Inspiration: Josh Meyer’s “The secret backstory of how Obama let Hezbollah off the hook” (Politico, circa January 2018) and the idea that using the article as mud pie material for the Obama Administration may be invalidated by the lifespan and volume of state secrets migrating across Administrations. This was the question: “Reporting how Obama shut down a Major Hizbullah investigation is ‘slinging mud’?”
Because . . . state secrets span Administrations.
” . . . requires a public that can access, understand, and use the information . . . ” https://www.nfoic.org/transparency-obama-administration —
The problem is with “understand“.
In the way of professional journalism, much condensed and simplified, every editor and reporter must ask about his story: “Is it clear? Is it accurate? Is it complete?”
All authoritarian / autocratic / dictatorial governments diminish the power of the press because . . . they are keeping secrets and intend not to share the reality of their political space with their subjugated populations.
How honest, for example, can Maduro be with Venezuelans when he is operating a criminal state?
He can’t share anything having to do with his circles of criminal enterprise. Instead, he has to tell the people fairy tales in a loud voice.
However, and in defense of secrets keeping and to criticize popular democratic self-determination — or perhaps point out the limits of the same — the British governing class got a strong lesson when it allowed nationalist forces, induced by Moscow-backed Islamic Terrorism and Migration — I “read” Syria as a deliberate underhanded assault on Europe — to make an issue of integration with the European Union, which has been Great Britain’s nearest and greater market and trading partner. Some part of the voting public had had no idea about where its state really was. Instead, they were focused on the degrading of British life by jihadists and needy migrants coming out of the middle east. They chose to lower the portcullis in an attempt to insulate themselves from what they believed was happening in Europe and happening to them because of a unified Europe. They’re now on the cusp of paying for their misjudgment.
Related: Graff, Garrett M. “The Government Secrets Trump Is About to Discover.” Politico, January/February 2017.
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