Patriotism and Journalism

Yesterday, Robert Jensen wrote a piece that was published in Newsday on how “Journalism Should Never Yield to ‘Patriotism’”. It’s a good article, although not terribly original for him, as it draws heavily from his excellent November speech I mentioned a few days ago. While he states what I perceive to be the obvious, the lapdogs in the corporate media seem to have totally dismissed such a premise, appropriately fulfilling their Gobbelesque role. Achin Vanaik had similar comments in a November piece from the Telegraph of India:

The finest, most honourable tradition of democratic, honest journalism demands that the premier commitment of journalists be to universal principles of human rights and justice which by their very nature must cut across all national loyalties. If this basic injunction of the classical Enlightenment concept of journalism and of the role of the intelligentsia was being observed, what we would be reading, seeing and hearing about September 11 and its aftermath would have been very different indeed from what we have had and are likely to continue having.

On a somewhat related note, I’m quite surprised that nothing Jensen has written since 9/11 is included in the recent lefty-collection of articles in September 11 and the U.S. War: Beyond the Curtain of Smoke, which, btw, you can read almost in its entirety online.