War? What War?
By Eric Boehlert
August 12th, 2004

Salon/The Guardian

The level of violence in Iraq has been escalating since the handover of sovereignty in June, but Americans are being exposed to less reporting and analysis about it, writes Eric Boehlert

Despite arriving sooner than expected and catching much of the American press off guard, the June 28 handover of sovereignty in Iraq was trumpeted as a momentous event.

That night CNN devoted its entire prime-time lineup to analysing the brief, 15-minute ceremony in Baghdad. Fox News cheered it as “a day that will go down in history”. Newspapers the next morning were clogged with reports from Iraq and speculation about what the transfer of political power would mean for the rebuilding of Iraq, as well as for the 140,000 US troops serving there.
The handover, though, has done very little to change things for the better in Iraq. In the past six weeks, the country has been gripped in escalating violence, forcing some coalition countries and private contractors to flee for safety. Kidnappings by insurgents have multiplied, as have assassinations, while electricity still remains in short supply.

Iraq’s national conference - critical to the eventual implementation of free elections - has been postponed, and US soldiers continue to die.

“On June 28, my feeling was nothing was going to change because of the handover,” says Steven Cook, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “There were still going to be car bombings and US soldiers being killed, and that’s exactly what’s happened. Nothing has changed.”

But one thing did change: US press coverage of Iraq. The handover marked a turning point in the level and intensity of media interest, which sharply decreased, particularly on the 24-hour cable news channels.

“Clearly the volume in press coverage has gone way down,” says Cook. “‘Sleepy’ is a good word to describe it. The coverage doesn’t compare with anything we’d seen during the previous 12 months from Iraq. The drop-off has been noticeable.”

“From the very beginning this has been an administration that wanted to hide the toll of the war — and the media have been absolutely complicit in that,” says Nancy Lessin, co-founder of the antiwar group Military Families Speak Out. Lessin’s stepson, a Marine, served in Iraq during the spring of 2003. “In April of this year, violence in Iraq was up and it was hard to keep the war off the front pages. But as soon as possible the pictures changed. Since June 28, [the war has] been off the front pages again.”

More recently, a week’s worth of fierce fighting in Najaf between coalition forces and militant Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi army has begun to bring Iraq back into focus. And if US forces unleash a frontal assault there, Iraq will once again dominate the headlines, as it so often has in the past 18 months.

“We’re still interested in the story. We’re on the air every night about Iraq,” says Marcy McGinnis, senior vice-president of news at CBS. “But what’s happened is, interest in the political scene has increased. News always ebbs and flows, and at times it may appear Iraq is taking a back seat to politics because that’s what’s in the news right now.”

Following the ebb-and-flow theory, Iraq is likely to return to the media forefront, however temporarily, when the 1,000th US soldier dies in Iraq. Based on the current fatality rate, that sombre event could happen as soon as late September. Still, considered as a whole from July 1 to the present, coverage of Iraq seems to have diminished. “It’s incredible how the press has veered away from Iraq” since June 28, says Peter Singer, a national security fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Last week “six US soldiers were killed in 24 hours, and there was nothing. If you’re President Bush and you see headlines about Martha Stewart and Laci Peterson, you’ve got to count yourself lucky, because that means the focus is no longer on Iraq.”

The physical danger reporters face inside Iraq has clearly curbed their efforts to report more. And for editors and producers back in America, trying to find a way to make the repetitive nature of the events in Iraq compelling remains a challenge. “One can imagine editors saying, ‘Gee, we just did a roadside bombing story yesterday,’” says Singer. “But that’s how an insurgency works; it’s the same attack over and over.”

That fatigue among members of the press corps makes it less likely that the daily violence in Iraq will be considered newsworthy. “I covered the bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad in August of 2003, and that was a shock,” says Ken Dilanian, a staff writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer who has spent several months reporting from Iraq in the past year.

“As I recall, CNN broke into its regular programming live and stayed with it all day. That was with 24 people dead. Nowadays that happens every week, and it’s on Page A14.” Press fatigue “was bound to set in,” agrees Cook. “But it is uncanny how it occurred right after the change in sovereignty on June 28.”

The media’s shift away from Iraq is good news for the White House, which has watched American sentiment turn decisively against the war and specifically against President Bush’s handling of the ongoing military effort.

“Without question, the Bush administration is better off with no news from Iraq,” says Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution who served in Baghdad as an advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority last spring. Now the administration is much more interested in ushering the war on terror back into the foreground, while shuffling Iraq into the background.

“Terrorism news trumps Iraq news for Bush,” says Juan Cole, a professor of modern Middle Eastern history at the University of Michigan. The emphasis on terrorism news fits with Bush’s poll results. Fifty-two percent of Americans approve of how Bush is handling the war on terror, compared with just 37 approving of his actions in Iraq, according to the latest CBS poll.

So far, the White House’s choreography is working as planned, particularly on cable TV, which is feasting on fresh terror warnings at home while giving just token attention to Iraq. So are newspapers like the New York Post. On August 7, under the banner headline “War on Terror,” the Post spread 11 stories over five pages detailing the “Crackdown on Qaeda Creeps”. The Post ran just a single article that day about the situation in Iraq. Readers might be getting the impression that Iraq is as irrelevant as Afghanistan has become.

Yet the diminished attention to Iraq has created an odd media disconnect. While most pundits agree Iraq will be a key issue in November, Americans are being exposed to less reporting and analysis about the war. “There’s an inverse relationship in press coverage and the situation in Iraq,” says Cook. “It’s amazing; the press has grown weary of reporting the same story regardless of how important it is. It is the issue in the campaign.”

For example, in the wake of the sovereignty handover, NBC’s “Meet the Press” discussed Iraq in depth during its July 4 telecast, featuring Senator Joe Lieberman, and Senator John Warner, who spent nearly 20 minutes on the topic. In the five weeks since that broadcast, however, the show has not once matched that degree of focus on Iraq.

Instead, when the topic is addressed it’s invariably in a domestic political context: How will Iraq affect the US election? What’s actually happening in Iraq has much less salience. (On the Aug. 8 broadcast of “Meet the Press,” national security advisor Condoleezza Rice was asked 18 questions; only three were about Iraq, and none were related to current events there.)

Ironically, after the Democrats’ convention in Boston, “Meet the Press” host Tim Russert, suggesting it was the Democrats who were not anxious to raise the war issue, asserted that Iraq was “the 800-pound elephant in the room that people don’t want to talk about”. Yet it is “Meet the Press” itself, along with much more of the mainstream press, that has become increasingly fascinated with domestic politics and indifferent to the war.

The political ramifications of the media’s recent sluggishness are significant because, aside from military families, most Americans don’t have a direct connection with the war. How the press plays - or downplays - Iraq between now and November “will have a profound impact on the election,” says Phil Trounstine, director of the Survey and Policy Research Institute at San Jose State University. “Less coverage would be good for the president,” he observes.

A recent survey conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press suggests a direct link between reporting on Iraq (or how people treat the news from Iraq) and Bush’s political fortunes. During the month of June, just 39% of Americans paid very close attention to the news coming out of Iraq, the lowest rate for all of 2004.

Over the same period, the survey found, Americans’ opinion of Bush, as well as of the situation in Iraq, improved noticeably. On July 14, ABC News’ the Note - the online roundup of the day’s must-reads for political junkies - theorised: “The Bush campaign is counting on the continued absence of a drumbeat of bad news out of Iraq to improve right track/wrong track” polling numbers.

Was there really an absence of bad news from Iraq? Nearly three dozen GI’s were killed during the first two weeks of July. On that same July 14 day, Iraq erupted in a new wave of violence. A suicide attacker detonated a massive car bomb near the British embassy, killing 11 and wounding 40.

An insurgent group, probably led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, announced it had beheaded a Bulgarian hostage. Five Iraqis were killed and 21 insurgents were wounded in fierce fighting in the Iraqi city of Ramadi.

Insurgents killed the governor of Mosul as he was driving in a convoy of vehicles. A gunman assassinated the director general of Iraq’s Industry Ministry as he left his Baghdad home. Meanwhile, two GI’s were killed that day when their vehicle rolled over.

Few if any of those deadly incidents on July 14 received sustained cable news coverage in America; instead the congressional vote on same-sex marriage was the preferred topic of the day.

The next day, canvassing the media landscape for stories that might affect the November election, the Note made no reference to the carnage in Iraq. Since June 28, that has often been the case with the Note, which perhaps better than any other site accurately captures the shifting moods and priorities of Washington’s political press corps.

