Hysteria and Truth in
the Politically Correct Organization:
The Case of the Burkett Memo Debacle at CBS News
Howard S. Schwartz
This paper is a draft. Comments are welcome, but please do not cite,
quote, or link without author’s permission.
Draft Date:
ABSTRACT
Political correctness represents
hysteria, a psychological dynamic that is inconsistent with and destructive
toward organization. This is shown in the case of CBS News, as illustrated by
the Burkett memo debacle. News organizations can do good journalism even though
they are biased, as long as they operate under the assumption that there is an
external world which their reporting can get wrong. Political correctness
undermines that assumption, and in fact undermines the whole idea that there is
an external world. In the politically correct organization, truth refers to
correspondence with a fantasy, rather than correspondence with facts in an
external world. Politically correct news organizations are not in the
journalism business anymore. They are in the business of political correctness,
which has become an end in its own right.
Introduction
From its beginnings in the university, political
correctness has metastasized into every area of social relations. Even within
the corporation, it has risen to unquestioned
dominance over communication in the matters to which it applies.
If this control were just in the area of speech, it would
be a matter of little concern to organizations. However, the merest reflection
indicates that it cannot control speech alone, since organizational decisions
involve positions that are proposed and defended through speech. Hence control
over speech through political correctness must imply control over
organizational decision-making, and hence over every aspect of the
organization. The implication of this is that the psychological dynamics that
underlie political correctness come to be the underlying dynamics of the
organization as a whole.
I have written
extensively about the psychological roots of political correctness (2002, 2003, 2004) and will repeat only the rudiments here. In
psychoanalytic terms, the key to the understanding of political correctness is
the psychology of sex roles, which are based on primitive images of the mother
and the father. In those terms, the father is seen as an obstacle to perfect
fusion with the mother, which we all had, or imagine we had, in infancy, when
that love was sufficient to make our lives perfect.
Now the father is not
really the obstacle to that fusion, he is only the form in which it first
appears. The obstacle is reality itself, which determines that we are all
separate creatures, and not one with mother. Nonetheless, the father has a
special relationship with external reality, precisely because he is not part of
the early fusion with the mother.
In the traditional
Western psychology of sex roles, his life gains its meaning by his engagement
with that world. He deals with the external world as a way of gaining the
love of the mother through his achievement, by transforming it so that she can
simply be her loving self. The father passes on to the children what he has
learned about the world through this process of transformation.
In this way they become members of society, and in that sense society
reproduces itself. As members of the society, we come to partake of the same
understandings and meanings, which Lacan calls the symbolic.
In these terms
political correctness means the repudiation of the role of the father and his
works. Its unconscious premise is that we could all have fusion with the mother
if we could only get him out of the picture. So we attempt to destroy him, and
to undermine the idea that he has achieved something worthwhile in the world,
which is the basis on which he has asserted his claim to standing -- he, that
is, and everything that takes on the paternal function that he fulfills, which
is to say authority in general.
Thus, implicitly and
explicitly, this outlook involves the rejection of the symbolic, the idea we
have of objective external reality. The father is identified with reality in
the family configuration, and he needs external reality so that he can engage it
and transform it and in that way gain standing with the mother. Get rid of the
symbolic and you deprive the father of any possibility of gaining standing.
However, students of organization will understand that the
structural elements of organization, definition of work, coordination,
standards of performance, and so on, require the shared meaning of the
symbolic, and the attendant definitions of truth and knowledge. Undermining
them would make organization impossible.
This will be a problem that may be most visible in
organizations whose primary purpose is itself truth and knowledge, such as the
university and the news business. The purpose of this presentation will be to
pursue this analysis through the case of a recent debacle at CBS News.
In this matter, a program designed to present damaging
information about President Bush’s career in the Air National Guard was quickly
determined to be based on memos that were obvious forgeries. It was
subsequently found that even the experts CBS had hired to authenticate the
memos had warned that they were probably forged. William Burkett, the
individual who turned out to be the source of these memos and the only witness
to their veracity, described by CBS as “unimpeachable,” was in fact a
well-known crank with an obsessive hatred of Bush and a history of
institutionalization for mental illness. Evidently, CBS’ journalistic standards
had broken down and its processes had become corrupted.
Of singular importance is the fact that CBS officials,
specifically anchorman and managing editor Dan Rather, clearly believed that
the story was true, even though the usual journalistic bases upon which truth
is established were missing. The question is, what
could he have meant by truth? My contention will be that the idea of truth he
was using was rooted in hysteria. It thus had a different basis than empirical
verification. It was rooted in a subjective feeling of truth. But this feeling
has intrapsychic roots, and is not anchored in
empirical reality. Truth conceived in this way subordinates objective symbolic
interaction to fantasy. I will work from this to show how this idea of truth
changes the nature of knowledge in organizations and must corrode every aspect
of organizational behavior and functioning.
