Charles Reeves

[Sept 22, 2003] Charley Reese Dangers Of War

Here is a quotation from Reich Marshal Hermann Goering. It's a statement he made during the Nuremberg trials:

"The people can always be brought to the bidding of leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."

Eric Margolis, an excellent journalist, quoted this in a recent column. While I can't verify the quote, I have no reason to doubt it. After all, it is one of those truths that are immediately recognized as an accurate statement about the human condition. Different people have expressed the thought through the centuries.

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Thomas Jefferson said it best when he observed that those who expect to be ignorant and free expect what never was nor ever will be. We, the American people, are not really free if we can't control our own government and its policies. And we will never do that if we remain ignorant.

The news media are partly to blame. I've often said that future historians charting the decline and fall of the United States will damn American journalism for abusing its freedom.

Public education is also to blame. Let's face it — it's a failure. The American taxpayers spend more on education than anybody else in the world and get less for it. It's not the fault of teachers. God knows most of them are frustrated beyond belief. The entrenched and politicized bureaucracy gives teachers and students the least of its attention.

Teachers teach, but only students can learn, and if the students have no desire to learn, there is nothing the best teachers in the world can do about it. Becoming educated is something individuals must do by themselves. And it's hard work.

The worst thing politicians do is mandate that teachers must produce uniform results on standardized tests. The problem with that crazy idea is that students are not uniform. The elephant at the education tea party everybody ignores is IQ. Students with high IQs will do better on standardized tests than students with low IQs. No amount of teaching will erase that gap.

But there are other ways in which students are not uniform, too. Some are healthy. Some are not. Some come from homes with supportive parents. Some come from dysfunctional homes. There is no point in expecting political demagogues who are willing to abuse both teachers and students to understand the complexity of education. Hence, the solution is to abolish public education altogether and start over.

In the meantime, it's never too late to educate oneself. The public library offers the equivalent of a free graduate education to anybody interested in pursuing it. And always be wary of demagogues quick to brand dissenters as unpatriotic.

[Sept 8, 2003] Charley Reese/Great New Book

To sum up, politicians routinely tell you what you want to hear, what will make you feel good. Bovard tells you, as a citizen, what you need to know. The truth is certainly less pleasant than government fairy tales, but Americans need to be realists. Government is a human institution, and human beings are flawed. Therefore, government is just as likely to be incompetent, to lie, to commit injustices, to exaggerate its virtues and to cover up its vices as is any other human institution.

I spent a lot of years close to government, and I can tell you that elected officials and bureaucrats are exactly as human as anyone else. Some are smart, some are stupid, some are brave, some are cowards, some are honest, some are crooks, some are conscientious, some are irresponsible, some love this country, and some lust for power.

To put blind faith in government is as stupid as putting blind faith in what a used-car salesman tells you. It is also un-American. In our great country, sovereignty rests with the people, and the proper attitude of a citizen toward government at all levels is courteous skepticism. Elected officials and bureaucrats are your servants, not your masters.

Government is not a benign institution. It is institutionalized force. Mao Tse-tung spoke the truth when he said the power of government comes out of the barrel of a gun. George Washington likened government to fire — a useful servant but a fearful master. If you want to remain free, you must always be wary of government, because governments, not private terrorists, are and always have been the greatest threats to liberty and the greatest mass murderers in history. The U.S. government has already killed three times as many innocent people in the war on terror than al-Qaida killed on Sept. 11.

Charley Reese Former Tank Gunner

I've noticed on the cable talk shows, sometimes called "news," that the so-called experts are always introduced as former somethings — former Green Berets, former CIA officers, former generals or colonels, etc. and so forth.

Well, not to be outdone, I'd like for you to know that I am a former tank gunner. Naturally, that doesn't make me an expert on anything except firing a now-obsolete 90 mm tank gun, but what the hey, being a former Green Beret or CIA case officer doesn't make one an expert on the Middle East or terrorism or anything else, either. Expertise is not a product of vocation outside the field of that vocation. America has an excess of pseudo-experts and a critical shortage of legitimate experts.

