Whatever happened to Ashleigh Banfield??

Eric Alterman was on Air America's Majority Report last night. Basically he said that a media outlet with a "business model" cannot have journalism. Juan Cole made a similar point the other day. To make his point Professor Cole uses the case of MSNBC's Ashleigh Banfield. You may have noticed that Ms Banfield disappeared a few months after the start of the Iraq war. The reason she disappeared was because she said some things that were too much for The War profiteering owner of MSNBC, General Electric, to take. Cole quotes something she said in a speech Banfield gave at Kansas State University on April 24, 2003 that led to her banishment where she states that reporters became cheerleaders for the war rather than journalists.

I think we all were very excited about the beginnings of this conflict in terms of what we could see for the first time on television. The embedded process, which I'll get into a little bit more in a few moments, was something that we've never experienced before, neither as reporters nor as viewers. The kinds of pictures that we were able to see from the front lines in real time on a video phone, and sometimes by a real satellite link-up, was something we'd never seen before and were witness to for the first time.
[......]
That said, what didn't you see? You didn't see where those bullets landed. You didn't see what happened when the mortar landed. A puff of smoke is not what a mortar looks like when it explodes, believe me. There are horrors that were completely left out of this war. So was this journalism or was this coverage-? There is a grand difference between journalism and coverage, and getting access does not mean you're getting the story, it just means you're getting one more arm or leg of the story. And that's what we got, and it was a glorious, wonderful picture that had a lot of people watching and a lot of advertisers excited about cable news. But it wasn't journalism, because I'm not so sure that we in America are hesitant to do this again, to fight another war, because it looked like a glorious and courageous and so successful terrific endeavor, and we got rid oaf horrible leader: We got rid of a dictator, we got rid of a monster, but we didn't see what it took to do that.

I can't tell you how bad the civilian casualties were. I saw a couple of pictures. I saw French television pictures, I saw a few things here and there, but to truly understand what war is all about you've got to be on both sides. You've got to be a unilateral, someone who's able to cover from outside of both front lines, which, by the way, is the most dangerous way to cover a war, which is the way most of us covered Afghanistan. There were no front lines, they were all over the place. They were caves, they were mountains, they were cobbled, they were everything. But we really don't know from this latest adventure from the American military what this thing looked like and why perhaps we should never do it again. The other thing is that so many voices were silent in this war. We all know what happened to Susan Sarandon for speaking out, and her husband, and we all know that this is not the way Americans truly want to be. Free speech is a wonderful thing, it's what we fight for, but the minute it's unpalatable we fight against it for some reason.

So Banfield was fired for stating the obvious. The government did learn one thing from Vietnam, let the American people only see a sanitized version of the war, the puff of smoke from the barrel of the motor, not the blood and guts on the other end. With the corporate take over of the media, journalism has died, disappeared just like Ashleigh Banfield. George W. Bush sits in the White House today not because of "moral values" but because of a media that cannot or will not investigate and report the truth. The truth takes a backseat to the business model and that business model includes not alienating those in power.