I will begin with a brief description of the memo debacle
and then proceed to an exploration of the organizational processes that were
responsible for it.
Burkett’s Revenge
Our story begins with a CBS News program on
Within hours of the broadcast, questions had been raised
on the internet about the authenticity of the memos. The first feature that was
recognized was that the memos were in a proportionately spaced font, which is
common in the word processed documents we have today, but extremely rare on the
typewriters in use when the memos were supposed to have been composed. Other
indications that the documents were produced on a word processor became quickly
apparent. For instance, the Times New Roman font in which the memos appeared to
have been composed had not been developed at the time, superscript characters
were employed that were not widely available, and, it ultimately turned out,
not even possible on contemporary typewriters, and
quotation marks were curled, making it possible to use different marks at the
beginning and end of quotations, rather than straight up and down as was dictated
by the space limitations of a typewriter keyboard.
These were only some of the issues raised about the
typography. Many more problems emerged concerning the violation of standard Air
Force and general US military forms and procedures, as well issues of
discrepant facts. For example, it was found that a general who was supposed to
have applied pressure to whitewash Bush’s record had retired two years
previously.
As the momentum of this criticism was developing, however Rather and CBS stood by the story. In a
statement released on September 10. for
example, they said:
This report was not based solely on recovered documents,
but rather on a preponderance of evidence, including documents that were
provided by unimpeachable sources, interviews with former Texas National Guard
officials and individuals who worked closely back in the early 1970s with
Colonel Jerry Killian and were well acquainted with his procedures, his
character and his thinking.
In addition, the
documents are backed up not only by independent handwriting and forensic
document experts but by sources familiar with their content. Contrary to some
rumors, no internal investigation is underway at CBS News nor is one planned.
But over time, these defenses crumbled. The “unimpeachable
source” turned out to be a well known crank with an obsessive hatred of Bush
and a history of mental illness, the sources familiar with Killian claimed that
the support they were supposed to have given had been misrepresented, and the
independent experts who were supposed to have authenticated the documents, in
fact, were found to have doubted their authenticity. In the end, Rather
and CBS had to admit that the documents were fakes, though Rather
continued to maintain that they were still “accurate,” whatever that could
mean.
The official verdict, rendered by a commission CBS hired
to investigate the matter (Thornburgh and Boccardi,
2005), left no doubt that CBS had erred in airing the
story:
The stated goal of CBS News is to have a reputation for
journalism of the highest quality and unimpeachable integrity. To meet this
objective, CBS News expects its personnel to adhere to published internal
Standards based on two core principles: accuracy and fairness. The Panel finds
that both the September 8 Segment itself and the statements and news reports by
CBS News that followed the Segment failed to meet either of these core
principles.
Although they were not willing to conclude with “absolute
certainty” that the documents were forgeries, the
expert judgments that they included in their report did not leave much room for
doubt. For example, they quote Peter Tytell,
indubitably one of the world’s leading authority in these matters, as
concluding that “the Killian documents were not produced on a typewriter in the
early 1970s and therefore were not authentic.”
For the purposes of organizational analysis, however, the
important issue was not whether the documents were fake or authentic, but
whether CBS had sufficient grounds to assert that they were authentic when they
broke this highly prejudicial story in the middle of a presidential election.
On that issue, there can be no doubt: all are agreed that they did not. The
producer of the segment, Mary Mapes was fired, and four other executives were
asked to resign. Rather himself was allowed to retire.
Organizational Analysis
The question for organizational analysis is how CBS could
come to violate so deeply its own most important standards -- standards that
could easily be said to define the very nature of its work. Answering this
question was, of course, part of the task set for the Thornburgh commission,
and they did provide some answers. Before turning to our own investigation, we
should consider the validity of theirs.
Their claim was that CBS erred as a result of trying to
get the story on the air as soon as possible. In making that claim they
discounted the possibility that CBS was acting out of a political motivation.
Take the second item first time first. The Commission may
not have come to the conclusion that CBS acted out of political bias, but their
argument here is very weak, consisting largely in the denial on the part of
Rather and Mapes that they had a political agenda.
There is, however, plenty of uncontested information in the pubic domain
indicating Mapes passion for the story, on which she had been working for four
years, and her belief that it would have a powerful political effect. For
example, consider these items:
1) Mapes was working with a
freelance
2) On July 30, Mapes sent an email
to one of her superiors at CBS in which she said: "...there is some very
interesting Bush stuff shaking out there right now...Re...his
qualification [sic] and refusal of service in
3) On August 3, she wrote:
"There is a storm brewing in
4) On August 31, Smith wrote to
her to see whether she could arrange a book deal for Burkett, as part of a way
to entice him to give them the memos. In the message, Smith maintained that one
of the selling points would be that the information they were trying to obtain
“could possibly change the momentum of an election.” Her response: "that
looks good, hypothetically speaking, of course."