Nevertheless, as a former private first class and tank gunner, I would like to point out another of the many contradictions in the Pentagon. At the same time that there is general acknowledgment that American armed forces are "stretched thin," the secretary of defense ("SecDef," in military jargon) is busily preparing to cut "excess capacity." This will include plans to eliminate more military bases, which has chambers of commerce all over the country as nervous as a fastidious cat trapped in a house without a litter box.

So what's the deal? Do we have too many forces or too few? Is our military stretched thin, or is it obese?

Well, regardless of what the SecDef thinks, I can tell you as a former private first class that your forces have to match your missions. I would say that right now we have an excess of missions and consequently a shortage of forces. It would seem to me to be common sense to reduce the number of missions rather than reduce further the armed forces, given that the president has managed to destabilize most of the world. We have, to use that abominable cliche, "boots on the ground" in about 120 different countries, none of which is a threat to America.

Another military maxim that even privates know is that you evaluate your potential enemies based on their capabilities to do you harm. Intentions can change instantly; capabilities cannot. Right now, the only countries that have the capabilities of inflicting serious harm on America are Russia, China and possibly North Korea.

It then follows as fleas to a dog that we have misdeployed our armed forces, and they are assigned missions most of which have nothing to do with protecting the United States of America. Last time I checked the Constitution, that is the only role allowed for the armed forces of the United States.

Still another maxim privates know is that the mission dictates the size and shape of the forces, not the other way around. Since at the moment we are engaged in guerrilla warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan and supposedly with terrorists, the appropriate forces are special operations and light infantry — not armored divisions or naval armadas. A nation as in debt as we are cannot afford to use million-dollar missiles just to kill one or two scraggly terrorists with serious body odor.

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All I can say is that given the leadership in Washington, I'm darn glad to be a former private first class rather than a current private first class. One of the disadvantages of being in the military is that stupid leaders can get you killed for no good or useful reason.

October 29, 2003 Charley Reese Too Much Secrecy

It is a sad thing, but the Bush administration is the most deceptive (or, if you wish to be generous, the most misinformed and manipulated) crew that has occupied the White House in the past few decades.

It is also the most secretive administration.

Let's get down to basics. There are two reasons, and only two reasons, for classifying any information as secret. One, of course, is information that would inform an enemy of our military plans and thus enable the enemy to counter them. The other reason is when revealing the information would reveal the human source of the information, such as a spy.

Using those standards, darn little information would be classified, but the Bush administration seems to want to classify everything. Why, for example, should the report of David Kay's search for weapons of mass destruction be classified? There can be nothing in that report that the Iraqis don't know. One can conclude that the only harm full publication would cause would be political embarrassment to the Bush administration.

The fact is, those inspectors work for the American people, the American people are paying their salaries and expenses, and by God the American people are entitled to know what they are getting for their money. No national-security matter is involved whatsoever.

Why classify that part of a report of a congressional inquiry that involves the Saudis? The Saudi Arabian government publicly demanded that it be declassified. Why should the American people be denied the results of their elected officials' work? Just what harm is going to be caused by letting the American people know what a number of members of Congress and their staffs already know?

Why should the names of anyone held by the federal government, in U.S. jails or in Guantanamo, be classified as secret? This is pure totalitarianism. The ridiculous term "enemy combatant" really means a person whose rights are being denied. You can't have a combatant without a war, and when people in a war are captured, they are prisoners of war, subject to all the rights spelled out by the Geneva Convention.

Certainly these people have relatives and friends who know they are being held somewhere and of course know their names. Why can't those names be published? It's ridiculous. This administration is paranoid. It is not safe to have mentally unhealthy people wielding great power.

The American people should be angry. They pay every penny of the cost of government. It is their government. They have a right to know anything the government knows and anything the government does, with the two exceptions cited above. It is not a foreign enemy the Bush administration fears. It is the American people.

I read some years ago an estimate that two-thirds of American history is still classified, and I don't doubt that at all. Stuff going all the way back to World War II is still classified long after there is rational reason for it being so.

I hope the American people will realize eventually that people who lie to them and keep secrets from them are people who consider them to be enemies. Any politician who fears or dislikes the American people should be routed out of office immediately.

