A Journalist’s Journeys in History, Politics & His Profession

Born in Germany, Uli Schmetzer spent forty years as a journalist covering global news events for Reuters and The Chicago Tribune. His memoir offers an insider’s experience, not only on news gathering but on the management and manipulation of news. Schmetzer’s book, published in Australia is available on Amazon.com. He has kindly allowed MediaChannel.org to feature an excerpt from the book’s epilogue. It is a fabulous read. — Danny Schechter.

Once you have lost faith in your trade or in your masters you tend to become careless, even auto-destructive. It is not deliberate but sub-conscious. You are not planning to jump off a bridge or gulp down phials of sleeping pills. No, it’s like a disease gradually creeping through your being, sapping your energy, reducing your vitality, sliding you into a state of melancholy or what the Germans call Weltschmerz. You suffer from flashes of rebellion followed by periods of depression and a sense of futility. At times it is like waking up from an exciting dream and realizing it was an illusion. The sense of disappointment becomes permanent. You begin to question values – yours, theirs.

The process is gradual as you discover the fairytales dished up by our entertainment moguls are not true, nor was the much-peddled belief the atom bombs, the carpet and fire bombings, the cluster bombs and Agent Orange were necessary to save human lives. The process begins early, when you realize the Red Indians were not scalping savages vanquished by white pioneers and sharp-shooting cowboys but freedom fighters battling for their land; the Australian aborigines were dying out not because they were an inferior race but because they had been methodically exterminated over the last two hundred years; the British empire was not created by patriots and the might of the British Navy but by thugs and avaricious merchants and the first mega-corporation, the East India company which forged Rule Britannia in blood and the misery of others.

Then you become conscious at this moment the U.S. can no longer be defined as the champion of freedom, justice and democracy because it has turned into the global bully using its superior muscle to bend everyone else to American will under the motto expressed by the current U.S. president: ‘You’re either for us or against us.’

By then, of course, you have become aware the war in Iraq was based on cock-and-bull stories invented to scare ‘the American people’, to anger them and raise their patriotism level so that the oil companies could lay their hands on the largest untapped petroleum reserves in the world while the reconstruction and home security industry could make billions of dollars with gadgets and personnel to protect the frightened public against ‘terrorism.’

Today you understand ‘disasters’ and ‘wars’ make fabulous fortunes for a new kind of disaster capitalism and that Israel has become a wealthy nation by exporting its home security technology as the best and most experienced in the world. In fact the only danger menacing this booming disaster economy, as Naomi Klein points out in her best-seller ‘The Shock Doctrine,’ is the threat of climatic stability or a sudden outbreak of global peace and with it an end to the profitable ‘permanent war’ on global terror.

Not to worry, both are unlikely.

Initially all this ‘wisdom’ came to me only vaguely as I rushed from one disaster zone to another, increasingly outraged by the brutality and the disproportionate retribution for so-called acts of ‘terrorism’ (which were in reality acts of resistance to occupation) and the cavalier way Washington and Tel Aviv brushed aside their blatant war crimes against civilian populations defining them as unfortunate collateral damage a byproduct of the need to make secure America and its allies, how we had to destroy entire nations with carpet bombings to save the bombed citizen from their evil rulers.

That hogwash is dished up to journalists day after day and if you don’t include it in your story the home desk will do it for you, plagiarizing these habitual official exonerations from the news agencies.

In the world today there is still ‘us’ the good guys and ‘them’ the bad guys. We are brainwashed with this propaganda message day after day through our media machine.

Faith does not collapse all of a sudden, it erodes gradually.

In the early 1990s Bob Rowley and I were taken off our regular beats abroad to concentrate on a series about the global smuggling of weapons and nuclear material. For nearly two months we traveled the world interviewing experts, police and the smugglers. In Munich I was given access to the jail cell of a convicted plutonium trafficker, caught in a sting operation; in Venice I had dinner with a leading Italian magistrate investigating the smuggling of plutonium inside tree trunks transported from the former Soviet Union to the Middle East; in Frankfurt a Polish smuggler carrying a briefcase containing plutonium died of radiation poisoning; on the Afghan-Pakistan border I spent two days with village gun makers turning Japanese scrap metal into lethal custom-made weapons including one-shot fountain pens, artillery pieces and custom-made automatic rifles; in Afghanistan CIA agents tried desperately to buy back the shoulder-held anti-aircraft Stinger missiles the Pentagon had donated to the Mujahideen when they still fought the Soviets, rather then the U.S.; in Zurich we heard of a CIA plane parked permanently at the airport. The plane allegedly functioned as a buy-up office purchasing nuclear material from smugglers.