These items and this line of argument bear also on the
second element of the Thornburgh claim, which was that CBS simply rushed the
story into press to gain a competitive advantage. This claim is buttressed by
the fact that other news media were on the story. But if other news
organizations were rushing the story into press, that simply opens the way to
another question, which is clearly related to the issue of political bias,
which is why was this the story that they were trying to bring out? This
possibility was addressed by the Commission, who noted:
The Panel recognizes that some will see this widespread
media attention not as evidence that 60 Minutes Wednesday was not
motivated by bias but instead proof that all of mainstream media has a liberal
bias. That is a perception beyond the Panel’s assignment.
But while that issue may have been beyond the Panel’s
assignment, it does not have to be beyond ours. The issue of political bias in
the media has been and remains a contentious one. I cannot resolve it fully at
this point, but I do wish to point to two matters that point in that direction.
First is that there is a considerable history of
apparently sloppy journalism in which falsehoods have been promulgated with
flagrant disregard of the facts, all in the same political direction, and none
of which were acknowledged until internet storms developed. A brief list:
1) A CNN story charging US forces
with having used poison gas in
2) Following a speech by President
Bush on September 4, the Associated Press ran this story:
Audio recordings of the event, which quickly became
available on the internet, showed that nothing of the sort happened. Instead,
Bush’s audience responded with cheers to Bush’s invocation of prayer. After the
internet storm developed, the story simply disappeared without retraction from
AP’s website, but not before having been picked up by newspapers and other
media across the country. You can listen to the audio here. In case that doesn’t work, I
have also placed access to the audio on my website at www.sba.oakland.edu/faculty/schwartz/bush.ram
3) A CNN news executive, speaking
to an international audience of important officials at
Journalists, by the way, are not just being targeted
verbally or … ah, or … ah, politically. They are also
being targeted for real, um … in places like
Again, no evidence for this very serious charge has been
produced. While Foley’s charge has been widely reported on the internet, the
main newsmedia of the
4) Most recently, Newsweek ran a story saying
that, according to anonymous sources, US interrogators at
Certainly, belief in the
The second is that stories critical of the left, though
equally or more incendiary, have not been published or broadcast. During the
course of the controversy, Dan Rather asserted that he had no bias, but that if
an issue arose that if a serious issue arose that were as potentially damaging
to the other side, he would certainly follow up on that. But there were several
issues that were potentially damaging, and neither Dan Rather, nor any of the
other mainstream media, followed upon them.
John Kerry’s Magic Hat
In contrast with the obsessive concern with Bush’s record during
the campaign, Kerry’s record was subjected to very little scrutiny, despite
some very serious charges. One extensive set of accusations concerned Kerry’s
war record, and was laid by a group of
Kerry made this assertion a number of times, first in a
movie review in the Boston Herald:
On more than one occasion, I, like Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now, took my patrol boat
into
But the most important was in a debate in the Senate on a
bill to provide aid to the contras in
I remember Christmas of 1968 sitting on a gunboat in
Kerry’s fellow officers, and some of the enlisted men that
had served under him, denied that he had ever been in
Unremarked by the news media, Kerry’s campaign backed off from
this story. First, they said that Kerry had patrolled the Mekong Delta
somewhere "between"
But
that doesn’t do it. The point of Kerry's 1986 speech was that he personally had
taken part in a secret and illegal war in a neutral country, and that he could
therefore personally bear witness to the fact that the government was lying about
the matter and to the effect that such lying had on him. But that was only true
if he was in
Still, I have not yet come to the most fascinating part.
In a long and hagiographic piece in the Washington Post by Laura Blumenfeld (2003), widely dispersed on the internet, there
is this:
… Kerry is reserved.
He inherited it from his mother, along with her devotion to public service.
"She taught us you stiff-upper-lip it," said his sister, Diana Kerry.
"John is a man of the people. Of the little people,
actually. He needs to project who he really is by simplifying."
And who is he,
really?
A close associate
hints: There's a secret compartment in Kerry's briefcase. He carries the black
attaché everywhere. Asked about it on several occasions, Kerry brushed it
aside. Finally, trapped in an interview, he exhaled and clicked open his case.
"Who told
you?" he demanded as he reached inside. "My friends don't know about
this."
The hat was a little mildewy. The green camouflage was fading, the seams
fraying.
"My good luck
hat," Kerry said, happy to see it. "Given to me by
a CIA guy as we went in for a special mission in
Kerry put on the hat,
pulling the brim over his forehead. His blue button-down shirt and tie clashed
with the camouflage. He pointed his finger and raised his thumb, creating an
imaginary gun. He looked silly, yet suddenly his campaign message was clear:
Citizen-soldier. Linking patriotism to public service.
It wasn't complex after all; it was Kerry.
He smiled and aimed
his finger: "Pow." (
Now, as I have said,
Kerry’s fellow officers, including his entire chain of command, denied that he
was ever in
I am almost finished.