The Bush administration, for its own private reasons, wanted to go to war against a country that had not attacked us, had not threatened to attack us and did not have the capability of attacking us. Therefore it concocted a lie about non-existent weapons and nonexistent relationships with al-Qaida. Now, to protect its lies, the administration wants to classify practically everything that has to do with the Iraq War and occupation.

I'm sure the president's friends in Texas miss him, and next year, hopefully, the American people will return him to their bosom. He is, for all his faults, a decent and affable man who probably knows less of what's going on in his own administration than we do. At least some of us are interested; he doesn't seem to be.

Charley Reese Compulsory Volunteerism

American politics has become so dumbed down that no one seems to have picked up on the contradiction in Gen. Wesley Clark's proposal for a civilian reserve force.

People who volunteered would sign up for five years and could be called to "active duty" by the president for up to six months. They could also be sent overseas. Compulsory volunteerism is, of course, a contradiction in terms.

People have become confused because the alternative to a military draft is called an "all-volunteer" force rather than what it is, which is a mercenary force. That is acceptable use of the language. Nevertheless, it is misleading. What one does when one "volunteers" for military service is enlist in and join an organization. The instant you take the oath, you are required to obey orders. Like the sham democracies in some African countries, where people get to vote one time and then live under a dictatorship, you volunteer one time to join and thereafter are subject to compulsion.

What the general is proposing is another military-style organization without uniforms or weapons. The general ought to watch the famous film of the Munich rally of the Nazi party. Adolf Hitler had the same idea. The film shows thousands of civilians standing at attention holding shovels. They were called, I believe, "labor battalions."

Americans need to understand the difference between patriotism and nationalism. A patriot loves his land and his people. A nationalist loves his government. The patriot voluntarily does what is necessary to protect his land and his people. A nationalist blindly obeys his government.

I'd be damned before I would allow my life to be disrupted because some American version of the Fuehrer decided that I needed to dig sewers in Haiti or paint schools in Iraq. I will never volunteer to be compelled to do anything. My concept of volunteerism is someone who does something of his own free will and is free to stop doing it whenever he decides to stop. Being compelled to volunteer is an Orwellian concept designed to put a false face on compulsion.

In this age of neo-imperialism, Americans ought to remember that all citizens, including the president and every other public official, have but one duty: to obey the Constitution. The Constitution does not authorize a "Dear Leader" or a "Fuehrer." It authorizes us to elect a fellow citizen who will, for a four-year term, administer the federal government and enforce its laws. A man holding the office of the president is no different from any other citizen and is subject to the same laws as the rest of us. He is, despite his duty as commander in chief, a civilian, not a military person.

The fact that modern presidents act like emperors, live in what has become a fortified palace and travel surrounded by Praetorian Guards should stand as a warning that we have strayed far from our American traditions. Do you know that after the recent United Nations meetings, the chancellor of Germany strolled out of the building and chatted with reporters on the sidewalks of New York? At the same time, the president, supposedly the leader of the free nation of America, was whisked out of the building surrounded by armed guards and hurried away in his armored limousine.

Charley Reese Spots Show On White Hats

There is an old saying among political-campaign professionals that if you wear the white hat, you'd better be sure it doesn't get any spots on it.

That's just another way of saying that if you choose to be judgmental of others and moralistic, then you'd better be sure there are no skeletons in your closet. People are tolerant of rascals; they tend to be intolerant of guys who pretend to be holier than the rest of us.

Thus, accusing Arnold Schwarzenegger of a few sexual- and dope-related escapades in the context of Hollywood, a Babylon of immorality, was like throwing a few spots of paint on a Jackson Pollock painting. Out there it is the traditional moralist who is the freak.

On the other hand, when Bill Bennett, a self-appointed preacher of virtue, turns out to be a compulsive gambler, and Rush Limbaugh, who once urged that white drug addicts be locked up, turns out to be addicted to painkillers, it embarrasses their friends and emboldens their enemies.

Some are saying Limbaugh should be arrested and prosecuted. Buying prescription drugs without a prescription is a violation of the law. Poor people are sometimes jailed for this offense.

But instead of jailing Limbaugh, we should stop jailing poor addicts. People who are addicted to drugs, prescription or otherwise, have a medical problem. Their drug-related activities are crimes only because the government has arbitrarily decided to criminalize the use of certain drugs. This is as stupid as another failed experiment — when the government decided to ban the consumption of alcohol.