We figured we had spent some $80,000 in expenses on traveling and accommodation alone.

But the series did not see print.

All efforts for an explanation fell on deaf ears. It was as if an official secrecy act had been imposed on the Tribune editors. Rumor had it the word came down from Washington the series would panic the public. Seven years later, on September 11, 2001, Americans would be jolted out of their false sense of security and truly panicked.

While in India in 1998 I wrote a story about the battle of Indian farmers and scientists to prevent Monsanto introducing its Genetically Modified Seeds (GMS). The Indians argued GMS would spell the end of their native seeds, might transmigrate and would grand Monsanto a monopoly on seeds in the world’s second most populous nation. The desk in Chicago tossed the story back at me with some queries. I rewrote the piece addressing the queries. A few hours after I dispatched the reworked story I received a telex message from the Monsanto rep in India. He complained about an alleged inaccuracy in the third paragraph of my story. The story had not been printed so far. Someone in Chicago had offered Monsanto a copy of the story prior to it being printed.

Needless to say the story was never printed and my furious inquiries how the corporation had managed access to unpublished copy were never answered.

Such incidents jolt your faith.

The Tribune’s series ‘The Miracle Merchants’ was a prime example how quickly the mass media bows to public outrage and pressure by a powerful lobby. The series, perhaps the best the Tribune has ever done in my experience, intended to discover what happens to the monthly $25 contributions donated by millions of Americans who “adopt” and support a needy child in the third world through one of the many charitable organizations.

Tribune correspondents around the world adopted a child through a different charity organization. We sent monthly installment to the organization and received, in return, their brochures and an occasional letter of thanks from the adopted child, plus a photo. After a year, on the same day, all correspondents tried to find their adopted child, not an easy task since the location of the children are given only in vague geographical terms and all communication must occur via the agency.
The child adopted in Africa had been dead for years.

The other children were located but had no idea of their sponsor. Every now and then they had written dictated letters. Their parents were nonplussed when told someone was paying a monthly fee for the schooling of their child. A painstaking investigation discovered only a fraction, not even a dollar at times, of the $25 a month donations reached the children, sometimes nothing at all. The great bulk of the donation was gobbled up by ‘administrative expenses.’

The charities had built skyscraper offices in the U.S. Their executives traveled first class and stayed in five star hotels during ‘field trips.’ Their local native representatives had acquired unexplained wealth. The one in the Philippines, a once badly paid former male nurse, had built a villa.

As expected the series enraged the charity industry. Organizations investigated threatened to sue. Not one of them ever did. But their outrage sounded good in the media because like all such denials it gives the public the idea the journalists have lied. No one ever follows up if those loud threats ‘to sue’ actually went to court.

Strangely, it was not the fake indignation of the charity industry that stopped the Tribune from the follow-up it had promised but the fury of readers, people who had been donating $25 a month for years to a needy child in the Third World and now felt betrayed – but not by the charities but by their newspaper.

The donors charged we reporters had made up the story. In the end no one wants to admit he or she has been fooled for years.

Like most of those involved in the expose, I was furious when the Tribune decided to drop any further investigation or pursue its original goal – to lobby for legislation that would make charities ,,

In my rookie days we lived in and wrote about a world that often resembled a children’s fairytale. But that world grew up. Journalism did not. Today our mass media still peddles fairytales narrated by government officials, party insiders, ‘experts’ and senior politicians who dominate our talk shows and our news print while critics of the System are usually ignored or given limited space. …

If the mass media today is defined as the biggest obstacle to humanity’s social and economic progress it is our duty to remove or reduce that obstacle. We cannot do this by dissuading young journalists to stay away from the mass media. Nor would I want to. In spite of my negative experiences I still believe journalism is one of the most exciting professions, one that gave me access to people and events I would have never met or seen. And unless you are cynical, in which case you shouldn’t enter the profession, it still gives you an opportunity, slim as it may be, to struggle for changes and improvements in our societies, a battle that must continue even though, as that graphic Australian colloquialism points out:

“Mate, you’ll be pushing shit uphill.”