in my opinion

Misinformation Has No Place in a Democracy

By Tracy Tardiff

Since 1950, when Radio Free Europe was launched, the U.S. government has actively utilized media as a political action tool. Radio Free Europe delivered pro-democracy and pro-capitalist messages disguised as news to Eastern Europe. By the 1980s, the Reagan Administration was feeding false stories to the media designed to manipulate Muammar al-Gaddafi, leader of Libya.

The government justifies these campaigns as required for national security. By their very nature, these programs are top secret. Therefore, the public is asked to trust, not question, the government. Deception is seen as acceptable in the course of a common national objective: the security of the people.

The problem is that this allows a small group of people who, being human, may be flawed, susceptible to paranoia or influenced by a personal agenda, to decide in secrecy what our common national objectives are. As we saw in the buildup to the Iraq war, the Bush Administration decided that our national objective was to invade Iraq. They began a misinformation campaign to convince the American public that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was linked to the Sept. 11 attacks. They punished anyone who attempted to point out inaccuracies in the story (Joe Wilson’s wife’s career was deliberately ruined and life endangered). This effectively discouraged anyone involved from speaking in opposition to the official misinformation strategy.

These campaigns threaten the legitimacy of journalism in a democracy. They do not represent the democratic ideals that America promotes both rhetorically and militarily throughout the world, and we cannot tolerate them. State Department and Pentagon employees who come forward to expose these practices should be viewed as heroes. We should charge elected officials and others who are suspected to be contributors with appropriate crimes such as libel. There is no room for such secret power in a democracy.