A Media Journey: from Edward R. Murrow to Fake News.

• Author: Virden, Dick
• Position: Essay

One of the Foreign Policy Association topics for its "Great Decisions" series in 2018 is "the media and foreign policy." Speaking on this and related issues to civic groups around Minnesota has caused me to reflect on my own long experience with the press and to look for insights that might apply to our public life today.

We hear a lot now about the rise of social media, a vital new phenomenon that clearly affects both national security policy and domestic politics. Whether that's good or bad is debatable, but that these the new media influence world affairs is not. The "CNN Effect" once put foreign hot spots on the map; now smart phones, Facebook, and Twitter spark movements like the Arab Spring.

Cyberwarfareis another new entry and a cause of great concern for our national security officials. At its heart, Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation is about Russia's exploiting our media, new and old, to affect the 2016 election and weaken our democracy.

We know that Moscow mounted a substantial "influence" or dirty tricks campaign against us. The evidence is overwhelming and no longer in doubt. Such hostile manipulation of media by outside forces is a new, insidious form of warfare that we ignore at our peril.

Then there's "fake news," two four-letter words that when put together are poisoning our political process, as is the related growth of sharply partisan media, particularly cable news and talk radio.

In addressing these trends and their impact, I mean to be fair minded and non-partisan, as befits a career diplomat who worked for nine presidents (five Republicans, four Democrats). But, like the great umpire Bill Klem, I will also call them like I see them. Readers are free to conclude I'm as blind as other umpires.

Media background

I've worked on both sides of the dividing line between government and the media. As a cub reporter one summer, I covered everything from fatal car accidents to a perfect game. This was for the Daily Transcript, a small paper then published in Little Falls, Minnesota (Charles Lindbergh's home town). When I misspelled a name or got some other detail wrong, I heard about it the next day. (I also heard, from an editor, that if I wanted to stay in the business, I should learn to type; that seemed reasonable, so I took a night course in touch typing that fall at a local high school).

To earn some pin money as a student, I reported on St. John's University (Minn.) sports for the wire services and other local media. St. John's coaches--including the legendary John Gagliardi, then just starting on his way to becoming the winningest coach in college football history--were not shy about pointing out what they saw as blown calls.

Those were early lessons in accuracy. There is right and wrong and sometimes even fubar (You can look it up in any dictionary of military terms).

After graduating, I worked for three years as a writer-editor for the United States Information Agency (USIA), then led by one of the all-time greats of broadcasting, Edward R. Murrow. I remember seeing him once standing outside USIA's iconic address (1776 Pennsylvania Avenue) beside the plaque defining the agency's mission as "telling America's story to the world." He was wearing a trench coat and smoking a cigarette, evoking for mehis dramatic reporting from London rooftops during the World War II Blitz.

Later, one of my Foreign Service assignments was as a correspondent for USIA's press service during the Vietnam War. My 16 months as a member of the Saigon press corps was an intense graduate course in politics, journalism, foreign policy and the difficulty of sorting fact from fiction. It soon became clear why truth is said to be the first casualty of war (whether hot or Cold).

Insert Vietnam photo here with caption:

Dick Virden, then a correspondent for USIA's Wireless File, interviews a U.S. Army officer in the Mekong Delta of South Vietnam, early 1971.

I've also served as a Press Attachein several countries. One tour was in Warsaw in the late 70s, when Poland's government was communist-controlled and ours was considered a hostile embassy. I had friendly, mutually supportive, relations with the few resident Western journalists, who were under siege themselves.

It was much trickier with Polish media. Contacts with dissidents were understandably sensitive. At great risk to themselves, they slipped us mimeographed copies of their illegal or "samizdat" publications and told us what happened at secret "flying university" sessions in church basements. We gave them bootleg copies of Newsweek and compared notes on local developments. After the transcendent 1979 first return home by the Polish Pope, John Paul II, we showed them videotapes of the reports on American TV networks (much more in-depth than the minimalist coverage seen on Polish state television).

With the official media, relations were adversarial, if generally correct. When Jimmy Carter visited Warsaw in December of 1977, we got Polish authorities to commit in advance to publish the transcript of his press conference in the party newspaper. They did, something of a coup for those times. We couldn't get opposition journalists into the press event itself--said to have been the first press conference by an American president in a communist country--but the morning after Carter left I hand delivered answers to questions they'd submitted in writing.

My next tour, again as Press Attache, was in Bangkok, then a regional hub for covering the aftermath of the Vietnam War, including the Boat People, other refugees and Americans missing in action. We're still...