The Narrow Separation of Press and State.

It was a remarkable comment that passed without notice. After interviewing the new White House chief of staff, a network anchor bade him farewell. "All right, Andy Card," said CNN's Judy Woodruff, "we look forward to working with you, to covering your administration."

If major news outlets were committed to independent journalism, Woodruff's statement on national television January 19, 2001, would have caused quite a media stir--as a sign of undue coziness with power brokers in Washington. Instead it was far from conspicuous.

Woodruff's remark was simply a statement of fact. In a world of corporate-owned-and-controlled media, warm collaboration is routine. Many reporters work closely with each new crew of top government officials. Leading journalists and spinners in high places are accustomed to mutual reliance. That's good for their professional advancement. It doesn't, however, bode well for the public's right to know.

"The first fact of American journalism is its overwhelming dependence on sources, mostly official, usually powerful," Walter Karp pointed out in Harper's magazine a dozen years ago. Since then, the problem has grown even more acute. A multitude of journalists advance their careers by (in Woodruff's words) "working with" movers and shakers in government.

Reporters with outsized reputations for investigative vigor--Bob Woodward, for example--may be the most compromised. Behind the scenes, the tacitly understood tradeoffs amount to quid pro quos. Officials dispense leaks to reporters with track records of proven willingness to stay within preferred bounds. "It is a bitter irony of source journalism," Karp observed, "that the most esteemed journalists are precisely the most servile. For it is by making themselves useful to the powerful that they gain access to the `best' sources."

While some fine journalism--assertive and carefully researched--gets into print and onto airwaves every day, the islands of such reporting are drowned in oceans of glorified leaks and institutional handouts. But democracy is only served when journalists keep searching for information that officials hide.

On the surface, concerns about scant separation of press and state might seem to be misplaced. After all, don't we see network correspondents firing tough questions at politicians? Isn't the press filled with criticism of policymakers?

Well, kind of. We're encouraged to confuse partisan wrangles with ample debate or--in the case of certain TV shows--high decibels with wide diversity. To a great extent, mainstream media outlets provide big megaphones for those who already have plenty of clout. That suits wealthy owners and large advertisers. But what about democratic discourse?

In general, news coverage of political issues is about as varied as the array of views propounded by the hierarchies of the Democratic and Republican parties. When there's bipartisan agreement on particular topics--such as the wisdom of keeping two million people in the United States behind bars or the value of corporate globalization--the media space for debate tends to be very limited. Consensus among major-party leaders has a way of circumscribing the mass-media arena.

Likewise, controversies and hard-edged reporting are likely to emerge in mainstream media only to the extent that leading Democrats and Republicans clash. So, in the opening weeks of George W. Bush's presidency, the refusal of most Democrats to challenge the far-right policies of the new administration resulted in largely uncritical news coverage.

With huge conglomerates more enmeshed in media ownership and advertising than ever, news operations are under heightened pressure to promote corporate outlooks, dovetailing with rightward trends in governance. It's true that business has always dominated government policymaking. But in recent times, mitigating interests--often known in mediaspeak as special interests--have been increasingly expunged from serious consideration. As syndicated columnist William Pfaff wrote in mid-January:

   What is new about the situation today is that a seemingly irreversible
   mutation in the U.S. system has occurred. At some point, quantitative
   change does become qualitative change. The point when that change took
   place was probably 1976, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that money spent
   in support of a political candidate is a form of constitutionally protected
   free speech. Moneyed interests now finance not only the winners of national
   elections but also most of the losers

Pfaff's column appears most prominently in the International Herald Tribune. Based in Paris, he has a clear-eyed view of big money's leverage over U.S. politics:

   This is part of the enlarging domination of American life by business
   corporations and their values, which are those of material aggrandizement,
   a phenomenon accompanied and promoted by the circuses and gladiatorial
   contests provided by the most important U.S. industry of all,
   entertainment, which now showcases elections and even wars as
   entertainments.

The United States is in dire need of wide-ranging, independent news media. Unfortunately, that's unlikely as long as most "journalism" resembles stenography for the powerful, corporate interests keep gobbling up media empires, and very few eyebrows get raised when a network anchor tells a key official of an incoming administration that "we look forward to working with you."

Norman Solomon is a syndicated columnist. His latest book is The Habits of Highly Deceptive Media.