Blog #5

Question everything: The lessons learned from "Shock and Awe"

As the public sits and watches in horror as the U.S. continues to involve itself in foreign affairs, it makes you ask if this is right and why we continue to add fuel to the fire and risk more lives? 

Unfortunately, when we watched the movie "Shock and Awe" in class, I couldn't help but notice that the U.S. was repeating history in a sense. In the movie, writers at Knight-Ridder are brave enough to question why the government was so quick to invade Iraq after 9/11. 9/11 was a tragic event and still evokes American citizens to be fearful that our country will go under attack again. However, even with this fear, it does not give the government the power to place blame and attack countries and individuals without proof.

The writers at Knight-Ridder understood and sensed a shift in blame from Afghanistan to Iraq, but little evidence was provided to explain why former President George W. Bush wanted to attack Iraq. The former president was scared that the rest of the world would identify America as weak and exploit us even more than the terrorist group al-Qaeda already had. Therefore, during his State of the Union speech on January 29, 2002, Bush said "I will not wait on events while dangers gather. I will not stand by as peril draws closer and closer. The United States of America will not permit the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons."

This approach to war led to many Americans and the writers at Knight-Ridder to be a little worried and unsure of their leader's decision-making. It was really startling to see how Bush and his administration painted Iraq as the bad guy and how much of the press were willing to mislead the American people with this information. So many individuals from both sides of the war lost their lives and others at home had to deal with the grief and mourning of these loved ones.

As a future journalist, it made me angry that Knight-Ridder's publication wouldn't run its stories exposing the government's opinions of Iraq and the lack of justification to invade because if they had, maybe more journalists and American citizens would have come to their senses and started questioning the decision to go to war a lot faster. It also aggravated me how we saw so many other highly regarded publications trusting the information the government was feeding them and hardly checking the information at all. If it wasn't for Knight-Ridder exposing the government for its lies and false information, who knows how much destruction would have been caused and how many more lives would have been affected. 

Not enough people are questioning why we keep giving weapons and money to fund the war in Ukraine and the war in the Middle East, and I am afraid that history will repeat itself. We don't have enough journalists who are providing us with factual information about these wars and many journalists are blindly justifying the funding that we provide.

I understand that tensions were extremely high after 9/11 and that they are immensely high right now, but that is no excuse for journalists to allow themselves to have the government manipulate them and publish false narratives. As a student studying journalism, I have been taught the importance of checking sources and investigating before publishing. It is shocking to me how many journalists set these principles aside when the government tries to enforce an agenda on the American people. 

If anything, it is even more important to double check your sources and provide the truth when tensions are so high. If good journalistic principles are not put into place, people are led blindly to believing one part of the story, leading to people making poor decisions and many more lives being put at risk. In intense situations, like war, people can't go back and fix their mistakes. The implications of war are permanent, and without journalists like those at Knight-Ridder, asking the hard-hitting questions and exposing wrongdoings, the government will be able to enforce its hidden agenda and affect the lives of many in the nation and abroad.

I'm not blind to the risks that journalists take when they go against the government and other people in power, but I don't think that we can give journalists the pass. They still need to be held to the highest degrees of standards, and they cannot be threatened by the power of others and ignore the issues at hand. It is scary that people go to extreme measures to hold power and dominance, but as a future journalist, I have learned from this movie and from other examples that I have learned about in classes, that the journalists who take the most risks and expose issues for the greater good are the ones who come out on top and are remembered as heroes.

It was extremely hard for these investigative journalists in the movie to get the information they needed to expose the former president. They were talking to individuals that were risking their careers as well, and I don't think that I can write this blog post without acknowledging and praising those whistleblowers in society who help make this kind of journalism possible. Between the whistleblowers and journalists, so many risks are taken, but without them, who knows where society would be today. These journalists and whistleblowers intimidate people in power and sometimes influence them to be more truthful because at times the people in power would rather be honest instead of being exposed as liars.

The government has and will continue to silence journalists and others who try to feed important information to these journalists. My biggest takeaway from watching "Shock and Awe," was that as a future journalist, I must value giving members of society nothing but the truth and must question everything!

The world continues to get crazier, and conflict is on the rise. As I step into the huge responsibility of being a journalist, I will certainly look back at how the members of Knight-Ridder handled themselves and at how they prevented so much destruction by putting their careers and lives on the line, instead of turning their cheeks like so many scared journalists did.

I hope that I can provide society with great pieces of journalism that touch peoples' hearts and expose the wrongdoings of individuals so that they cannot go on power trips and disregard everyone's wellbeing for their own selfish benefits.