The phony war on drugs that has cost billions of dollars and wrecked the lives of thousands of people is Prohibition all over again. Whenever the government decides to arbitrarily outlaw a product people want, outlaws organize to provide it. What did Prohibition accomplish? It created organized crime, expanded the powers of government and encouraged public corruption. What has the drug war accomplished? It has created new, more deadly criminal organizations, expanded the power of government and practically institutionalized public corruption. In neither case has the original purpose — reduction of consumption — been achieved.

The sensible way to combat addiction to harmful drugs is through education and treatment. At the same time, there should be a legal source for those not yet able to kick the habit. Except for the corruption and greed, the drug war could be won overnight by simply legalizing the drugs. Cocaine cartels could not compete with licensed pharmacies and public health offices selling the stuff at cost.

The drugs are derived from plants that grow like weeds. Production is exceedingly cheap, which is what makes possible the outrageous profit margins that not only make outlaws rich but also fill the wallets of corrupt officials.

Let me tell you a naked truth: Selling illegal drugs is a retail business involving thousands of customers. Do you honestly think anyone can operate a clandestine retail business involving thousands of customers that the police don't know about? Grow up. If customers can find the drugs, so can the cops. Why do you think that after 40 years and billions of dollars, illegal drugs are still as plentiful and as cheap as they ever were? I'm not saying all cops are corrupt. They don't have to be. Some are, however, and so are some judges and prosecutors and customs agents, Drug Enforcement Administration agents and CIA agents. Thousand-dollar-a-week public employees are never going to make much headway against million-dollar-a-week criminals.

As for Limbaugh - from all accounts a rather sad man despite his millions - maybe this will make him more humble and tolerant. Words, after all, can return to bite you where it hurts.

The Facts About Rebellion

Which political leader made war on his own people, killing 262,000 of them, burning their cities, destroying their food supply and placing the survivors under military occupation?

If your answer is Saddam Hussein, you're wrong. The answer is Abraham Lincoln.

Accepting the Northern but incorrect view of the War Between the States, Lincoln did exactly the same thing Saddam Hussein did. When "his own people" rose up in armed rebellion, he crushed the rebellion, brutally and decisively.

I'm making this point not to disillusion you about Lincoln but to point out how propaganda works. One effective way to propagandize people is to take a fact out of context. Much has been made of the fact that Saddam Hussein crushed the Kurdish rebellion. Any leader of Iraq would have crushed the Kurdish rebellion. If the Scots rose up in armed rebellion today, British Prime Minister Tony Blair would crush, or try to crush, the rebellion. What do you think the British have been doing in Ireland lo these many years?

Any government will assert the right to self-defense. When our forefathers chose to secede from the British Empire, the British tried to crush what they considered a rebellion. And before you give up the delicious and high-quality products of France, you should remember that without French troops and the French fleet, the British would likely have succeeded.

I know it's idealistic foolishness to expect the government to tell the truth rather than to resort to propaganda. For that reason, we, as citizens, have to learn to recognize propaganda. To sell the war, the Bush administration has demonized Saddam Hussein. The fact is, Saddam is a run-of-the-mill dictator, worse than some, better than some. In the war against Iran, a nation with three times the population of Iraq, the Iraqis used chemical weapons. So did the Iranians. In World War I, the United States, the British, the French and the Germans used chemical weapons. In World War II, we used nuclear weapons. In Waco, Texas, in 1993, the Federal Bureau of Investigation used chemical weapons against American civilians.

It's quite true that, like any other dictator, Saddam treats his political opponents harshly, but it's also true that if you stay out of politics, you could live as freely in Baghdad as you can in New York City. Unlike a communist-style dictator, Saddam doesn't give a damn what Iraqis think or do unless it involves a threat to his hold on power. There are two categories of dictators: totalitarians who want to control every aspect of a person's life, and gangsters who just want to stay in power. Saddam is in the gangster category. Iraqi women, for example, are entitled to free education, just the same as men, and are free to choose any vocation they wish. Prior to the Gulf War, Iraq had one of the largest middle classes in the Middle East, one of the best education systems and one of the best health care systems. We, not Saddam, have destroyed all three with the war and economic sanctions.