As I have said, the
But that was during
the campaign. After the campaign, on
And then, the matter
turning to Kerry’s service in
MR.
RUSSERT: And you have a hat that the CIA agent gave you?
SEN.
KERRY: I still have the hat that he gave me, and I hope the guy would
come out of the woodwork and say, "I'm the guy who went up with John
Kerry. We delivered weapons to the Khmer Rouge on the coastline of
So
delivering weapons to the Khmer Rouge it was. And a story
that certainly would have been in its own right. One would think that it
would have been news that the
But let us take stock
of this. My need here has not been to prove that Kerry lied about being in
So what have we got
here? Is this a demonstration of bias in the news media?
It might well be, but
making that charge would be nothing new, or perhaps even interesting. It is, of
course, a frequent charge, and is often supported by studies that show that
those who work for the media are overwhelmingly liberal. But journalists claim
that their political orientation is unimportant, since they can follow the
canons of objectivity no matter what their orientation. I believe they
are correct in that.
The idea of news media
not having a political slant may well be an aberration. In many Western
countries, it is understood that newspapers have characteristic outlooks and
perspectives, and this is not believed to detract from the quality of their
journalism. What is important for the quality of their journalism is that they
understand a fact to be a fact, independent of themselves, and that they accept
their subordination to the facts. What is important is not that a news
organization be objective, but rather that it
recognizes that its biases may get in the way of their understanding of
independent reality, and that they try to keep that from happening. In other
words, it needs to accept the importance of getting things right and does what
it can to make sure that it has not gotten things wrong. And this is where CBS
fell down. Telling the story that it wanted to tell became more important than
whether or not the story was true. The problem with CBS News was not that it
was biased, but that it had lost the idea that it ought not to be.
But how could a news
organization lose that idea? Indeed, how could an organization that had lost
that idea still be a news organization? And if it was not a news organization,
what was it? And how did it make the transition from a news organization to
whatever it became? These are the questions toward which I will now turn.
The point that I wish
to make is that CBS News had become a fundamentally different type of
organization than it had been. It came to be doing something else. Its meaning
had changed. It had ceased to operate according to one underlying psychological
dynamic and came to be operating according to another. It had become
hysterical. These are theoretical points to which I shall return. First it will
be necessary to get a more tactile sense of the organization’s processes,
especially with regard to the question of how, in the Burkett memo scandal, CBS
News could have overridden the normal checks a news agency maintains to make
sure it does not get things wrong.
CBS News in our
time
In doing an
organizational analysis of this sort, it generally makes sense to focus on the
central role. In the broadcast news business, that would be the producer, Mary
Mapes.
Most viewers don't
know that on TV newsmagazines producers like Ms. Mapes do most of the important
reporting. The on-air correspondents normally just parachute into the story at
the end. (Fund, 2004)
To be sure, in this
case, there was a bit of a difference:
The "60
Minutes" National Guard segment was an exception. Mr. Rather has
acknowledged that he was deeply invested in the story, and when he learned Ms.
Mapes had gotten the documents from Bill Burkett, a controversial former
National Guard lieutenant colonel, he asked Mr. Heyward
to take charge. In an interview with the New York Times, Mr. Rather quoted
himself as telling Mr. Hayward, "I have to ask you to oversee, in a hands-on
way, the handling of the story." According to Mr. Rather, "He got it.
He immediately agreed." (Fund, 2004)
However, while the
role of the correspondent was larger than it usually is, the producer’s role
was still of paramount importance. Focusing on the producer in this case,
Mary Mapes, quickly yields dividends. Several times in
the accounts of CBS journalists and executives, the explanation given is that a
belief in Mapes’ integrity carried the day when there was an issue of
verification. Her prestige was said to be so great that when she said, for
example, that her source was unimpeachable, it was accepted without further
investigation that her source could be trusted. For example:
Mapes’ executive
producer, Josh Howard said, ''Mary Mapes told us her source made her completely
confident about where they came from, and that they were authentic, and that
made me confident..." (September 19 New York Times)
From a sociological point
of view, it is clear enough what we have here. The organization suspended its
own faculty of critical judgment, and relied on the judgment of a specific
individual.. Instead of relying on their procedures to
determine what they should do, they substituted her judgment. In psychoanalytic
terms, Mary Mapes had been put in the position of the ego ideal. This is
coterminous with the classical psychoanalytic view of the leader
(Freud, ). She was exerting, and they accepted, her leadership.
But leadership is something that social science knows about. According to the
standard account, leadership, or high status, generally goes to the individual
who best represents the group’s judgment of what a member of the group should
be. In accepting Mary Mapes’ leadership then, CBS News was saying something
about its own identity. In exploring the mind of Mary Mapes, then, then we are
also exploring CBS News as an organization.
The Mind of Mary
Mapes
Let us begin with an
account on the CBS News website
Mapes, 48, was described
by colleagues on Tuesday as a dogged and talented journalist who made no secret
of her liberal political beliefs.