For instance, on July 22, the Note linked to 116 separate stories, drawn from 23 quasi-political categories (9/11 commission, national security, the economy, same-sex marriage, etc.). Not one of them had to do with events in Iraq.

And that was just 24 hours after an audacious bombing by insurgents of a Baghdad police station, a deadly attack that was completely overshadowed on cable news outlets by the story that former national security advisor Sandy Berger had been under investigation - for nearly six months - for breaching protocol at the National Archives while reviewing documents in preparation for the 9/11 commission hearings.

Television wasn’t alone in downplaying the police station bombing story. While the Washington Times and the Washington Post both put the attack on Page 1, scores of major-market dailies, including the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Arizona Republic, Denver Post, Hartford Courant, Indianapolis Star, New York Times and San Jose Mercury News, kept the story off the front page.

A recent check of the Note on Aug. 2 indicated more of the same: 83 story links in 15 categories, none of them dealing with Iraq. Yet voters are told by the press that come November, the issue of Iraq may very well decide the election. After June 28, the line about there being “no bad news” from Iraq even seeped into reported pieces. On July 21, the New York Times, in a campaign trail dispatch, noted that one key factor that may work in Bush’s favour in November is that “in Iraq, the transfer of sovereignty has led to some reduction in American casualties.”

But, in fact, nearly as many US soldiers lost their lives in Iraq during the first half of July alone as did during the entire month of June. Of the 15 months since major combat ended, July ranks as the fourth deadliest for US soldiers serving in Iraq. And if August’s current fatality rate continues, it will easily claim more American lives than July did.

So why does the press act as if the handover of sovereignty has changed the situation on the ground? “It seems the mainstream press has bought in to the White House line about June 28 - ‘OK, we’re in a new phase,’” says Lessin of Military Families Speak Out.

“But we still have 138,000 troops there and are occupying a country. It hasn’t changed. If it has changed, it’s increased the violence in many areas. Then again, the press has [always] been in the lap of the administration, and once again it’s playing its role of lapdog.”

CBS News executive McGinnis denies that charge. “We have 22 minutes [on the “CBS Evening News”] and we pick and choose the stories each night. We make subjective editorial choices every single day, and we’re not making them on how to help or hurt George Bush or John Kerry. The decisions [about Iraq] are based on what’s happening in Iraq that day.”

Of course, major news organisations are still covering Iraq and spending extraordinary resources - both human and financial - to keep Americans informed. The major dailies, as well as the nightly network news broadcasts, still dutifully report the developments in Iraq. On August 6, for instance, USA Today ran a long Page 1 account about new fighting in Iraq, while “NBC Nightly News” opened its broadcast with a similar report.

But since the hand-over in Iraq, a certain intensity, or urgency, has been missing from the coverage - a reluctance to go beyond the day’s random bombings, kidnappings and shootings.

To be sure, the 24-hour cable shows are the news outlets that have ratcheted down their Iraq reporting the most over the past six weeks. That became glaringly obvious during the Democratic national convention in Boston, where many pundits and producers spent much of the time ignoring the politics and bemoaning how little actual news there was to report.

Yet here’s a small sampling of what happened in Iraq that same week, little of which was deemed newsworthy enough to seriously interrupt the endless, repetitive cable TV discussion about swing voters and Teresa Heinz Kerry’s “shove it” remark:

· July 26: Attackers shot and killed Iraq’s senior interior ministry official and two of his bodyguards in a drive-by shooting.
· July 26: A suicide bomber detonated a car filled with explosives, mortars and rockets near the gates of a US base in Mosul, killing three.
· July 27: The dead body of a kidnapped Turkish truck driver was found.
· July 27: One Iraqi was killed and 14 coalition soldiers were injured when a mortar hit a Baghdad residential district.
· July 28: A car bomb exploded on a busy boulevard in Baquba, killing 68 people and wounding nearly 100. The attack stood as the deadliest insurgent strike since the US occupation began last year.
· July 28: Seven Iraqi soldiers and 35 insurgents were killed during a firefight in Suwariyah.
· July 29: Reeling from the violence and a wave of kidnappings, Iraqi officials once again postponed a three-day national conference to choose an interim assembly in preparation for the country’s first elections.

Experts say that week was typical of the chaos that has transpired in Iraq this summer, with or without the spotlight of the US press shining on the region. “Iraq remains very much in the balance. That’s the only fair assessment you can make right now,” says Brookings’ Singer. “I’ve talked to friends who served in the CPA, and I don’t know anybody with on-the-ground experience in Iraq who doesn’t think the situation there isn’t completely screwed up,” adds Cook.

“Iraqis are so embittered and [have] completely lost any faith in us, even the most pro-American Iraqis,” says the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Dilanian, who says he has had a profound change of heart on the topic.

Last April, fresh from reporting in Iraq, an optimistic Dilanian wrote that the press was ignoring improvements in Iraq and underplaying the chance for a real turnaround. In late June he returned to Baghdad to cover the sovereignty handover.

Summing up his new grim impressions in an August 1 article, Dilanian admitted his earlier prediction was wrong and wrote, “The situation in Iraq right now is not as bad as the news media are portraying it to be. It’s worse. Most Iraqis aren’t seeing the improvements they had hoped for, and they’re not blaming the guerrillas - they’re blaming the Americans. Sovereignty seems to have had zero effect on this equation.”

That’s the key story many American news outlets have missed since June 28.

Eric Boehlert is a senior writer at Salon.

This article has been provided by Salon through a special arrangement with Guardian Newspapers Limited. © Salon.com 2004
Visit the Salon site at www.salon.com

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Outfoxing The Conservatives
By Nikki Finke
LA Weekly

July 15, 2004

The director of a new movie exposing Fox News talks about his journey from TV nice guy to rightwing nemesis.

He’s as creatively talented as Michael Moore and even more of a political activist, but to this point practically unknown by comparison. Now, though, his documentaries are about to become just as controversial as those of Moore. He’s Robert Greenwald Œ66, the Hollywood movie and television director/producer/provocateur. Unlike Moore, Greenwald stays behind the camera, but suddenly this week his name is everywhere because of the ambush-style release of his latest documentary, “Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism.”
After premiering Tuesday in New York (it’s set to debut July 19 in L.A. with a live introduction by Howard Dean), the expose has Dick Cheney’s favorite news network snarling at Greenwald, at The New York Times (which, on Sunday, published a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the video), and at its fictitious nemesis, the “biased liberal media.” Journalism and political Web sites, not to mention that trade bible, Editor & Publisher, are following the attacks and counter-attacks with undisguised glee. (Except for the Washington Post’s media reporter Howard Kurtz, who is not just leaning over backwards but actually tying himself into contortionist knots to take Fox News’ side, probably because Kurtz knows he could be accused of conflict of interest since he still has that shameful “Reliable Sources” gig with rival CNN.)

Yet, this is only the start of what will be a hat trick for Greenwald this year.

His 2003 video, “Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraqi War,” is being expanded into a full-length documentary feature with added footage and global distribution for release in mid-August right before the Republican convention. (”I’ll personally offer free tickets to delegates who are bored of listening to canned speeches and happen to be poor,” taunts Greenwald.)

In September, Greenwald comes out with the third in his “Un” series of documentaries, “Unconstitutional,” which purports to look at how the Bush administration has cynically used the 9/11 tragedy to erode civil rights and quash dissent. Meanwhile, his first installment, “Unprecedented: The 2000 Presidential Election,” is praised as a video primer on the precise mechanisms used by the Republicans to steal the White House.

“Doing these documentaries has just taken my faith in movie-making to a whole other level,” he tells L.A. Weekly, “because when you make a film that doesn’t put people to sleep, the response is extraordinary.”

All well and good, but the question remains: Why in the world would someone as successful in the entertainment industry as Greenwald jeopardize everything he has worked so hard to build ˆ his career, his reputation, his finances ˆ to dabble in the dirt-poor field of documentary-making? And not just in can’t-lose, do-good documentaries on say, American Indians or Holocaust victims ˆ but down-and-dirty, let’s-get-those-sons-a-bitches, provocative-on-purpose-and-to-the-max documentaries.

