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Earlier this year, a major newspaper wrote what is called a "puff piece" on Vice President Cheney that actually suggested he run for president, in a news article, not the editorial page. In a "puff piece," a journalist does not raise any serious questions and the object is just to give some easy publicity for some persyn or cause.
Everyone knew that Cheney was not going to run for president, but the newspaper went ahead with the story. What is obscure to the public is that journalists regularly go through a cycle of reward and punishment with their sources. The dilemma is called "source cultivation."
By running a puff piece on Cheney, the bourgeois journalist can hope that Cheney will give him details on a more interesting story later. Many of the best bourgeois journalists indulge in this practice in one way or another, because capitalist journalism rewards the individual for being first to break a story.
Under socialist journalism there is no reward for being first, no reason the individual has to be first to break a story and hence no reason to be "cultivating sources." Socialism does not have the dilemma described here. If a government leader breaks a story to this socialist journalist or that one does not matter under socialism. To the extent that it matters it will be because of residuals from capitalism. Marx generalized this difference between socialism and capitalism by discussing the contradiction between socialized production and private appropriation. The social or the public has an interest in accurate journalism, but private appropriation means that the bourgeois journalist has an interest in being first. Newspapers are competing with each other for profit, not the truth.
The way journalism stands in the united $tates, a bourgeois journalist who writes a good puff piece on a meaningless subject may think of himself as a path-breaking hero. He prides himself on thinking that he will be the one to ask the source a question that no one else has thought of and thus do a public service. Hence, flattery of bourgeois sources such as Cheney is built into the institutions most dedicated to investigative journalism.
The worst case of source cultivation in recent times was by Judith Miller at the New York Times. In the run-up to the Iraq War ground invasion, Judith Miller provided the single greatest justification for that war by easily accepting Cheneyite justifications on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq that were not true. Here the source cultivation crossed over into two other areas--incompetence and lackeyism. To say Judith Miller was cultivating Cheney as a source would be an understatement, and she ended up making herself a mouthpiece, not just of imperialism, but specific government officials that she needed to cultivate. The trick of having a degree of bourgeois integrity is to cultivate on the inessential while bringing truth as the meat-and-potatoes.
For many years, MIM's principal task has been "create public opinion and the independent institutions of the oppressed to seize power." Lately that word "independent" has been difficult for many.
Another organization claiming to be Marxist has the slogan "create public opinion; seize power," and the basic underlying reason is that they are an organization built to put a leader in imperialist power. The slogan does not say what kind of public opinion or what kind of power, because it's not relevant to that organization. Not surprisingly, that organization re-quoted Judith Miller, this time on Iran. It has also directly and knowingly run CIA articles in its newspaper and pushed Democratic Party slogans. We can even say globally that there were many who thought none of this was any big deal.
It is difficult to break with imperialist power even in just the media. MIM has said it many times that there might be enough John Browns to run a proletarian media in the imperialist countries, but not much more in the imperialist countries. State power is a huge influence on all our thinking, not just by running organizations such as "Voice of America." Where there is no vibrant proletariat, political passivity is the norm and the politically passive are dominant throughout imperialist country political organizations even those calling themselves the most revolutionary.
Judith Miller is a professional journalist and she already understands the dilemma of source cultivation. Sadly, in allegedly revolutionary ranks, most have not even this rudimentary training regarding power struggle and its inherent difficulties. Even those who mouth our slogan "create public opinion and the independent institutions of the oppressed to seize power" and have agreed with that for years falter on that word "independent" in practice.
Too often we have people who believe that it is enough to spout ideology and lifestyle guidelines to perceive power. The walking zombies among us become obstacles in the power struggles of the oppressed, because they do not even see that a power struggle is going on. For the vast majority, this rejection of power struggle will be conscious: why even attempt politics when we can watch the Paris Hilton video the 1001st time.
Those of us running away from bullets in the battlefield perceive power. It's easier that way than in countries inundated with economic and pornographic bribery. Those dodging bullets have an elevated pulse, maybe a shortness of breath. Likewise, anyone who perceives imperialist power should feel that struggle coursing through the body or suspect that one has become a zombie.