She's only a few months removed from a career-defining highlight. Mapes took a
story that had received little attention — the abuse of prisoners by American
soldiers in
"She pursued
stories very aggressively always," said Jeff Fager,
executive producer of 60 Minutes. "She definitely has an investigative
sense. She was responsible for the bulk of the work on Abu Ghraib.
That was her story."
The Dallas-based producer, who declined through a spokeswoman to talk with The
Associated Press, also landed the first TV interviews with Strom Thurmond's biracial
daughter and Hillary Rodham Clinton after her husband's impeachment. Mapes was
almost jailed in 1999 for refusing a judge's order to turn over a videotape of
Dan Rather's interview with a white man convicted of
killing a black man by dragging him behind a pickup truck.
She worked at
John Carlson, a former commentator at KIRO-TV who is host of a conservative
radio talk show in
Mapes was "quite liberal" and disliked the current President Bush's
father, he said.
"She definitely was someone who was motivated by what she cared about and
definitely went into journalism to make a difference," Carlson said.
"She's not the sort of person who went into journalism to report the news
and offer an array of commentary."
(www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/09/22/national/printable644919.shtm)
What I think is
important to understand about this account on the CBS News website is the
apparent recognition that for Mary Mapes, reporting the news was secondary to
“making a difference,” in terms of what she cared about. This is hardly the
profile of a person passionate about getting the facts right, but seems to be a
dominant characteristic of the person, as recognized by CBS News and therefore,
as I have said, a model of what CBS News took itself to be.
This is an important
point. CBS News could well have employed Mapes for her virtues: doggedness,
intelligence, etc. while avoiding her deficiencies by keeping them under observation.
Knowing that she was passionately devoted to a political cause, they could have
compensated for that in the way they used her material. However, their adoption
of her as a model precluded that, and turned her into her own instrument of
validation. This is what was involved in choosing her as a leader. In doing so,
they subordinated their own concern for the truth.
This subordination of
concern for truth to the drives of political passion is shown again in an
account by John Fund (1974) of a remarkable incident in her KIRO period.
Former employees of KIRO, the CBS affiliate in
Former colleagues of
Ms. Mapes agree that she was a passionate practitioner of advocacy journalism.
"She went into journalism to change society," says former KIRO
anchorwoman Susan Hutchison. "She always was very, very
cause-oriented." Lou Guzzo, a former KIRO news
commentator who served as counselor to the late Gov. Dixy
Lee Ray, a Democrat, says advocates in journalism are fine, "but if you're
as liberal and activist as Mary and work on the news rather than the opinion
side, it creates problems."
John Carlson, another
news commentator at KIRO from 1986 to 1993 and now a conservative talk show
host, recalls frequently arguing with Ms. Mapes after going off air. "The
joke was that I'd have to debate twice at KIRO," he recalls, "once on
the set and then shortly afterward with Mary."
Mr. Carlson vividly
recalls how Ms. Mapes's social advocacy landed her in
trouble in a major story. In the mid- and late 1980s, the
In the winter of
1987, officers announced themselves and knocked on the door of a known
The Bascomb shooting angered many people in
Fortunately for the
cops, Mr. Fincher wasn't the only one at the scene of the raid that night. A
reporter for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Mike Barber, was tagging along
with officers. Mr. Barber observed the officers arriving at the house,
knocking, announcing themselves and then entering. He was there when the
shooting happened and when the ambulances were summoned. At that point, a man
"reeking of alcohol" walked out of some nearby bushes and approached
him. He wanted to know what had just happened. That was Wardell
Fincher. But Mr. Fincher wasn't thoroughly checked out, so all this came out
after the story aired. The police were eventually cleared but it took years and
an unsuccessful civil-rights lawsuit by the Bascomb
family to undo the damage.
By that time, Ms.
Mapes had left Seattle, and no one I talked with who worked at KIRO at the time
can recall her being disciplined in any way for her mistake. Instead, in 1989
she was fast-tracked to the "CBS Evening News" and later became Mr. Rather's hand-picked producer on "60 Minutes."
"Maybe the National Guard mess would never have happened if she had been
handled properly back then," says one former KIRO reporter who still
admires her work ethic and ability to break stories.
From the standpoint of
our organizational analysis, this last paragraph is crucial. Not only was Mapes
not disciplined for her failure to check out her source, but she was promoted
shortly thereafter to a prestigious position at the network. CBS could
not have been ignorant of this incident, in which her ideological zeal led to a
lapse in journalistic standards; they simply cannot have thought it was very
important.
But what was that
ideological zeal, and how did it interact with journalism? What kind of stories
did Mapes want to tell, and what kind did she not want to tell?
With regard to the
first, in going over the two stories that brought Mapes the most fame, Mark Gimein (2005), writing in New York Magazine finds a
consistent narrative in Mapes’ productions:
Both the Abu Ghraib story and the story of Bush’s National Guard files
started as narratives of the military’s punishing the lower ranks while
protecting the privileged and well connected.
