On matters of conscience

by: Eric B.

Mon Jul 13, 2009 at 12:55:08 PM EDT

I'm going to kick this off by explaining how it came to be that I have a good deal of blood on my hands, and why it's there over the objections thrown up by my own conscience.  Despite the fact that my conscience told me I'd be enabling something that I understood would result in the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent people, I still enabled the thing to happen.

For a lot of years earlier this decade, I worked as the desk editor for the local newspaper.  I edited stories, laid out news pages, wrote headlines.  Some of them were pretty good.  Most of the time we stuck to local content on the front.  As use of the Internet increased, in fact, I came to regard wire content as filler material around the advertising.  You could get it anyplace and no one was about to pay 50 cents for the privilege of learning something they could get for free online.

We made exceptions, however, and the biggest one of all was the invasion and occupation of Iraq. The reasons for this are probably obvious, and if you really want one that is concrete it is that some stories are so big they can't help but be local.  The front page was filled until the fall of Baghdad of coverage from Iraq.  Stories about local things went where there was space for non-Iraq coverage.

Most of us remember the media coverage from that time as just plain terrible.  The media failed to fully vet the reasons for war, and the coverage of the invasion wasn't really any better.  The AP's coverage of the invasion was hopelessly slanted.  You might remember the "spontaneous" street protest of "regular" Iraqis in which a statue of Saddam was pulled down and beaten with shoes.  At the time, I half-jokingly suggested to a colleague that it was probably a P.R. rig job.  It turns out that my hunch was correct, that a Marine Corps crane had knocked over the statue and that the spontaneous riot was just a handful of people rounded up for a photo op.  The AP reporter, who was there and knew that it was a con job on the American people, still filed the story.  I laid it out, despite my suspicions (based on the lack of available evidence, unfounded though they were).  The paper's readers woke up the next morning to a front page that was part of a concerted campaign to manufacture public opinion.

Probably no one will be surprised to learn that I opposed the war from the get-go.  During my time in the military, which had ended just four years before, I was privy to intelligence reports that laid out that Saddam was a paper tiger with no ties to terrorists and who'd only use his dwindling, aging stocks of unconventional weapons if forced to preserve his regime.  I marched against it, I objected to it on the editorial page, and then I enabled it on the front page.  This is where the blood on my hands comes from, and it will be there for the rest of my life.

Right now, you're probably wondering why I'd do such a thing.  The answer is that I was being paid to.  It was my job.  Actually, that tells part of the story, the obvious part.  It was my job, but also part of what I considered to be my obligation to the public.

Most everyone who works for a newspaper understands that there is a time for your personal beliefs and there is a time to set those aside and do the god damn job you are being paid to do.  It's not due to a lack of convictions; it's because the job carries with it certain responsibilities to the community the newspaper serves.  That is, an individual's personal convictions are not more important than providing people a source of information they can trust is not shaped by them. When you cannot make the two jibe, it is time to find a new line of work. Most people I have ever known in the journalism business understand this; most people who whine endlessly about bias do not.

more...

I bring this up because there is now a package of bills in the state Legislature meant to expand coverage for birth control and contraceptives.  One of the provisions requires pharmacists to dispense them.

Unless you've been living under a rock for the last decade, you understand why this provision is part of this bill.  We hear endlessly from conservatives that government bureaucrats shouldn't interfere in health care decisions made between doctors and patients.  This apparently has its limits when it comes to infringing on the beliefs of conservative Christian pharmacists who refuse to dispense contraceptives. I give you Gary Glenn:

Pharmacists should not have to put aside religious beliefs to provide any type of contraception, said Gary Glenn, president of the American Family Association of Michigan.

“Anything that would compel a pharmacist to violate his own religious conscience we would oppose,” he said.

I really have next to no sympathy for pharmacists who feel unduly infringed upon because someone is asking them to do their job.  I mean, I don't have anything special against people with strong religious convictions (although I am an atheist).  If you are incapable of executing the duties of your job on religious grounds, however, you have come to a point where you are no longer capable of rendering the public service that comes with your job. You should find a new line of work just the same that if you can't put together a front page without injecting her personal political opinions it's time for a career change.