Someone running from bullets is not likely to be an obstacle for his comrades. She is not apt to ignore that a machine gun or tank is blasting away at her from 200 yards and won't be withholding that from her comrades, who will probably be seeing her run or otherwise attempt to escape or fight back.
In Judith Miller's case, she was working for the New York Times, which did not endorse the Bush administration for election in 2000. Nonetheless, this made her the perfect cover for those who do not perceive power at all. She became an obstacle to understanding, a mouthpiece of the government. Her editors did not catch her till after the war found no weapons of mass destruction. At best they were incompetent source cultivators gone amok with no perception of power struggle. At worst, since the Democrats they supported also voted for the war, the New York Times was in on the conspiracy.
Related to this question is recognizing shadow-boxing when we see it. MIM has shadow-boxed the CIA a quarter century now. It's shadow, because 99% of the time the CIA will not admit that it is there. The proletarian side has to figure out what the CIA is doing to oppose the proletariat by itself and then act accordingly. It's also shadow, because even when MIM knows the CIA is there, there is nothing MIM can do to take up a real physical fight. Because of all the shadow, it's easy for this to fall into another perception of power struggle problem.
In the united $tates, there are many more Republican males than Republican females. So this means that another kind of shadow-boxing is common at the dinner table. The Democratic female and Republican male often argue, not because either individual plans to do anything about politics, but just to see how the argument would go. That too is shadow-boxing, a simulation for illustrative purposes.
Sometimes one shadow-boxes and ends up in agreement. It comes from knowing the moves the other side is going to make. When both sides of a shadow-boxing match know what is going to happen next, because of past predictability, agreement is one possibility. Defeat for the side not in the trend of history is another possibility. Sometimes people fight even when they know they are going to lose. Crackers have a poignant tale along those lines from the Civil War, when they fought in "home guards" when they had no chance of winning.
Expert shadow-boxers with an eye on public opinion will move the battle right up against MIM as far as it can go. In this way it is possible to win over everyone to the side of imperialism who is unable to perceive shadow-boxing. As usual, MIM warns the proletariat internationally that such shadow-boxing in the imperialist countries is 99.944% successful. It is in all likelihood that the imperialists will win it inside imperialist borders for now while losing on the world scale. Defeat in the imperialist countries is often so total that the imperialists can stop shadow-boxing and slide further into various forms of decadence. Then new shadow-boxers come along and the process starts anew.
The process of imperialist country shadow-boxing poses no danger unless the oppressed nations proletariat falls for it. The most vulnerable moment is in defeat in the imperialist countries. The CIA shadow-boxers aping Maoism are left standing and the genuine communists are gone. At that moment, the oppressed nations must be wary of ties to the imperialist countries the most. In general, it is not worth risking much for contact with imperialist country alleged revolutionaries. Even the minority that spouts ideology and righteousness usually does not perceive power struggle in its midst. It simply does not arise from the conditions in the imperialist countries.
If we think of the imperialist countries as giant machines of oppression, the imperialist pieces of the machine break down more often than the labor aristocracy pieces. Whether we think of it as a power outage, short circuit or light bulb burning out, the imperialist machine "goes off" sometimes. We do not have to compromise with a light bulb for it to go off: it just burns out. Nor do we talk about the light bulb's lifestyle or aptitude for corruption away from a non-existent Euro-Amerikan proletariat. The light bulb goes out, but everyone knows the mode of production is not changing this year in any imperialist country. So whatever actors we might search for in connection to a faulty light bulb will not be succeed in that regard.
If we stick our hands into the labor aristocracy pieces of the machine, we will be bloodied and left with mangled appendages and end up deformed cripples like the left-wing of parasitism. Thinking of the bulbs going off in the imperialist machine as some kind of Euro-Amerikan worker upsurge is completely wrong. That tendency is not there. It would be better to think of MIM as imperialist light bulbs going off than some popular uprising. There is no class basis for thinking otherwise in the imperialist countries--some cults, book clubs and chic apparel redistribution schemes notwithstanding.