But all the people
involved with the story at the start—Lawson, Charles, Mapes—believed that this
was a story not just of a few American soldiers who abused their position, but
of soldiers who were themselves mistreated by the military.
With regard to the
stories she did not want told, Washington Post reporter Jennifer Frey (2004)
tells this story, again about the KIRO period:
Even in her early
years in the business, Mapes was driven, passionate and unafraid of ruffling
feathers. [Mapes's close friend Lisa] Cohen remembers
her clashing repeatedly with the KIRO news director … bristling at publicity
stunts she found journalistically distasteful.
"We had a very
portly sportscaster," Cohen remembers, "and the news director thought
it would be great publicity if we sent him out in a Santa Claus suit to show up
live on people's doorsteps to give them one little bag of groceries. One little
bag. Mary was assigned to it. She was horrified. She told him he couldn't do
that, that it was unfair to these people, that they were giving them no
warning, that it would embarrass them. If he was going to do something, she
wanted him to do something meaningful."
To Cohen, that was
classic Mapes: principled, unafraid to challenge, always willing to work harder
than anyone else.
But while this view of
Mapes does not need to be challenged, the story suggests more about Mapes and how
she acted within her role. What the story says, and of course this is simply an
adumbration of the
This puts us in a
position to form an hypothesis. It is that
what Mary Mapes was passionate and principled about, what she was unafraid to
challenge authority about, and to work hard about, was political correctness. By
accepting the leadership of Mary Mapes, CBS News was affirming the importance
of political correctness.
Political
correctness and journalism
If this is so, it
helps to resolve the issue of media bias. Media figures claim that, while they
may have a certain political point of view, they can still be good journalists.
I have agreed with that. All that is necessary is the recognition that one can
be wrong. But if what has been called a bias is really political correctness,
then the possibility of being good journalists disappears. The reason is that
political correctness involves the repudiation of reality and it is
inconsistent with the psychological assumptions that underlie good journalism.
You can have bias and good journalism, but you cannot have both good journalism
and political correctness.
Political correctness,
as we have seen, is always an attempt to destroy the father’s standing with the
mother. But what is true of the father’s standing with the mother may be
generalized to all status. For the politically correct, differences in status
are regarded as illegitimate, and claims that some have earned their status by
concrete achievement are dismissed as smokescreens to cover up oppression. If
some have more status than others, that means that
they have stolen that status from those who are of lower status. Within the
ambit of political correctness, the meaningful and moral life is a project of
reversing the effects of this collective crime. It means transforming the world
so that those who have been deprived of status in the past are compensated with
love, and those who have had more status are hated for their crime. But
transforming the world, in this case, simply means transforming the way people
feel. In the absence of an objective world, feelings are all there are. We can
easily see the role that information media will play in this project. That will
include those media previously given over to the task of journalism, but they
will no longer be practicing journalism. Journalism will have died.
The reason why PC is
lethal to journalism is rooted in its rejection of the idea of an objective
world, an idea that PC absolutely cannot tolerate. If there were an objective
world, people could legitimately gain status by achievement, by doing something
beneficial in terms of our collective capacity to live in that objective world.
Only through denying the possibility of achievement is it possible to reduce
the world to the simple morality play of oppressors and oppressed. For this
reason, the very idea that there is an objective world becomes an object of
scorn and hatred. Obviously, this precludes the possibility of journalism
recognizing the possibility that it has gotten the facts wrong. In the absence
of an idea of an objective world, journalism could only mean the furtherance of
the politically correct morality play, but that isn’t really journalism at all.
What is it? The answer is simple. It is political correctness, which is an end
in itself.
We can certainly see
all this play out in the coverage of President Bush. He represents the father
and is seen in this context as the arch oppressor. That is why no good can be
ascribed to him, and why any attacks on him, no matter how spurious,
ill-founded, and even bizarre are regarded as legitimate. They are legitimate
because hatred of the father is the very source of legitimacy, the epistemological
bedrock, as it were, of legitimacy. This is why the idea of Bush having
gotten his positions in life, including his position in the Air National Guard,
through illegitimate pressure gained so much traction.
Mary Mapes has
maintained that that the forged documents meshed perfectly with the known facts
about George Bush. As the Thornburgh Commission demonstrated, she is wrong
about that. However, the documents certainly meshed perfectly with the fantasy
she had about George Bush. That fantasy was, for her, the ultimate reality, and
so it was for many others. When Dan Rather said that the documents were “fake
but accurate”, that is what he had in mind.
So far, we have looked
at the psychodynamics of the memo debacle from the standpoint of the father’s
role, but what about the mother’s role? In our account so far, we have considered
the mother’s role only under her aspect as the object of desire. Within this
dynamic, her role is only a passive one. Doesn’t the maternal role involve
doing anything?
