In today’s Washington Post, Howard Kurtz reports that the White House actively pressures the editors of major newspapers to withhold stories that could damage the Bush administration’s image and reputation with American citizens.
The important question this revelation raises is, “What else don’t we know?” What other information, gathered by professional reporters and editors, has been kept from the American public. Kurtz has finally blown the whistle, revealing what he says, “may be the tip of a large and rather dirty iceberg.” It is incumbent upon those whose own stories have been suppressed to come forward and make their voices heard, starting with my own.
In June 2004, my book Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President described and predicted virtually everything that has now come to light about the outlaw nature of this administration. I am a respected medical doctor, a university professor and an acknowledged expert in the field of psychoanalysis. My publisher, ReganBooks, is not only mainstream, it is also part of the conservative-leaning News Corporation, which also owns Fox News. Nevertheless, no major U.S. newspaper reviewed my book. The New York Times, unable to ignore my work entirely, hired a well known psychiatric shill--a member of the Bush administration’s health advisory team--to dismiss it in the Health section of the paper. This same paper later gave full press coverage to the spurious Swift Boat book attacking Senator Kerry.
In the broadcast medium, it seemed that radio hosts had the courage to invite me to discuss my book. Only Tucker Carlson (an admitted conservative) and Tina Brown (an admitted liberal) dared interview me on television, and it was cable television at that. CNN’s Judy Woodruff, a personal friend, was too frightened of her Time Warner employers to even make the effort.
My book cannot be the only example of responsible information suppressed by the Times and the Post, as well as by television media. I think that killing stories critical of the administration is based on fear of reprisals, rather than shared beliefs that secrecy is a fundamental function of presenting the news.
I assume that people like New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller have more respect for the American public than that – just not enough guts to do the right thing. This is why I applaud reporters like Kurtz and Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter, but put my faith in The Huffington Post. Not only has corporate media betrayed the public trust; they have made themselves irrelevant at best, and enemies at worst, to the American people.