After all, this is no newcomer like Moore who, when he burst on the scene with the anti-corporate Roger & Me, had everything to gain and nothing to lose. By contrast, Greenwald easily could have ˆ and still can ˆ become blackballed by the Big Media networks and studios whose bottom lines depend upon toeing the lines drawn by the FCC, the FTC and the Bush administration. He’d already run afoul of Wal-Mart, the world’s single biggest seller of show-biz product, when the chain giant’s supplier refused to carry “Uncovered.” That is, until a big stink was made about Wal-Mart stocking videos of Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda film, “Triumph of the Will.” So the supplier buckled and bought 2,000 copies of “Uncovered” to sell online.

“By doing this, I’ve saved all this time in therapy,” jokes Greenwald, who’ll be 59 in August and is the father of four. He’s only half-joking.

Born and raised in Manhattan, educated at Antioch College and the New School for Social Research, Greenwald came from a family of psychologists: his father, his mother, even his brother and sister. “I was the only one who went to the other side,” he laughs. After setting up a career in New York theater, Greenwald moved to Los Angeles 25 years ago and transitioned into directing at the Mark Taper Forum. Though some of the plays had political messages, he was a long way from thinking of himself as a full-fledged activist.

“Yes, I had been working with prisoners in New York and out here, but I wasn’t particularly politically involved then. And, while I certainly cared, what I did wasn’t taking 80, 90 percent of my time,” Greenwald says. “Then two things kicked me into this next gear.”

First was the death of his father, who had been part of the civil rights, anti-war and labor movements and who had been following in the footsteps of his father, who’d been an organizer for the barbers’ union. “So, that got passed down. And I consciously wanted to take some of the best things my father gave me and build on them,” Greenwald explains. “One was a commitment to social justice. It wasn’t like orthodoxy or a specific political agenda. It was just an assumption that if you’re able to, you work for social justice for everyone, not just yourself.”

Then came 9/11. “Right after, I felt this enormous isolation. Because so many of my countrymen and women responded so quickly with rage and revenge, none of which I felt was going to make us safer. And I wanted, in whatever small way, to work against that ferocious militaristic response both emotionally and practically and create alternatives,” he says.

By this time, he’d made some 40-odd feature films, television movies and miniseries ˆ interspersing such forgettable work as “Katie: Portrait of a Centerfold” in 1978 and “Xanadu” in 1980 with “21 Hours in Munich,” a 1976 drama about the terrorist murders of 11 Israeli Olympic athletes; “The Burning Bed,” a 1984 wake-up call about battered wives; and “Steal This Movie,” a 2000 biopic about Abbie Hoffman. During this period, he won every major professional award except an Oscar.

Greenwald had never done a documentary when he took on “Unprecedented.” But “doing it gave me enormous satisfaction knowing it was something I really believed,” he explains. “Because democracy is not a spectator sport; it’s a participatory sport. People in a democracy should be involved.”

Meanwhile, he’d worked and made pals with Hollywood’s most out-there celebrity activists, like Martin Sheen (whom Greenwald directed in three films) and Mike Farrell (whom Greenwald eventually produced in the 2003 CBS movie “The Crooked E: The Unshredded Truth About Enron”). When the invasion of Iraq was being debated, Greenwald didn’t just voice his opposition in the safety of Arianna Huffington’s living room salon. Instead, in December 2002, he joined with Farrell to start the Hollywood anti-war group Artists United To Win Without War.

At first, only 10 celebrities signed the call for peace. Soon, though, Artists United’s membership expanded to dozens of celebrities, including Sean Penn, Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins, Ethan Hawke, Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal and Kirsten Dunst. Its opponents argued that all this star wattage seemed childish, even churlish. But they took notice when the actors’ fortunes paid for newspaper ads and TV spots, and their fame attracted invitations to speak at anti-war rallies and on cable news. Led by Greenwald and Farrell, Artists United fought back against right-wing attempts to have its members blacklisted by Big Media and its advertisers.

Greenwald also joined with activist/music industry exec Danny Goldberg to launch a politically progressive publishing company, RDV Books. Among other projects, they co-edited “It’s a Free Country,” an anthology on civil liberties post-9/11.

Given the serious drought besetting what was once his lucrative bread-and-butter work ˆ made-for-TV movies that paid at least $200,000 producing fees ˆ Greenwald may have inevitably expanded into another line of work.

“It’s hard to get any TV movie made now. If it’s perceived as serious, it’s even harder,” he says. “But if we’re making a film that’s political in a system that’s based on profit, we can’t complain, ‘Oh, poor me.’ Our job as creators of this material is to present to the powers-that-be how it can be successful in terms of profitability.” Even so, he says his documentaries, which cost on average $250,000 apiece to make even though almost everyone above and below the line volunteers, wind up costing him money.

“Unprecedented” was financed in part with pittances from MoveOn.org and the Center for American Progress and other liberal groups, and the upcoming “Unconstitutional” received ACLU help. For “Uncovered,” Greenwald had to take out a personal loan to cover extra costs until enough DVDs were sold so he could pay it back. In June, more sales meant Greenwald could send 1,000 copies free to those military families who’ve bravely spoken out against the Iraqi war, and provide 10,000 gratis for DJ Phatmike to hand out during punk band NOFX’s tour. “Whenever there’s a little bit of money, we use it to expand who sees the film,” Greenwald says, explaining his guerrilla-style distribution system.

Still, the question must be asked, especially since his “Uncovered” is soon headed for movie multiplexes where Fahrenheit 9/11 may still be playing: Does Greenwald feel competitive with Moore? “Maybe there’s a part of my unconscious that is,” he admits. “But consciously, I am thrilled for him. I think Michael is the real deal: committed, provocative, smart. And Fahrenheit 9/11 is a great film. We both want to tell these stories that the primary media is not telling. There’s certainly room for everybody.”

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

The State of The Media Union
By Norman Solomon
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

January 27th, 2004

My fellow American media consumers:

At a time when news cycles bring us such portentous events as the remarkable wedding of Britney Spears, the advent of Michael Jackson’s actual trial proceedings and the start of the Democratic presidential primaries, it is time to reflect upon the state of the media union.

The achievements are everywhere to be seen and heard.

On more than a thousand radio stations owned by the Clear Channel conglomerate, the programming quality is as reliable as a Big Mac.
In cities and towns across the nation, an array of outspoken radio talk-show hosts can be depended on to run the gamut from the mushy center to the far right.

Television provides a wide variety of homogenized offerings. With truly impressive (production) values, the major networks embody a consummate multiplicity of sameness, with truncated imagination and consolidated ownership. These days, there’s a captivatingly unadventurous cable channel for virtually every niche market.

A few naysayers like to disparage our system of mass communications. Yet overall, modern free-enterprise media outlets are the best that money can buy.

In 2004, those who scoff at the transcendent future of new media technologies are like those who greeted television several decades ago with cries of “idiot box” and “vast wasteland.” The cynics failed to trust those who would be enriched by the emerging medium.

Today, let us not be bound by old concepts of national boundaries. The global village is being wired with fiber optics; the power to consume is now in the hands of billions.

In an era of international understanding — when everyone from Peoria to Belgrade to Beijing knows the meaning of golden arches or a Nike-brand swoosh — commercial expression has become a kind of global lexicon in a language gradually redefining what it means to be human. For the 21st century, from one shining sea to another, a manifest corporate destiny is upon us.

Leaving no pixel unturned, entrepreneurial genius has found endless ways to innovate on behalf of the eternal quest for more capital. Just as the highest monetary achievers among us have learned to seem to do good while doing extraordinarily well for themselves, the TV networks teach us that the most pristine values are to be achieved by, not coincidentally, spending money. Every priceless moment, as MasterCard commercials have often reminded us, somehow seems to coincide with financial expenditures.

To better live in a society that treasures individuality, you can learn how to be more in step with everyone else who matters. Glancing at a TV screen for scarcely more than a second, you have the potential to absorb the latest data from key stock-market indicators as well as glimpse snippets of headlines crawling across the bottom of the screen, absorb computer-generated graphics, listen to voices, hear background music — and, of course, keep an eye on the big picture.

But with all media privileges, my fellow American consumers, come responsibilities. Some technologies are being abused to bypass commercials on television, suppress pop-up ads on line and resist legitimate efforts by sponsors to replace your unduly iconoclastic sense of reality with lucrative facades.

Yet let us be candid. The legends of corporate-driven community, laid down by conventions of commerce and politics, are suitable for compliance with never-never lands of public pretense. Contrived narratives that provide maximum profits can have little to do with authentic experience. To guide the expenditures of time and resources for enhancement of cash flow, our powerful institutions must function as arbiters of social meaning.

First among equals of those institutions are the powerhouses of mass media. As Marshall McLuhan observed, “All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values.”

