Encounters with classified military information at the age of 20 left the author with the unshakable understanding that the media has no choice but to report on the banal – because they just don’t have access to the intricacies of what’s really happening.

By Idan Gazit

In 1968, Daniel Ellsberg, still a respected foreign policy analyst, famously sat Henry Kissinger down for a sobering discourse on the social and psychological effects of access to classified information. Mother Jones recently brought this delightful exchange to my attention:

“You will deal with a person who doesn’t have those clearances only from the point of view of what you want him to believe and what impression you want him to go away with, since you’ll have to lie carefully to him about what you know. In effect, you will have to manipulate him. You’ll give up trying to assess what he has to say. The danger is, you’ll become something like a moron. You’ll become incapable of learning from most people in the world, no matter how much experience they may have in their particular areas that may be much greater than yours.”

Having experienced a situation akin to the one described by Ellsberg, I was moved to share my experience.

I have some firsthand experience with the effects of handling classified information from my time in the Israeli military. Readers looking for disclosure of juicy secrets can stop now; I’m not going to be sharing any confidential information, just the effect of that information on my life.

This isn’t about boasting—my experience did not involve high-impact data of the likes cited in the original article, but it was an eye-opening experience. Regardless of your stance on Israel, the media reports upon minutae of events here obsessively. To know the truth and then see the resulting coverage is an experience I will carry with me for the rest of my life. It changed my entire understanding of the media and its role in our world. It changed how I read and understand what people write.

It would be an understatement to say that it was the most profound perceptual shift I’ve experienced in my 32 years of life, and it happened when I was only 20.

During my military service, it came to pass one day that I had access to extremely sensitive current diplomatic information from peace talks that were taking place, except this information wasn’t from our diplomatic pouches, it was from “theirs.”

I’m not going to argue morality here; governments and corporations regularly snoop as much as they are able to get away with. In diplomacy as in any negotiation, information is power.

These talks were the lede on every news outlet: press conferences nightly, Serious World Leaders™ with Serious Faces™ jockeying for brainshare in the 24-hour news cycle.

There I was, looking at communiqués burning the wires between the negotiation team and the home office, and it could have been for an entirely different summit, for all the relation it bore to the news coming from my television. The topics that were the subject of intense coverage by the talking heads had virtually zero overlap with the topics that comprised the bulk of the angsty missives. Most of the diplomatic traffic had to do with two topics that didn’t receive a single mention on the news—not during, and not after.

It is worth noting that these are topics which both sides knew about. They were clearly negotiating around these topics, and even if they started as one side’s private concerns unvoiced at the negotiating table, they clearly didn’t stay that way. In the end, there was a tacit, unspoken agreement that these topics not see the light of day, because neither side saw advantage in revealing the information.

The issues in the media were obvious issues, or at least, issues that could be laid bare on camera by a 10-minute interview with some “expert.” Probably not even that; these were issues that could be reduced in richness and dimension so as to fit in a convenient this-vs-that Chicken McNugget of television. The issues in the communiqués were thorny, complex issues. They were not accessible to the layman, and they each contained a graph of dependencies, existing conditions, and painful compromises of intricate complexity. These issues were unfit for reduction to fit into the ever-shrinking bandwidth of journalism. As a result, the one thing both sides could agree on (without talking about it) is that the world would be better off not knowing. They threw the media some juicy-but-predictable bones to chew on and that, literally, was all she wrote.

Ever since that experience, I approach what I read with a level of skepticism bordering on paranoia. The media isn’t necessarily lying to us, rather they aren’t able to get at the real issues. Either they just can’t access the information, or they are unable to identify the importance of some information, but the end result is the same, tautological banality: they report on that which they are able to report upon. Which isn’t very much.

It could be that my experience was an isolated one, and those peace talks had less leaks than most, leaving the media with poorer raw materials from which to bake the news. I’ve not been directly exposed to a similar situation since, something with such clear inputs and outputs as to be almost scientific in nature. It left me with a deep mistrust of information, and a sense of inadequacy when it comes to understanding about world events. That whole British-Irish thing? No fucking clue what went down there, no matter what Wikipedia aggregated on the matter. How about India and Pakistan? Sri Lanka? Anything really.

Think about it. It will make you feel small and stupid, which ironically isn’t such a bad thing. I could do with more of us getting a dose of humility when it comes to complex topics. We supposedly teach this in school as “critical reading.” The reality is that we suck at inculcating in our children a healthy skepticism of information and an understanding that all information carries bias. They’ll be growing up on a larger and more varied diet of information than we did, and it’s probably a good idea to teach them how to ingest it safely. Otherwise, they might believe the shit coming out of Fox News.

Oops, guess that ship has sailed.