Another propaganda technique is to focus on Saddam. To hear the Bush administration and to watch American television, you'd think Iraq was occupied by one individual, Saddam. He's only one of 25 million people, and the overwhelming majority of Iraqis are just like us, with the same dreams and hopes we have.

I don't give a damn about Saddam Hussein. He's a tough guy and a killer. He's lived 66 years in a tough and dangerous world. I'm sure he's ready to die if it comes to that. But why should Iraqi children have to die or be maimed or orphaned just because our political leader doesn't like their political leader? It's too bad we can't give Bush and Saddam each a knife, put them both in a dark room and let them settle the matter between themselves.

Charley Reese

Is it any wonder that millions of people around the world and in the United States don't support President George Bush's personal crusade to topple Saddam Hussein? Keep in mind that after the Sept. 11 attack, which Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with, virtually the entire world united in sympathy with us. Never has one president destroyed so much support by so many people in so short a time.

The fact is, the people in the Bush administration who want to go to war with Iraq wanted to go to war with Iraq before Sept. 11. As a matter of fact, they wanted to go to war with Iraq before George Bush was even elected president. That's a matter of record. This war against Iraq has nothing to do with disarming Iraq and nothing to do with terrorism. It has to do with the United States creating a situation in which it and Israel will dominate the Middle East and its oil resources.

The thing to remember about these alleged weapons of mass destruction is that nobody in the Bush administration or with the United Nations has ever laid eyes on them. What exists is a discrepancy between two numbers in reports — both supplied by the Iraqi government. One report stated that so many chemical bombs were used; another report had a different number. And the Iraqis are certainly right in that nobody can prove a negative; you can't produce for inspection what you don't have.

I personally don't know if these weapons exist in Iraq or not. I do know they exist in many other countries. I do know that in the Gulf War, Iraq did not use any chemical or biological weapons, even when it was being routed from Kuwait and "bombed back into the preindustrial age," to use an American phrase. I do know that in the 12 years since, Iraq has not used any chemical or biological weapons, even though it has been subjected to the harshest economic sanctions in modern history and to practically regular bombing. I do know that in the past 12 years, Iraq has not threatened, much less attacked, any of its neighbors, while during that the same period of time we have attacked Sudan, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq and Yugoslavia. I do know that every one of the "neighbors" George Bush claims Iraq is a threat to has said repeatedly that it does not feel threatened by Iraq.

I do know that the only leader threatening the world with nuclear weapons and pre-emptive attack is George W. Bush. It gives me no pleasure to point that out. But it is not the role of an American citizen to be a sheep. It has become apparent that those of us who supported Bush made a mistake. I'm beginning to believe that a philanderer and a liar is less dangerous than an upright but ignorant man who thinks God has appointed him to rule the world.

Charley Reese The Last One

OK, this is my last anti-war column. The president's going to go, and I have a rule that when Americans go into combat, I don't criticize the war they're in. I'll raise hell trying to stop them from going to war, but once they're in it, I support them.

So I want you to do me, and yourself, a favor. Buy or rent two videos. One is "Black Hawk Down," the story of the Rangers' battle in Mogadishu, Somalia, and the other is "We Were Soldiers," the story of the battle in Drang Valley in Vietnam. Both are very good films, both are based on true stories, and both give as reasonably accurate a picture of war as you can get without making the audience throw up in their popcorn.

You watch these two films and then remind yourself "When I say 'let's go to war,' I'm saying young Americans should be subjected to this. While I'm sitting at home watching the war on television, this is the kind of hell these young men and women will be going through."

In both battles, Americans fought so heroically, sacrificed themselves so selflessly, it makes you want to cry. But you know what's really sad about these battles? Neither one mattered a damned bit. Neither one changed anything. A quarter of a million wounded and 57,000 dead Americans later, Vietnam went communist. In Mogadishu, not only was Mohammed Aideed never captured, but the United States later cut a deal with him. He died in 1996, and one of his sons is now the warlord.

All that heroism, all that blood, all that pain, all that suffering was for nothing. It accomplished nothing, nada, zero and zip.