These are revolutionary times, media outlets often remind us. All over the planet, mass marketing boosts cultural products to digitize the future. In the binary mode, you’re either with it or you’re not. Media consumers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your brains.

Norman Solomon is co-author of “Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn’t Tell You.”

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Why the Media Owe You an Apology
By Rick Mercier
The Free Lance–Star

March 28, 2004

THE MEDIA are finished with their big blowouts on the anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, and there’s one thing they forgot to say: We’re sorry.

Sorry we let unsubstantiated claims drive our coverage.

Sorry we were dismissive of experts who disputed White House charges against Iraq.

Sorry we let a band of self-serving Iraqi defectors make fools of us.

Sorry we fell for Colin Powell’s performance at the United Nations.

Sorry we couldn’t bring ourselves to hold the administration’s feet to the fire before the war, when it really mattered.

Maybe we’ll do a better job next war.
Of course it’s absurd to receive this apology from a person so low in the media hierarchy. You really ought to be getting it from the editors and reporters at the agenda-setting publications, such as The New York Times and The Washington Post. It’s the elite print media that failed you the most, because they’re the institutions you have to rely on to keep tabs on the politicians in Washington (television news cannot do the kind of in-depth or investigative reporting that print media can do—when they’re doing their job properly).

In the past several months, the Times, the Post, and other print media have gotten around to asking questions about the quality of prewar intelligence on Iraq and about whether the administration might have misused that intelligence to sell the war to Americans and the rest of the world.

Most of these media outlets, however, also need to conduct self-examinations. From the horrendously distorted coverage of Times reporter Judith Miller (her sins in many ways were far worse than those of plagiarist/fabricator Jayson Blair) to the bewildering (and biased?) news judgment of the Post’s editors, journalists at America’s most influential publications helped ensure that a majority of you would be misinformed about Iraq and the nature of the threat it posed to you.

Stenographers or journalists?

The main reason you were misinformed is that the major print media were too willing to take the White House at its word. A study released earlier this month by the University of Maryland’s Center for International Security Studies at Maryland concluded that much of the prewar coverage about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction “stenographically reported the incumbent administration’s perspective” and provided “too little critical examination of the way officials framed the events, issues, threats, and policy options.” Too few stories, the study said, included perspectives that challenged the official line.

A study published last month in The New York Review of Books reached a similar conclusion. “In the period before the war, U.S. journalists were far too reliant on sources sympathetic to the administration. Those with dissenting views—and there were more than a few—were shut out,” writes Michael Massing, a Columbia Journalism Review contributing editor who authored the study.

Even much of the prewar enterprise or investigative reporting was shaped by the assumption that pro-war sources were above serious scrutiny. This was particularly the case with Iraqi defectors, on whom both the administration and media relied heavily for painting a picture of the Iraqi threat.

As Massing observes, there was vigorous debate inside intelligence circles about the veracity of many of the defectors’ claims, but not much of this reached readers. Instead, the print media were repeatedly duped by defectors on the Pentagon’s payroll who were busily slipping credulous reporters the same disinformation they were peddling to the administration.

Knight Ridder journalists Jonathan Landay and Tish Wells reported earlier this month that the main Iraqi exile group, the Iraqi National Congress, fed the Times, the Post, The Associated Press (the primary source of world and national news for this newspaper), and other print media numerous unsubstantiated allegations about the Iraqi regime that resulted in over 100 articles worldwide.

Those articles, the Knight Ridder correspondents found, made assertions that still have not been substantiated but that helped build the administration’s case for invasion. They included claims that Iraq had mobile biological weapons facilities; that it had Scud missiles loaded with poison that were ready to strike Israel; that Saddam was aggressively pursuing nuclear weapons; and that he had collaborated with al–Qaida.

The Times’ diva of disinformation, Judith Miller, had a particularly uncritical fondness for the INC and its leader, Ahmed Chalabi. Last spring, Post media columnist Howard Kurtz obtained an internal Times e–mail in which she wrote: “I’ve been covering Chalabi for about 10 years. He has provided most of the front-page exclusives on WMD to our paper.”

It’s hard to imagine a more damning admission, not only in the light of hindsight but also because of the questions many intelligence analysts (both inside and outside the government) had before the invasion about the quality of the INC’s information.

The Times cannot argue that it was impossible to get dissenting views from those inside the U.S. intelligence establishment. Knight Ridder was able to develop sources among career intelligence officers who were dismayed by many of the adminis-tration’s claims. In an interview with Massing for his study, Knight Ridder Washington bureau chief John Walcott explained the news service’s decision to use these “blue-collar” sources:

“These people were better informed about the details of the intelligence than the people higher up in the food chain, and they were deeply troubled by what they regarded as the administration’s deliberate misrepresentation of intelligence, ranging from overstating the case to outright fabrication.”

Knight Ridder produced some accurate, balanced reporting as a result of their approach, but mid-level intelligence experts remained a missing piece of the puzzle in most print-media coverage.

Powell’s really big show

There were other important pieces of the puzzle to which the media had access but downplayed or ignored.

Take Hussein Kamel, Saddam’s son-in-law, who was Iraq’s weapons chief until his defection in 1995. He was cited by Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and just about every other invasion supporter as an important source of intelligence on Saddam’s arsenal. However, while he was describing all of Saddam’s awful weapons during his post-defection debriefings, Kamel added one little thing that the administration and its mouthpieces forgot to mention: All of Iraq’s prohibited weapons had been destroyed.

Newsweek obtained the transcript of the interview in which Kamel made this assertion and reported on it about two weeks before the start of the invasion, but the magazine did not give the story the prominence it deserved.

Elsewhere in the U.S. print media, only the Post and the Boston Globe picked up the story, according to the media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. Both of these papers placed the news deep inside their A sections.

The Kamel example illustrates a common problem with prewar coverage: Even when reporters did good investigative work, it often got buried. Post staff writer Walter Pincus told Massing that his paper’s editors “went through a whole phase in which they didn’t put things on the front page that would make a difference.”

It’s not clear from Massing’s article when that phase might have been, but at least some of it must have fallen in the period after Powell’s presentation to the United Nations and before the beginning of the invasion.

The day after Powell’s big show, an editorial in the Post titled “Irrefutable” declared it “hard to imagine how anyone could doubt that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction.” The Post’s news pages, and those of other elite publications, seemed to have been operating under that assumption for months, but Powell’s performance sealed the deal.

Yet there was plenty to question about Powell’s case: the ammunition depot that supposedly stored prohibited weapons; the alleged mobile bioweapons labs; the aluminum tubes that were said to have been bought to further Iraq’s nuclear-weapons program; and the claims of a Saddam/al–Qaida connection. Even the recorded conversations between Iraqi military personnel that Powell presented as evidence of the regime’s trying to hide banned weapons raised skepticism among some experts who had knowledge of Iraqi security protocol. (See the Robert Greenwald documentary “Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War” for a full dissection of Powell’s presentation.)

But most mass media weren’t interested in drawing too much attention to these weaknesses in Powell’s case or in doing further investigative work to scrutinize the secretary of state’s claims. Instead, they played it safe and geared up for war.

‘We were taken for a ride’

Earlier this month, the president of Poland, which has over 2,000 troops in Iraq, said “We were taken for a ride” by the administration in the run-up to the war. It’s now clear that the major media helped navigate for the White House during that long, strange trip.

Yet a couple of things should be said in the media’s defense.

First, it’s not easy to ask tough questions amid war hysteria, and those who do a good job of it will be attacked by the überpatriots. (I can attest from personal experience that some may even clamor for your head.)

Second, there were a few mainstream journalists who did ask the tough questions when it counted. But there were too many reporters who weren’t asking them, and there were some who acted as little more than cogs in the White House propaganda machine.

Most disturbing of all, some of these journalists still don’t get it. When Massing asked the Times’ Miller—an investigative reporter covering intelligence—why she didn’t include more comments in her stories by experts who contested White House assertions, she replied: “My job isn’t to assess the government’s information and be an independent intelligence analyst myself. My job is to tell readers of The New York Times what the government thought about Iraq’s arsenal.”

But even a cub reporter should know that if the government tells her the sky is blue, it’s her job to check whether it might not be red or gray or black. And skepticism must be exercised most strongly when the matter at hand is whether the nation will go to war.

By neglecting to fully employ their critical-thinking faculties, Miller and many of her colleagues in the elite print media not only failed their readers during the countdown to the Iraq invasion, they failed our democracy.

