman Solomon is author of "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death." For more information, go to: www.normansolomon.com

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