Maybe you think that after Saddam Hussein is gone, everyone will live happily ever after, but I'm here to tell you that it will be the same. Nothing will change. No liberal democracy is going to bloom in the ancient desert of old Babylonia. No American will be able to say "I'm safer and freer now" because those young people died in Iraq. No Iraqi standing in the rubble is going to say, "Gee, I'm glad the Americans got rid of Saddam by destroying my home and my family." All this war is going to accomplish is to add to the world's store of misery — more death, more wounded, more destruction, more debt, more poverty, more hatred, more profits for the merchants of death, more pollution and more terrorism.

To waste something so precious as a young life is awful to think about. Look at the faces of these young soldiers. Many are barely more than boys, really. Boys always fight wars because it's too strenuous for old geezers. These days, the generals will sit in air-conditioned comfort far from the sound of guns. They will hold their briefings for the press. When the war is over and the young men are buried or packed away in VA hospitals or sent home to try to make a living, the generals will get the book contracts, take off on the lecture circuit and get rich. Some of them might even get gifts of stocks from grateful corporations that profited from the war. When the next war comes, they'll be on television as "Fox News consultants."

And I haven't even mentioned the suffering that will be inflicted on the Iraqis — their young boys, their children, mothers, fathers and grandfathers. You saw how Americans ran terrified from the collapse of the towers in New York. Imagine what it's like to be in a city that is being bombarded with 2,000-pound bombs, cruise missiles, artillery and Gatling guns. Imagine trying to save your children in such a mad inferno. Imagine what it would be like to see your children torn into ragged, bloody chunks of meat by shrapnel, or burned into a twisted piece of charcoal, with wet, yellow intestines leaking out. It's pure hell to be the collateral damage. But sit back and enjoy your war. It's what you want.

Pseudo-Journalists Betray the Public Trust Deceptively cloaked as journalists, these marketers of opinion are playing a nasty prank on the public, and indeed on journalism itself.


Even an Empire Needs Legitimacy. The Question Is, How Do We Win It?

From Law Clerk to Chief Justice, He Has Slighted Rights By John S. Carroll, John S. Carroll is editor of the Los Angeles Times. This piece is adapted from a speech he delivered at the University of Oregon earlier this month.

One reason I was drawn to my chosen career is its informality. Unlike doctors, lawyers or even jockeys, journalists have no entrance exams, no licenses, no governing board to pass solemn judgment when they transgress. Indeed, it is the constitutional right of every citizen, no matter how ignorant or how depraved, to be a journalist. This wild liberty, this official laxity, is one of journalism's appeals.

It is also one of its myths. I've come to realize that the looseness of the journalistic life, the seeming laxity of the newsroom, is an illusion. Yes, there's informality and there's humor, but beneath the surface lies something deadly serious. It is a code. Sometimes the code is not even written down, but it is deeply believed in. And, when violated, it is enforced with tribal ferocity.

Consider, for example, recent events at the New York Times. Even before it was discovered that the young reporter Jayson Blair had fabricated several dozen stories, the news staff of the Times was unhappy. Many members felt aggrieved at what they considered a high-handed style of editing. But until Jayson Blair came along, the rumble of discontent remained just that, a low rumble.

When the staff learned that the paper had repeatedly misled its readers, the rumble became something more formidable: an insurrection. The aggrieved party was no longer merely the staff. It was the reader, and that meant the difference between a misdemeanor and a felony. Because the reader had been betrayed, the discontent acquired a moral force that could only be answered by the dismissal of the ranking editors. The Blair scandal was a terrible event, but it also said something very positive about the Times, for it demonstrated beyond question the staff's commitment to the reader.

Several years ago at the Los Angeles Times, we too had an insurrection. The paper had published a fat edition of its Sunday magazine devoted to the opening of Staples Center. But unknown to its readers — and to the newsroom staff — the paper had formed a secret partnership with Staples, in which the developer helped the newspaper sell ads in the magazine in return for a cut of the proceeds. Thus was the independence of the newspaper compromised — and the reader betrayed.