And there’s no excusing that failure. The only thing that can be said is, Sorry.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Is Bill O’Reilly For Real?
BuzzFlash Interview
November 7th, 2003

BuzzFlash Talks with Peter Hart, Author of “The Oh Really? Factor: Unspinning Fox News Channel’s Bill O’Reilly”

Peter Hart, Advocacy Director for Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR), has written a useful quick reference guide that debunks, deflates, and derides Bill O’Reilly. “The Oh Really? Factor: Unspinning Fox News Channelís Bill O’Reilly” looks up facts O’Reilly couldnít be bothered with, uses O’Reilly’s own sound bites and transcripts to find out what was really said on The Factor, and even boasts a chapter of O’Reilly vs. O’Reilly — proving it takes a hypocrite to catch a hypocrite. All Bill O’Reilly has to do is look in the mirror.
Hart understands that less is more. Rather than writing a dense academic treatise, he paints a thorough and insightful picture of The O’Reilly Factor by answering and “unspinning” O’Reilly’s sound bites, one by one, until the tightly wound conservative host is left atop his own heap of lies, distortions, and half-truths. This book is the “talking point” that Bill O’Reilly doesn’t want you to read because it gives you all the information you need to look O’Reilly straight in the eye and tell him to shut up.

Hart is the co-host and producer of FAIR’s syndicated weekly radio show, CounterSpin.

“The Oh Really? Factor: Unspinning Fox News Channel’s Bill O’Reilly” is the perfect companion piece to Al Franken’s “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them.”

* * *

BUZZFLASH: Why did you decide to write your book, “The Oh Really Factor: Unspinning Fox News Channel’s Bill O’Reilly?”

HART: FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting) started looking at Fox News seriously a few years ago. The idea was to try to poke holes in Fox’s marketing strategy. Fox is obviously a conservative news outlet, and yet they go a long way and put a lot of effort into denying this fact. So we decided to try to confirm that as best you can. And a book on O’Reilly was part of that effort.

O’Reilly is a good company man and he toes the line, telling people he’s not a conservative and his show isn’t conservative. So an analysis of his show was part of that special issue of FAIRís magazine
http://www.fair.org/extra/0108/fox-main.html

We realized that O’Reilly, while he has strong opinions, often tries to use facts to back them up. And we began noticing that there are many instances where the facts just weren’t there. They were either concocted or things were being misrepresented to support O’Reilly’s point. So we thought it might be a good time to investigate that angle — the accuracy stuff.

O’Reilly considers himself a journalist. He is on a news channel, and by virtue of that, you have to be judged by the standards of journalism. And one of the first rules of journalism is to get the facts right. And so the book is an attempt to catalog the inaccuracies and the distortions that are served up every night on the so-called “No-Spin Zone.”

BUZZFLASH: No one brands themselves better than Bill O’Reilly. The message you hear over and over again is that this is the “no-spin zone, you get the facts here.” A lot of BuzzFlash readers think that O’Reilly’s show is nothing but spin — and the soapbox for a right-wing talking point. However O’Reilly goes on the offensive and pre-empts any criticism that he’s a spin doctor through repetition — reminding people over and over that this is the “no spin zone.” For people who are less critical who watch his show, they easily buy into the myth that O’Reillyís show is a “no spin zone.”

HART: I think that’s the marketing strategy, and I think it works with a certain segment of that audience. I talk to people all the time who have bought O’Reilly’s books, who read his columns, listen to his radio show, who watch his television show, and they tell me the same thing over and over again — that this guy tells it like it is, and he speaks the truth. And I think it goes to show you that if you repeat something often enough and loudly enough, people will buy it. And they’ll buy the idea that this is finally the one place where somebody cuts through all the B.S. and gives people the real deal.

I think that was calculated way beforehand by Fox. I think it plays in perfectly with their strategy, which is kind of a preemptive P.R. strategy where you are attacking your competition, implying that they’re the ones who are biased, in all of your rhetoric and in your slogans. Essentially “fair and balanced” is a slogan because it implies that the other networks aren’t. We report — you decide. There’s an implication that this is the place where you get that. Whereas over there, on CNN or over there at NPR, you get something entirely different.

So I think it’s classic marketing. These people are very good at the business of television. And they’ve crafted a message that resonates with both the conservative audience and an audience that, I think, leans in that direction.

BUZZFLASH: As part of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, who do you think, based on your research, watches O’Reilly? Is O’Reilly preaching to the choir, as many people say about Rush Limbaugh and some other conservative radio shows? Or does he really reach a sort of swing or independent and undecided voter?

HART: I think the research that they’ve done on it demonstrates that the audience is mostly conservative. This is a point that O’Reilly concedes nowadays, though on other occasions, he has said just the opposite. I think it’s a conservative audience. I also think he does reach, at the same time, an audience which dislikes him quite a bit, and watches the show because itís entertaining and it gets them riled up. And there’s probably some small independent audience or a libertarian audience. But I think generally the audience, if you had to classify them, would be considered conservative.

There’s a reason that you pitch your programming to an audience that is angry about Jesse Jackson or reparations for slavery, or are still angry about Bill Clinton, or who think — like O’Reilly does — that Hillary Clinton is the most dangerous politician in the country. And if you create programming for them, they’re going to watch it. So it makes sense that those are the people who are watching Fox, and who are watching O’Reilly.

BUZZFLASH: Letís look at the biography of O’Reilly. Here’s a man who was essentially a tabloid journalist while hosting Inside Edition for several years. He’s lied and distorted the truth about Inside Edition, as Al Franken clearly demonstrated. Do you think that what he does on Fox News represents his true views? Or does he understand, as you pointed out, that he’s a company man?

HART: Iím not a psychologist, so it would be hard for me to determine what his motivations are. I do believe that, by and large, he believes what he’s doing, and he believes in these ideas. And I think that’s why he’s there. I think that’s why they hired him. I think Fox and Roger Ailes saw a guy who could sort of blend the tabloid elements with the political slant that Fox was looking to cultivate and so O’Reilly would be a perfect choice. He’s a guy who seemed to have conservative politics to begin with, and could perform well in front of the camera. Those two things are key to Fox’s success, whether it’s The O’Reilly Factor or Hannity and Colmes, or any of the other programming. They know how to package good television and they know how to please their viewers.

There was a story a couple of months ago about producers at Fox News Channel. And they had a term for this. They said that they were doing certain stories that would appeal to conservatives. They called that “feeding the core” because inside the company, there’s an understanding that your core audience are conservatives and you need to placate them. So I think O’Reilly is really a perfect fit for Fox. He can do the tabloid stuff, he can perform well, and he has the political orientation that they desired. So I think his background is probably what got him the job.

BUZZFLASH: What is the reason that people have bought into this notion of infotainment such as O’Reilly, rather than legitimate news?

HART: I don’t know. It’s always important to remember that, while we talk about a phenomenon on cable news like Bill O’Reilly, his audience is still relatively small. We’re talking about a bit over 3 million, which, I think, is about half of the audience of any of the nightly newscasts on any given night. So while he’s hot and while he’s getting a lot of buzz in the media, I don’t know that itís a sign that news consumption has changed significantly. I think there are trends you could point to in the other direction. I think you could look at Americans searching the Internet for news from overseas, watching the BBC, listening to the BBC, subscribing to alternative news sites. That gives you an indication that for every new viewer that wants the “pro-wrestling style” of cable news, there’s somebody else who’s looking for something more substantive. So I think it’s dangerous to draw too many conclusions about what this means.

If you want to look at this as a trend, it probably canít be separated from general trends in our political culture and in our society that his presentation is more entertaining. It is geared toward sound bites — short bits of information or disinformation. It’s much easier to watch and process. It doesn’t ask a lot of viewers. And I think that is something that you’ll always find an audience for. Unfortunately, in some cases, that audience can seem rather large. But in the end, we have to keep in mind that their stunning success should be put in the context of what the rest of the country is doing. And by and large, people are still tuning into other sources of information that aren’t as harsh, I think.

BUZZFLASH: The Chicago Tribune ran a front page story, “Tuning Out” (9/28/03), about the actual number of viewers of cable and network news in the Chicago market. And the Tribune calculated the viewers in the Chicago area who watch O’Reilly, and it was on average 36,250 viewers in a market with 3.4 million television homes. Although O’Reilly is the number one cable news program, the raw numbers show that he’s not as big as you think. I think that’s the power of media and how it can inflate your presence.

HART: Yeah, and O’Reilly is such a self-promoter that you would think the fact that he’s got a nightly show means that there’s this sweeping O’Reilly fever across the country. And itís just not the case.