Well, the answer is
yes and no. The maternal role, and by extension the female role, always
involves doing things, of course, but this is always within the context of
someone else’s active agenda. So it is that we think of her as a care-giver, a
nurturer, or for that matter even an organizational participant. But can’t she
get beyond that? Can’t she operate within a characteristically female outlook
on life, a feminine agenda?
The answer is no,
there cannot be a self-sufficient feminine agenda. But there can’t be a
self-sufficient male agenda, either. The male and female roles are complementary
to each other, each providing an aspect of meaning for the other that they
cannot provide for themselves. In her role as representing fusion, the woman is
the one for whom things are done. Her role is to offer the possibility of her
love, which brings out such activity. The underlying fantasy is that she needs
simply to be herself. She is, after all, as the representation of fusion,
sufficient exactly as she is.
The mother is perfect,
but precisely because of this perfection, her life has no form. She requires
the father to form an agenda. He is happy to do so, since action in pursuit of
fusion with her gives him the sense that there is something to be sought. This
gives the context in which behavior can have a purpose, and activity in pursuit
of that purpose may be said to have meaning. The meaning it may be said to have
is the structure of life that it is his function to create. In this way,
and only in this way, can his behavior have meaning, because, given his
inherent limitation, he cannot even have the fantasy of simply being who he is.
So there is
complementarity between theses roles. But this complementarity creates a mutual
dependency, and with dependency comes tension, each party of the struggle
trying to become independent by dominating the other.
In psychoanalytic
terms, the attempt on the part of the paternal role to dominate the maternal is
referred to as the obsessive-compulsive character, in which the individual
takes his own desire as a source of threat. When the maternal role tries to
overcome the paternal, we have what is called hysteria, in which the
individual, identifying with the maternal, takes herself as perfect in herself,
and rejects subordination to any external agenda, and indeed even to the
symbolic itself.
Political Correctness
and Hysteria
If we want to fully
understand political correctness, we must see it as an essentially hysterical
phenomenon (Schwartz, 2004). Under its sway, identifying with the perfect
mother, the politically correct have the sense of being perfect in themselves, rejecting any kind of external constraint or
determination or even meaning. Political correctness identifies these as
domination by an imperfect and oppressive father. Their object, then, is to
reveal the imperfection of this father, implicitly contrasting that
imperfection with their own perfection and declaring his agenda as something
that they do not have to follow.
For the politically
correct, life revolves around a certain question, around which life is
organized. The question, which isn’t really a question at all, but an assault,
is “Who are you to tell me what to do?” The object here is undermining the
father with this question, revealing to him and to everyone else that he cannot
have a place within the mother’s affections, since he has not and cannot earn a
place. Psychoanalysis refers to this project of undermining as castration. It
is the meaning of life for the politically correct -- an end in itself.
The problem is that
everything we know about reality, embodied in the symbolic, was the product of
the father’s attempt to get close to the mother. Rejecting what they see as the
father’s agenda means rejecting the idea of reality itself, and therefore all
grounds for prudence, for taking conscious purposeful action, and, with regard
to journalism, the idea that one’s ideas can be contradicted by the facts.
All that is left is
the fantasy of being oppressed by the father, which becomes the self-justifying
criterion of truth and the determinant of all meaning. It arises from inside the
self, not through interaction with the world outside. It is the product of
internal dynamics, which may have nothing to do with what is going on outside.
Validation is accomplished, therefore, by reference to feeling, rather than by
empirical investigation.
This is why
politically correct journalists can make the most outrageous and destructive
statements, for example that the
This is a matter that
has very serous consequences. Political correctness is not a project
consciously aimed at reaching a desired state. The energy that keeps it going
is the self-righteous rage that provides the emotional core of the state of
opposition. Hysterics live to castrate the father, because the act of
castrating provides them with all the meaning they need and can have.
Political correctness,
then, does not recognize the need for a political program outside of itself.
This may be why many politically correct journalists reject the idea that their
political orientation has any affect on their journalism. In this, I’d say they
are both right and wrong. They are right in the sense that the dynamics of political
correctness can occur within political programs of the right as well as of the
left. The Nazis, for example, when they attacked the liberal democracy of the
Interestingly, the
self-sufficiency of the castrating process means there has to be a father. Of
course, it does not take much to be declared an oppressor. Political
correctness has never lacked for villains to attack, even when it has had to
conjure them out of whole cloth, as witches were conjured up to give meaning to
the witch hunt
But if we refer back
to the psychology of sex roles, we can see that this is as much of a dependency
as any traditional housewife had on her husband. The difference is that the
politically correct are parasites, rather than partners.
As with any parasite,
the danger is that they will, even if inadvertently, kill the host. The
castrated father will not be able to do his job of protecting the family. In a
world as dangerous as this one, such castration is essentially suicidal. The
pure internal focus of the politically correct assures that they will not know
they are killing themselves until they are well and truly dead, and the rest of
us along with them. This state of permanent, proto-suicidal moral assault is
the project upon which CBS News embarked when it gave up journalism.