I was not working at the newspaper at the time, but I've heard many accounts of a confrontation in the cafeteria between the staff and the publisher. It was not a civil discussion among respectful colleagues. Several people who told me about it invoked the image of a lynch mob. The Staples episode, too, led to the departure of the newspaper's top brass.

What does all this say about newspaper ethics? It says that certain beliefs are very deeply held. It says that a newspaper's duty to the reader is at the core of those beliefs. And it says that those who transgress against the reader will pay dearly. Such commitment, deeply imbedded in newsroom culture, is taken for granted in the so-called traditional media. In newer forms of media, however, it is a foreign language.

All across America, there are offices that resemble newsrooms, and in those offices there are people who resemble journalists, but they are not engaged in journalism. What they do is not journalism because it does not regard the reader — or, in the case of broadcasting, the listener or the viewer — as a master to be served.

In this realm of pseudo-journalism, the audience is regarded as something to be manipulated. And when the audience is misled, no one in the pseudo-newsroom ever offers a peep of protest.

Last Halloween, I was stuck in freeway traffic. Punching buttons on the car radio to alleviate the boredom, I came across a rebroadcast, 65 years after the fact, of Orson Welles' famous dramatization of "The War of the Worlds."

This radio drama portrayed a Martian invasion so realistically that it prompted hysteria. Believing that creatures from Mars were actually invading the town of Grover's Mill, N.J., listeners ran out into the streets, jammed police switchboards and gathered in churches to pray for deliverance. As I listened to the broadcast, it became obvious why people believed the Martians were at hand. It didn't sound like fiction; it sounded like journalism. The actors who described the unfolding events at Grover's Mill had the same stylized cadences and pronunciations as broadcast journalists of the time.

This is how the 23-year-old genius Orson Welles learned that journalism can be faked, and that people will invest their trust in something that sounds like journalism but isn't.

You may have guessed by now that I'm talking about Fox News. I am, but I am also talking about a broad array of talk shows and websites that have taken on the trappings of journalism but, when studied closely, are not journalism at all. Deceptively cloaked as journalists, these marketers of opinion are playing a nasty Halloween prank on the public, and indeed on journalism itself.

I can offer some eyewitness testimony. Last fall, The Times did something rash. Alone among the media that covered the California recall election, we decided to investigate the character of candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The recall campaign lasted only two months, so we had to hurry in determining whether, as rumored, Schwarzenegger had a habit of mistreating women. It turned out that he did. By the time we nailed the story down, the campaign was almost over, and we had a very tough decision to make: whether to publish the findings a mere five days before the election.

We decided to do so, figuring that choice was better than having to explain lamely to our readers after election day why we had withheld the story. We braced for an avalanche of criticism, and we got it. What we didn't expect was criticism for things that had never occurred.

Long before we published the story, rumors circulated that we were working on it, and the effort to discredit the newspaper began.

On Fox News, Bill O'Reilly's program embarked on a campaign to convince its audience that the Los Angeles Times was an unethical outfit that attacked only Republicans and gave Democrats a free ride.

As evidence, O'Reilly said that the paper had overlooked Bill Clinton's misbehavior in Arkansas. Where, he asked, was the L.A. Times on the so-called Troopergate story? Why hadn't it sent reporters to Arkansas? How could it justify an investigation of Schwarzenegger's misbehavior with women and not Clinton's?

I wasn't employed in Los Angeles at the time of Troopergate, but I do have a computer, so, unlike Fox News, I was able to learn that the Los Angeles Times actually was in Arkansas. It sent its best reporters there, and it sent them in force. At one point, it had nine reporters in Little Rock. And when two of them wrote the first Troopergate story to appear in any newspaper, they made The Times the leader on that subject. Not a leader, but the leader. Their story would be cited frequently as other newspapers tried to catch up.

The bogus Troopergate accusation on Fox was only the beginning. The worst of the fictions originated with a freelance columnist in Los Angeles who claimed to have the inside story on unethical behavior at The Times. Specifically, she wrote, the paper had completed its Schwarzenegger story long before election day but maliciously held it for two weeks in order to wreak maximum damage.