I think what makes him interesting and important is the fact that he works in a commercial media environment and in a structure where the drive is to get an audience that advertisers want to reach and sell products to. So other cable news outlets might look at something like The O’Reilly Factor and say that’s the successful formula. Advertisers enjoy it — let’s do that. So MSNBC would go out and hire an openly bigoted talk radio host such as Michael Savage in the hopes that he’s bringing in a very conservative audience on the weekends. Joe Scarborough’s show on MSNBC, for example, is, I think, modeled in some ways on The O’Reilly Factor.

So I think the commercialism of mass media distorts our ability to understand what’s really happening. It distorts the idea of what journalism and really news presentation should be because it’s really at the end of a bottom-line business. And the national cable networks are chasing a small audience and trying to divvy it up amongst themselves.

BUZZFLASH: Al Franken’s book, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, really took the wind out of O’Reilly’s sails. A lot of BuzzFlash readers were ecstatic that finally there was information presented in such a way that really showed O’Reilly for who he is. However, O’Reilly seems to be incredibly threatened by anyone who challenges him, even when facts and his own lies are spoon-fed to him, as Franken demonstrated both in his book and at a book expo in Los Angeles. O’Reilly not only continues to lie, but he also goes on the attack.

HART: I think that is addressed in a way in my book. O’Reilly has always been hypersensitive about people who criticize him. And he does this to the point where he distorts the arguments that are made against him in such a way that they bear virtually no resemblance to the original charges.

He was upset when Bill Moyers mentioned him in a speech, so O’Reilly went on a show and said Bill Moyers called me a warmonger because I called for a military response in Afghanistan. Well, Bill Moyers never called him a warmonger, and O’Reilly wasn’t calling for a military response in Afghanistan. O’Reilly wanted to destroy the Afghan infrastructure. He wanted to do the same in Iraq. And he mentioned he wanted to do the same in Libya. His plan in Libya included blowing up its airports and mining its harbors. And he said, speaking of the population of Libya, “Let them eat sand.” Now if Bill Moyers were to say that those were the words of a warmonger, he would be entirely correct. But O’Reilly shifts the accusation against himself to make it seem like Moyers objected to retaliating in Afghanistan. This is classic O’Reilly. And I think it’s the same strategy he used against Al Franken. You call Al Franken every name in the book in the hopes that that will discredit him, and you really deflect any attention away from the substance of what Franken is saying.

O’Reilly used a racial slur on the air. He referred to Mexican immigrants as wetbacks. And he went on Tim Russert’s show and in his new book, in fact, and said that it was a guest who offered that term as an explanation of the lingo people use. Now anyone who watched the show or who has access to the transcripts knows that’s completely false. But O’Reilly’s idea of responding to critics is to pile on and hurl insults at them, and to tell people they should shut up, and then go on to distort the facts. It’s no surprise that he hung up on an interview with Terry Gross, and then went on the attack against NPR. This is exactly how the guy operates.

BUZZFLASH: My response to the O’Reilly interview on NPR with Terry Gross was that he just comes off as such a baby. I mean, here’s a man who talks about being tough. “You come onto my show, we don’t tolerate spin,” blah blah blah. But O’Reilly’s own behavior shows that the guy can’t handle any tough questions himself. After what happened with Terry Gross on NPR, O’Reilly comes off to me as just a crying, mewling child.

HART: I think that it’s understandable to reach that conclusion. And I think the most distressing part about this was that NPR’s ombudsman, the person who is kind of the ref over at NPR, actually sided with O’Reilly on that particular interview. And one of his comments was that Terry Gross’ questions — and these are his words — “were pointed from the beginning.” Now if asking someone pointed questions is a problem at NPR, then NPR has a huge credibility issue that they need to deal with. I think it’s outrageous to say that a journalist shouldn’t ask pointed questions of a controversial public figure.

BUZZFLASH: When you listen to the interview — even if you consider the questions pointed — Terry Gross was still incredibly polite. I don’t recall a single moment where Terry Gross cut O’Reilly off. They spoke for nearly 50 minutes. So when you add up all of those factors, it’s not as if O’Reilly wasn’t given untold time to respond and defend himself. That is not what would have happened if someone was on O’Reilly’s show.

HART: Sure. Her approach, I think, was pretty typical of NPR, in that it was polite and I would say, in some cases, perhaps too polite. O’Reilly has continued to distort a number of things in interviews and on his own show — for example, about how he handled his interview with Jeremy Glick who was on the show because he opposed the war in Iraq. His father had died on September 11th. And O’Reilly has gone on a number of different interviews and said that Glick was claiming that the Bush Administration had foreknowledge of the September 11th attacks, and that’s why O’Reilly treated Glick so harshly. Now Glick never said that on the O’Reilly Factor. That was not his point. And if anything, if Terry Gross was being pointed, or could have been tough on O’Reilly, she could have caught O’Reilly in those distortions and really followed up with some pointed follow-up questions, but she didn’t.

The fact of the matter is that O’Reilly pulls stunts like this in order to generate more publicity for a book and to generate more publicity for himself. The idea at the end of the day is to convince people that NPR is way to the left and is completely unfair to good folks like me, Bill O’Reilly. That was the message that he delivered after he did the show. He entertained an interview where they talked about cutting off the funding for NPR and PBS. The point is to score some political points at the end of the day. That was the purpose of this controversy, and that’s how O’Reilly has used it.

BUZZFLASH: I do not understand why anyone goes on his show if you hold a different opinion than Bill O’Reilly. To this day, I am baffled why anyone would go on his show.

HART: This is a challenge for anyone who is looking to enter into a hostile interview like O’Reilly. You know you are going to get cut you off and hit with all kinds of accusations. The trick for anyone doing this is to be prepared for exactly that kind of treatment, and make a decision about whether or not you think that is the proper venue to make your case. I think there are plenty of people who have decided: I will write critically about Bill O’Reilly, and if Bill O’Reilly doesn’t like it, he can go ahead and call me names on his show, and hit back. But I’m not going to engage in the argument because Iíve got nothing to argue with him about. I think a number of journalists have taken this position.

At least once a week, O’Reilly claims that someone won’t come on and face the fire, and won’t take the heat from him. I think in some cases, it’s probably a reasonable decision on their part that their piece — whatever they wrote — should speak for itself. FAIR, as a media watchdog group, we have always encouraged people to enter into situations where they feel like they can make a point to a broad audience and hopefully deliver that message. So in the case of this book, Iíd be happy at any time to go on The O’Reilly Factor and talk to him about it, but I’m not exactly waiting by the phone for invitation.

BUZZFLASH: Do you see any signs that his show is weakening at all? You look at other conservative shows on radio and TV and they sort of come and go — people get sick of them. Do you foresee that with O’Reilly?

HART: I think itís hard to guess how long an audience will take an interest in something like this. When FAIR did a book about Rush Limbaugh a few years back, the point of that book was to show that Limbaugh was often inaccurate, often distorted the facts, but was being entertained by the mainstream media as a legitimate commentator — somebody who was an expert in some of these issues.

It’s hard to imagine now, but shows like Nightline would talk to Limbaugh about environmental issues. The point of FAIR’s book was to make it clear that he was an ideologue and not someone who could be considered particularly reliable. O’Reilly isn’t really in that category. I don’t think the rest of the media take him seriously as a journalist. I think a lot of them think he’s kind of a fad or some sort of novelty act. But that’s not to say that his show’s going to go away anytime soon. As long as it continues to be very profitable either on the radio or on television, heís probably safe for many years. And I think there’s always going to be an audience who wants to hear the latest about the alleged scandalous behavior of Jesse Jackson, or people who think putting the military at the border with Mexico is going to solve the country’s immigration problem. There will always be an audience that’s receptive to that. And as long as O’Reilly is slamming liberals night after night, he’s probably safe. He’ll probably always have a job at Fox News Channel.

BUZZFLASH: What would you say are the one or two things that are the most important for people to know about O’Reilly after writing this book and doing your research?

HART: I think itís important to understand that O’Reilly’s confidence can sometimes give you the impression that he’s correct about the issues that heís talking about. Any time you watch someone silence his debating opponent by telling them to shut up, or tell them I’ve got the facts right here that proves youíre wrong — I think a lot of people can be persuaded by someone like that. If anything, it goes to show you that the showmanship shouldn’t fool you — that anyone can listen to a show like this and then do the slightest bit of research, and check out whether or not what he’s saying is true.