Looking at the matter
this way helps us to understand certain matters in current journalism that
might otherwise seem peculiar. For example, it explains why even minor
imperfections in George Bush, the United States, the Republicans, all of whom
represent the oppressive and constraining father, are blown up to hideous
proportions, while nothing is made of the imperfections, even major ones, of
those whom the father opposes. For example, at the time the media were filling
themselves with images of naked terrorists at Abu Ghreib, the contemporaneous,
filmed decapitation of a living kidnapped American received almost no mention.
The reason is that the only project of political correctness is the castration
of the father. There is no world beyond that. A corollary is that any hint that
the father needs to fight terrible, common, and very real enemies would give
him grounds to assert his claim to importance, and that cannot be allowed.
Pictures of people
jumping to their death from the
Conclusion and
Generalization
What has been said of
journalism applies, mutatis mutandis, to any organizational project that
requires the belief that there is an independent reality which we must
understand and accommodate, and about which it is possible to make a mistake.
That means all organizational phenomena beyond the equivalent of a lynch mob. I
have elsewhere (1992) argued that political correctness leads to a kind of
organizational nihilism, in which the organization reorganizes itself around
the aim of its own destruction. These reflections provide, and only provide, an
additional dimension to that.
References
Blumenfeld, Laura (2003) Hunter, Dreamer, Realist: Complexity Infuses Senator's Ambition 
June 6,
Frey, Jennifer (2004)
Mary Mapes's Darkest Hour: The '60 Minutes' Producer
Finds Herself Quite a Story Washington Post, October 4: Page C01
Fund, John. (2004) The Producer: Meet Mary Mapes, the
crusading journalist behind CBS's current troubles. Wall Street Journal,
October 4.
Gimein, Mark (2005) Target: Mapes.
Kerry, John. (1979)
O'Neill, John and Jerome Corsi
(2004) Unfit for Command, Regnery.
Schwartz, Howard S. (2002) Political
Correctness and Organizational Narcissism, Human Relations, 55 (11):
1275-1294.
Schwartz, Howard S. (2003) The Revolt of the Primitive: An Inquiry into the Roots of
Political Correctness. Paperback edition.
Schwartz, H.S. (2004) Organization
in the Age of Hysteria. ISPSO,
Thornburgh, Richard and Louis D. Boccardi. (2005) Report of the Independent Review panel on the
It is impossible to understand what happened next without an
appreciation of the transformations that have happened in the transmission of
information due to the rise of the internet. Until this time, the technology of
broadcasting was extremely expensive, resulting in near-monopolies in the
transmission of information. With the internet, the cost of information
transmission dropped almost to zero, even to the point that the distinction
between the transmitter of information and its recipient essentially vanished.
Out of this, vast interactive networks, called (without elegance) the
“blogospher,” developed around individuals who compiled “weblogs” or “blogs.”
These bloggers, who were themselves networked together, could transmit
information that was made available to them by members of the networks who were
not bloggers themselves, but who had expertise or interesting thoughts to
contribute on various subjects. This network of distributed intelligence is
what the “mainstream media,” previously a centralized monopoly, came up against
in the debacle. For this paper, I have made much use of many of these blogs for
insights and routes to information. I cannot mention them all, but would like
to express my debt to www.powerlineblog.com, www.hughhewitt.com,
and www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/
who will have to stand for all.
To be sure,
there were typewriters that had superscript characters, but such characters
were on the same sized block as the other typewriter characters, and appeared
therefore on the same line. The superscripts in the memos were above the lines.
The point
here is that a computer can figure out whether a quotation mark is at the
beginning or end of a quotation, and make the changes by itself, so one key can
suffice for two such characters. On a typewriter, having different quotation
marks for the beginning and end of quotes would have required two keys.
Why they
were not willing to come to an absolute conclusion, in the face of the
overwhelming evidence they adduce, is an interesting question. My suspicion is
that it arose from the way they understood their contractual relationship with
CBS. The terms of their contract have not been made public. One fact that may
have had an effect was that, under
The other
arguments were to the effect that the editing process had made the story less
incendiary than it otherwise might have been, and that the documents, if they
had been authentic, would have provided important information. Neither of these
arguments add much support, it seems to me, to their
conclusion.
Brinkley’s book makes no mention of any diary entries that place Kerry in
"The banks of the [
He may be
wondering still, since this was the last diary entry of his wartime experience.
Kerry’s
original picture of his “band of brothers” showed him with these fellow
officers, not the enlisted men who served under him.
His
honorable discharge was only granted years after his military career had ended,
and only after President Carter had declared what amounted to an upgrade for
many who had received less than honorable discharges. If he received a less
than honorable discharge originally, it would probably have been for
negotiating with the enemy and publicly advocating their position without
authorization while still an officer in the United States Navy.