This brings me to the title of this little essay: Mediagate. Just as the media can be a source of information, they can also be a source of disinformation.⁷ The media do function as a gate and hence as gatekeepers: some information is allowed to pass through while other information is not. This is why, before the era of media consolidation was ushered in by The Telecommunications Act of 1996, most towns had party papers; the Republican party daily and the Democratic party daily.⁸ There might also have been a union paper and an anti-union paper as well as a few ethnic- or religiously based weekly publications. But I also use the suffix -gate in the old-fashioned sense: as a reference to Watergate. Watergate, the greatest and last triumph of the American press, began in 1972 when two Washington Post reporters broke the story that the President—yes, the President of the United States, the Commander-in-Chief, the Leader of the Free World—had resorted to bugging the Democratic Party offices in the Watergate building in a desperate bid to assure his re-election.

If I were one of those powers that be and that desire to continue being the powers that be, the breaking of the Watergate story would have been the signal that the day had arrived to control the US free press. To this I would add an even subtler twist. The Carter presidency, with its fireside chats encouraging energy conservation and smaller cars, presented the American nation with a stark reality: we, as a people, had become weak. Because we did not want to hear the truth; we only wanted to hear what made us feel good. Perhaps it was some post-Vietnam malaise, but that illness has lasted almost 40 years now. It hasn’t killed us, but it hasn’t made us stronger, either. A nation founded on ideals, which is nothing more than an attempt to put the truth as one knows it into practice despite the loss of mere convenience or of life itself, had been reduced to decadent Romans. No, maybe we don’t have bread and circuses per se, but we certainly do have Starbucks and Survivor. Besides, who needs a coliseum when you have cable?

We no longer seek out truth; we expect it to be delivered to us like some late night pizza. Unfortunately, however, we cannot place orders for truth as we can for pizza. We have, instead, to take what we can get or, rather, what we are given.

So, for instance, we lived through the incessant media circus of the Whitewater scandal, which involved a special prosecutor and $80 million in court costs to find out what might have happened to a series of land deals ranging in value from $200,000 to possibly "several million" dollars; we have not, however, lived through a media blitz detailing the endless intricacies of the Enron scandal, which involves a company that claimed to have made $111 billion dollars in revenues in one year, financed quite a few prominent Republican candidates, and defrauded thousands of employees and investors of retirement and other monies.⁹ We suffered through Monicagate and an impeachment trial, but we have not lived through Cheneygate and a possible murder trial—personally, I think pellets in a face is evidence in greater need of prosecution than semen on a skirt.

In none of this am I comparing presidencies. I think Clinton was a wonderfully immoderate Republican president, and I think Kerry would have been a spectacularly moderate Republican president. What I am interested in is the bias of the press. It is not, by the way, a liberal bias. There is no bias toward freeing people from the pillaging of greedy corporations by passing on information about corporate shenanigans through the special investigative work of undercover corporate reporters. There was no bias toward making the Lewinsky episode a feminist issue; it was simply presented as a sexual peccadillo, and I am sure Benjamin Franklin and his legitimate and illegitimate children are laughing hysterically somewhere in the afterlife. So, I suspect, is Thomas Jefferson. Even the current hysteria over the Foley affair(s) is lamentable. Is he guilty of being a pedophile? No. None of his "friends" were small children below the age of sexual maturity.¹⁰ Was he guilty of incredibly bad judgment? Yes. But he is also guilty of something more dangerous: a lack of foresight. Given the current standing of President Bush in the polls, he should have seen this coming. Somewhere, and from someplace, an entertaining and distracting scapegoat was needed. Since the GOP seems to have known about "the Foley situation" for several years now, do you really think it was the Democrats who outed poor Mr. Foley?

Just like poor Scooter before him, Foley will be tried loudly and futilely in the press, and then it will all fade away. Perhaps a small article or blurb will appear several months hence, no doubt after the mid-term elections. Now, I am not condoning Foley’s actions by any means. What I am condemning is the use to which such events are put by the press. They give us pseudo-political titillation instead of showing us the bodies of US soldiers in flag-draped coffins being brought back to Dover Air Force Base. The press has been "forbidden" to film or photograph this deplaning of coffins¹¹ as such coverage proved to be a real downer for the American people during the Vietnam War, thus leading to that war’s too early demise. Instead, we get nothing.