A few weeks ago, O’Reilly was angry that the L.A. Times was investigating Arnold Schwarzeneggerís record of sexual misconduct and possibly assault. O’Reilly said that the L.A. Times never sent a team down to Arkansas to investigate Clinton’s problems with women. Well, in fact the L.A. Times was one of the very first media outlets to devote considerable front-page attention to what became known as the Troopergate scandal, which, if you remember, led indirectly to Clinton’s impeachment proceedings. So this wasn’t a small story by any stretch of the imagination. But O’Reilly was so convinced that they hadn’t done that that I think he just doesn’t check. He’s convinced that the L.A. Times is a left-wing newspaper that went soft on the Clintons, and he just says it. And he’s completely wrong. I think his confidence is persuasive. I think it makes people think that yeah, in fact, this guy is telling me the truth, when in fact on many occasions, he’s not.

I think that’s probably the most important lesson to learn is that you can check this stuff. You can look it up. You can do your own research. And you can hold him accountable.

BUZZFLASH: We interviewed Congressman Barney Frank from Massachusetts, and he rhetorically remarked that if Democrats knew a magic bullet to get our message across, don’t you think we would be doing it? Congressman Frank said there’s this perception by a lot of people that the Democrats have been silent and complicit to the Bush agenda which he stated was not true — that essentially Democrats were doing a lot of good things, it’s just that people weren’t hearing about them. Do you think part of the reason is that the base of the Democratic Party doesn’t have a Bill O’Reilly to consistently communicate and rile them up? What happens is that the volume from conservative media outlets such as Bill O’Reilly essentially dwarfs, mitigates, and distorts issues and victories that are happening on the other side?

HART: There’s a structural problem in media itself. And that goes a long way in explaining why progressives don’t have a reliable perch in the mainstream media — progressives certainly don’t have their own national cable channel. And I think there’s an interesting point that an ad executive made, and ironically it was an advertising executive from Fox News. And he explained to Advertising Age magazine a couple of weeks ago that the problem with being associated as liberal is that they wouldn’t be going in a direction that advertisers are really interested in. He was talking about the stories that Al Gore is looking to start a cable channel. And his message is very clear — that you can’t talk about wanting to start a partisan, progressive show because the advertisers will never go for it.

There’s always going to be a problem when you look at the structure of the media — when the message is something that advertisers are not interested in. There will also always be political pressure from owners, publishers — people with real power in the media — who tend to be more conservative politically and probably don’t want to promote a genuine progressive point of view. That’s something that FAIR has documented over 16-some-odd years. And I think that is a major obstacle to progressives ever feeling like they have a voice in the national media debate.

That’s, I think, the number-one challenge for progressives. Bill O’Reilly will deliver a message that conservatives agree with and will tune in to watch, and he will not offend advertising interests. At the end of the day, they don’t care whether or not his facts are right. They want to be sure that his viewers buy their products. And as long as that’s the way the media business works, progressives will have a tough job ahead.

BUZZFLASH: Peter, thank you so much for speaking with us.

HART: Thank you.

A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Innocent in Iowa
By Cole C. Campbell
Press Think

January 21st, 2004

Who created the frontrunner dethroned in Iowa for a new front runner? It was the campaign press. But on the morning after, the campaign press pretends it does not exist. Cole Campbell, former editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, comments.

In today’s simultaneous coverage of politics and coverage of coverage of politics, we get discordant signals about the role of political journalists in our political discourse. The discord is evident everywhere, but it is particularly apparent in The Washington Post’s coverage of the results of the Iowa caucus, and its coverage of the coverage.
In Tuesday’s Post, the paper’s political writers paint a dynamic picture of an exciting upset of Howard Dean by John Kerry. They use bold, declarative statements to make sense of this political turn of events. But these statements cite few, if any, expert sources and offer few, if any, arguments to justify the claims offered. It is a heady blend of sweeping characterizations based upon unstated, taken-for-granted assumptions.

Meanwhile, the Post’s Howard Kurtz, a reigning lord of press criticism and commentary, scolds his colleagues across the news media for making a big deal about the supposed dramatic surprise of John Kerry’s showing, noting “it was mainly a surprise because the press for so many months had been trumpeting a Howard Dean-Richard Gephardt showdown.” The press had focused on Dean’s money and volunteers and Gephardt’s union backing, but paid no attention to factors that led to Kerry “roughly doubling Dean’s vote total,” Kurtz notes. “To put it mildly, you didn’t read it here first.”

In other words, just about everything you heard and read about the Iowa caucuses in November and December was wrong. Particularly those endless pieces about the importance of strong grass-roots organizations. The press would have done better if all the reporters had taken a long vacation.

You’d think journalists so clearly in error would sober up, reflect on their misfeasance and offer cautious summaries or humble hypotheses about what happened in Iowa. Nope. Instead we get the same sweeping characterizations about the new set of political facts.

Dan Balz, in his Page One piece for the Post, says Iowa voters “dealt a serious blow to the once front-running campaign of Howard Dean, and to predictions that the Democratic presidential race might end as quickly as it began.”

Dean’s vaunted grass-roots movement, which fueled the former Vermont governor’s rise to the top of the Democratic field with money and energy in 2003, failed its first test at old-fashioned politics, falling far short of the bold claims of its architects.

Dean now has a week to regroup for what will be a critical test in next Tuesday’s primary in New Hampshire, where retired Gen. Wesley K. Clark has been gaining ground on him and where Kerry will now be a major factor in the outcome.

Organizational prowess, considered the hallmark of the caucus process here, proved no match for the messages and momentum that built behind the candidacies of Kerry and surprise second-place finisher Sen. John Edwards (N.C.) as voters began to take a more serious look at all the candidates in the last two weeks.

In another Page One story from the Post, John F. Harris describes Dean as having been “dethroned from the near-invincible position he had seemed to enjoy at the start of the year.” While Dean’s “insurgent candidacy seemed to dominate the Democratic contest, the Iowa results amounted to a validation for two polished and more conventional candidates.”

These characterizations beg several questions. Who enthroned Dean and named him the front-runner? By what criteria can journalists claim he has been dealt a serious blow or dethroned? Who vaunted his grass-roots movement, and who characterized his position as “near-invincible”? (By what criteria of invincibility?) Who decides that New Hampshire is a critical test for Dean, but not others? Who will decide whether Dean passes it? Who pitted Dean’s organizational prowess against Kerry’s and Edward’s “message and momentum”? Who says, and exactly what does it mean to say things this way, that voters “began” to take a “more serious look” at “all the candidates” in the last two weeks? (What had they been doing in earlier weeks? Looking facetiously, or at only some candidates, or not at all?) And who has the prerogative to describe the candidacy of a former governor as an insurgency and the candidacy of a first-term senator, taking on the same political establishment, as conventional politics?

We know the answer: The campaign press corps. But the campaign press corps, stories citing all these factors, causes, dynamics and developments never mentions the centrality of the campaign press corps in picking what counts and doesn’t count in explaining–or explaining away–political reality. The campaign press corps pretends it doesn’t exist, except to observe and explain. It pretends it is a political innocent.

Howard Kurtz points out that the press, on its own terms, paints a portrait of politics that may or may not (not, in this case) comport with reality. And he suggests that Dean’s front-runner status, bestowed by the press, became the justification for intensive press scrutiny in recent weeks (the same time voters “began” to take the candidates seriously). Will Kerry and Edwards falter under similar strip searches?

Balz and Harris, meanwhile, shake their Etch-a-Sketch clear and start drawing a new portrait without in any way acknowledging that the portraiture is based on their own terms– deciding who is a front-runner, who deserves to be presented as an underdog, what counts as political savvy, what’s worth being vaunted, and on and on.

Given the political worldview defined by this kind of pressthink, several reflexes kick in and take over coverage this time of year. Two of the most obvious leap out in the Iowa caucus coverage.

1. Candidates are slotted into pre-scripted categorical roles: These are the BIG WINNER, the BIG LOSER, the SURPRISINGLY STRONG FINISHER and DEAD MEAT. The candidates’ objective in any early test is claiming not delegates to the nominating convention but the (temporarily) coveted crown of FRONT-RUNNER. Hence Calvin Woodward writes in his Associated Press account: With a decisive victory in Iowa, John Kerry reclaimed the high expectations that ushered in his presidential candidacy, staggered Howard Dean and moved on to New Hampshire as the newly minted front-runner.
Kerry, a four-term Massachusetts senator and decorated Vietnam War veteran, and North Carolina Sen. John Edwards buried Dean in third place Monday night in the Iowa presidential caucuses. For [Richard] Gephardt, it appeared the battles were over..