Now if this were true, I wouldn't still be here to write about ethics. The reporters and editors involved in the story would have given me the same treatment Jayson Blair's editors got in New York, and I would no longer be employed. But it wasn't true. The idea that the newspaper held the story for two weeks was a fabrication. Nothing remotely resembling that ever occurred.

It is instructive to trace the path of this falsehood. Newspapers have always been magnets for crackpots. Hardly a day goes by that we don't get a complaint from someone whose head has been rewired by the CIA, or who has seen a UFO, or who has a tortured theory as to why the newspaper did or didn't publish something. I tend to shrug such things off, figuring that it's unseemly for a large newspaper to quarrel with a reader.

But we live in changed times. Never has falsehood in America had such a large megaphone. Instead of being ignored, the author of the column was booked for repeated appearances on O'Reilly, on MSNBC, and even on the generally trustworthy CNN. The accusation was echoed throughout the talk-show world. The tale of the two-week delay — as false as any words ever penned by Jayson Blair — earned the columnist not infamy but fame. Millions of Americans heard it and no doubt believed it. And why not? It sounded just like journalism.

Let us turn now to a mundane subject: corrections. Like a factory on a river, daily journalism is an industry that produces pollution. Our pollution comes in the form of errors.

America's river of public discourse — if I may extend this figure of speech — is polluted by our mistakes. A good newspaper cleans up after itself.

Every fact a newspaper publishes goes into a database. So do the errors. A good newspaper corrects those errors and appends the corrections to the original stories, so that the errors are not repeated. Thus we keep the river clean. Last year at the Los Angeles Times, we published 2,759 corrections. Some of you may be shocked that a newspaper could make so many mistakes. Others may be impressed that the paper is so assiduous in correcting itself.

It has now been six months since Fox and the other talk shows told their audiences that The Times did not cover the Troopergate scandal. It has been six months since they accused the newspaper of a journalistic felony by timing its story about Arnold Schwarzenegger. These are simple factual matters, easily provable. Nevertheless, corrections have not been forthcoming.

I'm not happy about this, but at least I know the truth. The deeper offense is against those who don't — the listeners who credit the "facts" they hear on Fox and the talk shows.

In the larger scheme, these two falsehoods represent two relatively minor discharges of pollution into America's river of public discourse. I suspect there are many others, and on much more consequential subjects — the war in Iraq, for example.

An interesting study published in October explored public misconceptions about the war in Iraq. One of those misconceptions was that Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction had been found. Another was that links had been proved between Iraq and Al Qaeda. A third was that world opinion favored the idea of the U.S. invading Iraq.

The study did not examine what had actually aired on specific media outlets, but the results spoke for themselves. Among people who primarily watched Fox News, 80% believed one or more of those myths. That's 25 percentage points higher than the figure for viewers of CNN — and 57 percentage points higher than that for people who got their news from public broadcasting.

How could Fox have left its audience so deeply in the dark? I'm inspired to squeeze one last bit of mileage out of our river metaphor: If Fox News were a factory situated, say, in Minneapolis, it would be trailing a plume of rotting fish all the way to New Orleans.

Some view the difference between the talk shows and traditional journalism in political terms, as a simple quarrel between left and right, between liberal and conservative. Those differences exist, but they're beside the point.

What we're seeing is a difference between journalism and pseudo-journalism, between journalism and propaganda. The former seeks earnestly to serve the public. The latter seeks to manipulate it.

It is the netherworld of attack politics that gave us Roger Ailes, the architect of Fox News. Having spent much of his career smearing politicians, he now refers to himself as a journalist, but his bag of tricks remains the same. Over time, I believe, the public will become increasingly aware of the discrepancy between what it's told by pseudo-journalists and what turns out to be the truth. They may even grow weary of the talk-show persona — the schoolyard bully we all know so well.

Recently this newspaper had the good fortune of winning five Pulitzer prizes. I'm not sure we're worthy of all that, but we won't turn them down. I wonder how the news of the awards struck the talk-show fans who know the Los Angeles Times only for its ethical outrages. Surely they must have been scratching their heads over that one.

But they probably didn't worry about it long. My guess is that they sat back on their sofas and consoled themselves with more soothing thoughts, such as the way President Bush saved America from catastrophe by seizing those weapons of mass destruction in Iraq while the whole world cheered.