On The Fourth Estate (11 August 2003)

Last week, I happened to watch a documentary on the Watergate scandal of thirty years ago. Now I remember Watergate. I wasn’t very old, but I was old enough to realize something big was happening; what I wasn’t, was old enough to understand why it was happening.

It was happening because two reporters, who were lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time, had noticed something unusual and had followed it up. To be specific: Bob Woodward was covering a routine court case for the Washington Post when he heard one of the defendants tell the judge, sotto voce, that he worked for the CIA. Nothing more, nothing less. He followed that up, with the help of Carl Bernstein, and together they began digging. They took nothing at face value, and ultimately they revealed a cover-up that brought down the President of the USA.

Sixty years ago, in July 1943, Etienne Dupuch, the longtime editor of the Tribune, did something similar in the Bahamas. The philanthropic millionaire Harry Oakes was discovered murdered in his bed, in circumstances that remain confusing to this day. The Duke of Windsor, then the governor of the Bahamas, had begun a mystifying cover-up, which included contacting the Miami branch of the FBI, attempting to conceal certain facts of the case, and, apparently, framing Oakes’ scandal-mongering son-in-law. Dupuch found out about the murder and dispatched reports about it to the international press, thus thwarting, at least for a while, the royal conspiracy.

In any free democracy, the role of the press is fundamental to the proper functioning of the government. So fundamental is it, in fact, that the press has been dubbed “the fourth estate”. The idea is this. Democratic government is carried out by three “estates”: the executive, the legislature and the judiciary. In The Bahamas, these three branches of power in our government are Cabinet, Parliament, and the courts. But these cannot function properly without the Fourth Estate: the press.

This is because the press — the voice of the people, and the voice for the people — is the only thing that can keep the government honest. Sorry as I am to impugn, even remotely, the reputation of politicians (believe me, some of my best friends are politicians), it remains a sad truth that power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The ability to speak and have one's words heard and obeyed can turn the heads of men and women, and make even the most honest into thieves and tyrants. The role of the press, therefore, is not incidental to good government. It is fundamental to ensure that politicians' power never becomes absolute.

This is why, in the words of Thomas Carlyle, the press in a democracy “becomes a power, a branch of government, with inalienable weight in law-making, in all acts of authority.” It is only through the press that the people who elected the government can know for sure whether their trust is being fulfilled or broken. What that suggests to me is that the media — newspapers, radio, television — have a duty to investigate impartially and honestly the activities of the executive, the legislative and the judicial branches of government, and to report on them to the people.

Let’s take a look at Watergate. The scandal itself was minor, a stupidity committed by a paranoid administration; what was most unthinkable about it was the cover-up itself, which involved the President, the Attorney-General, and elements connected with the CIA and the FBI, thus co-opting both the executive and the judiciary of the government of the USA. The activities of these people were kept secret from the legislature, from Senate and Congress. What Woodward and Bernstein and the Washington Post achieved was to put the truth on the street, and focus the attention of these bodies — and of the whole country — on the misconduct of the most powerful people in the nation. In this instance, the press kept the government honest.

In the Bahamas, a miscarriage of justice was thwarted in 1943 by Dupuch’s nose for investigation and swift action. By getting the news of Oakes’ death out to the world before the Duke of Windsor and his cohorts could stop him, Dupuch deprived the executive and the judiciary of their ability to organize a plausible cover-up of the real events (they did manage to cover them up effectively, but implausibly). By attending and reporting on the trial, the Guardian's editor Mary Moseley built on the foundation Dupuch had laid, and did not allow these bodies to create a scapegoat out of Alfred de Marigny. Between them, the two main newspapers in the country squeezed at least a small bit of justice out of a machine that appeared intent on allowing not one murder, but two.

In both cases, the strength of the press, its proper functioning as a Fourth Estate that demanded some kind of honesty from the three official branches of government, came from the quality of its investigative reporting. Woodward, Bernstein, Dupuch and Moseley were not feature writers or society columnists; they were newshounds, and they were trained to get at the truth of an issue by digging, finding facts, and confirming those facts with third sources (Woodward's mysterious "Deep Throat") — in other words, by backing up their stories with proof, not rumour. Without this sharp edge, the press becomes just another form of entertainment, and its function as the Fourth Estate is lost.

That is exactly what I believe to be the case with our Fourth Estate in 2003. I am concerned that our press — which has proliferated, rabbit-like, across media — has become a very blunt instrument. Investigative reporting, the identification of real stories, the impartial digging to find the truth, the leaving of one's desk and going onto the street to discover what the news really is, is a rare occurrence in this country. We have more than enough opinion to go around — there is no shortage of talk shows, no dearth of letters to the editor, no lack of columns like this one that are mouthpieces for a few literate individuals' personal thoughts — but we do have a real shortage of facts.

On the one hand, too many newsmen and women wait for the news to come to them; they set up tiplines and wait for people to call, they attend press conferences when they are invited, they report the news as it is handed to them. Too much of the "news", in fact, is free national advertisement, consisting of little more than the regurgitation of information provided by the subjects of the stories. Too many reporters attend press conferences equipped with tape recorders, from which they transcribe information verbatim, or else they acquire a copy of the press release. The tone of interviews tends to be either obsequious or shallow; tough questions, grounded in solid research, are not asked.

On the other hand, some members of the press go to the opposite extreme. Focussing rather irrelevantly on the private lives of public figures, they report wild rumour, sensationalize minor events, and create “news” which is barely more than printed gossip. As a result, many thinking people mistrust what they read in the papers; in fact, I know several who have stopped reading local newspapers altogether, but look to the international press for their information. But it is equally common for gullible people to trust everything they read in the newspapers. The government of the country slips between the gaps that are left. Without hard investigative reporting, the press creates the opportunity for our executive, our parliament, and our judiciary to do more or less what they please in relative obscurity.

In a democracy, investigative reporting is a fundamental requirement of good government. It is more important than ever that the Bahamian media take seriously their role as the Fourth Estate. We cannot expect the government to hold itself accountable to the people that elected it; that accountability must constantly be demanded by the press. The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil, after all, is for good men to do nothing; and without the truth, there is nothing that good men can do.