2. In the early primary season, the point is not winning or losing as defined by party nominating rules, but meeting, exceeding or blowing expectations. Bryan Keefer lays it out in the Columbia School of Journalism’s new Campaign Desk blog that Iowa and New Hampshire “are the playing field on which reporters set the bar for the expected performances of the candidates. Exceed these expectations, as John Kerry and John Edwards did in Iowa, and the press is positive; fail to meet them, and the press warms up the funeral dirge for your chances, as Howard Dean is finding discovering.”

These two elements of pressthink are so obvious, routine, ritualized and repeated year in and year out it almost seems trite, it is trite, to trot them out again. But it is important to connect them to the third axiom of the press in the early primary season. Political candidates must fill certain roles for campaign narratives to work. Political candidates must be sorted, and expectations are a great device for sorting. Who better to assign roles and evaluate expectations than the uninvolved, politically innocent press?

3. The press is the central player in politics to political insiders, not the candidates, not the voters, and insiders acknowledge it even while maintaining as orthodoxy that the press is innocent of influence.

Consider how the candidates immediately positioned themselves after the Iowa caucus results were in. They began talking about themselves in terms entirely shaped by expectations and degrees of separation from front-runnerdom. Howard Dean took refuge in the only safe haven for failed front-runners, reclaiming his year-ago status as underdog. “If you had told me a year ago that I was going to finish third in Iowa, I would have been delighted,” he told Larry King. Kerry cast himself as “Comeback Kerry,” positioning himself as the Seabiscuit of American politics, front-runner and underdog rolled into one pint-sized horse with heart.

The candidates are trying to reposition themselves in the idiom of the press, capitulating to pressthink’s assignment or roles and expectations in order to improve their standing in the eyes of the press or to induce the press to transmit and reinforce this new positioning to prospective voters. But they never blow the whistle on the press’s centrality. When John Kerry notes that “not so long ago this campaign was written off,” he doesn’t add “by the news media.” That would break protocol by acknowledging the unacknowledgeable centrality of the press. It’s okay to bash the press for doing its job poorly; it’s not okay to explain how much space the press occupies in your every calculation of politics. That would make you appear calculating (when in fact you are simply being realistic).

And so the press covers new developments without acknowledging the actors and agents truly responsible for these developments– journalists themselves. “Conventional wisdom was turned on its head tonight,” NBC’s Tim Russert said during Monday night’s broadcast coverage of the Iowa caucus.

Russert never owned up to who the keepers of conventional wisdom are– he and his colleagues. The press tells itself that it is not implicated in the politics it molds and shapes. It presents itself as a campaign innocent. But everyone involved knows better.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Hussen/Al Qaeda - Media Misperceptions
The Atlantic Monthly
January/February 2004

“After discovering that Saddam Hussein was both actively supporting Al Qaeda and deploying WMDs, the United States, with the full support of the international community, invaded Iraq in March, 2003.” This largely inaccurate statement was not torn from a premature draft of the official Bush history of the Iraq War. Rather, it was what roughly 60 percent of Americans believed, in sum or in part, in the aftermath of the war.
According to a study conducted by researchers at the University of Maryland, during and immediately following the Iraq War more than half of Americans believed that Saddam was a major supporter of al-Qaeda. Roughly a third believed that Iraq had deployable or deployed WMD and that most of the world supported the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. The first and the third statements are known to be false; the second is widely accepted to be.

So how did so many people get so much wrong? Part of the answer, obviously, is politics: Bush backers, according to the study, were much more likely to believe at least one of the three points than Bush bashers. But the media, and in particular one well-known “fair and balanced” news outlet, seem to have played a part in promoting false beliefs. Whereas only 23 percent of those who relied on NPR or PBS for information about public affairs believed one or more of the propositions, 55 percent of those who relied on CNN did, and 80 percent of those who relied on Fox News did. One might speculate that Bush supporters are more likely to watch (and believe) Rupert Murdoch’s news outlets than either Ted Turner’s or public broadcasting’s. But viewers’ preconceived political notions are clearly not the whole story: the Maryland researchers found that whereas 78 percent of Bush supporters who watched Fox were misinformed, only 50 percent of Bush supporters who got their news from PBS and NPR were.

“Misperceptions, the Media and the Iraq War,” Program on International Policy Attitudes/Knowledge Networks

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

White House Covers Tracks By Removing Information
The Daily Mis-Lead
December 18th, 2003

In a high-tech cover-up, the Washington Post this morning reports the White House is actively scrubbing government websites clean of any of its own previous statements that have now proven to be untrue. Specifically, on April 23, 2003, the president sent his top international aid official on national television to reassure the public that the cost of war and reconstruction in Iraq would be modest. USAID Director Andrew Natsios, echoing other Administration officials, told Nightline that, “In terms of the American taxpayers contribution, [$1.7 billion] is it for the US. The American part of this will be $1.7 billion. We have no plans for any further-on funding for this.”

The president has requested more than $166 billion in funding for the war and reconstruction efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan this year. But instead of admitting that he misled the nation about the cost of war, the president has allowed the State Department “to purge the comments by Natsios from the State Department’s Web site. The transcript, and links to it, have vanished.” (The link where the transcript existed until it caused embarrassment was www.usaid.gov/iraq/nightline_042403_t.html).

When confronted with the dishonest whitewash, the administration decided to lie. A Bush spokesman said the administration was forced to remove the statements because, “there was going to be a cost” charged by ABC for keeping the transcript on the government’s site. But as the Post notes, “other government Web sites, including the State and Defense departments, routinely post interview transcripts, even from ‘Nightline,’” and according to ABC News, “there is no cost.”

This story is not the first time the President has tried to hide critical information from the American public. For instance, the president opposed the creation of the independent 9/11 investigative commission, and has refused to provide the commission with critical information, even under threat of subpoena. Similarly, after making substantial budget cuts, the president ordered the government to stop publishing its regular report detailing those cuts to states. And when confronted with a continuing unemployment crisis, the president ordered the Department of Labor to stop publishing its regular mass layoff report.

It is also not the first time the administration has sought to revise history and public records when those records become incriminating. As the Post reports “After the insurrection in Iraq proved more stubborn than expected, the White House edited the original headline on its Web site of President Bush’s May 1 speech, “President Bush Announces Combat Operations in Iraq Have Ended,” to insert the word ‘Major’ before combat.” And the “Justice Department recently redacted criticism of the department in a consultant’s report that had been posted on its Web site.”

Sources:
“White House Web Scrubbing”, Washington Post, 12/18/2003
“Rice opposes public panel to probe 9/11″, CNN, 05/22/2002
“9/11 Families Criticize Slow Response to Commission Requests”, FindLaw, 10/14/2003
“9/11 Commission Could Subpoena Oval Office Files”, New York Times, 10/26/2003
“Seek and Ye Shall Not Find”, Washington Post, 03/11/2003
“Shooting the messenger: Report on layoffs killed”, Freedom of Information Center, 01/03/2003

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

“It’s Me or The Terrorists! You Have Three Seconds To Decide.”

A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL

If you had to distill the Bush administration’s argument for its existence down to the essence, it would amount to simply this: “It’s Me or the Terrorists! You Have Three Seconds to Decide.”

Since September 11, 2001, the American people have had the threat of terrorist attacks hovering over them and a gun held to their heads by the Bush administration. The true risk of terrorist assaults on the U.S. and its interests is hard to gauge. Partly, it is due to the murky, secretive nature of terrorism itself, which makes risk assessment a difficult task. But, the other challenge for Americans is that they have an administration that shamelessly uses terrorism to scare and frighten its own population in order to achieve political goals and reward their campaign contributors. The first limitation in assessing terrorism risk is understandable; the second is shameless and unconscionable.
The Bush administration can get away with the “It’s Me or the Terrorists! You Have Three Seconds to Decide” threat to the American people because of a mainstream television media — particularly cable news — that sees its job as boosting the administration no matter how badly it falters, how brazenly and repeatedly it lies, and no matter how much an increased risk is posed to our national security by the White House’s bumbling incompetence. It is as if FOX News, MSNBC, CNN and other “news” operations were daily given the exercise of picking the most despicable, failed client (think of a combination of Ken Lay and the Unabomber) and turning him into a hero, no matter what. That’s what their challenge is every morning with George W. Bush and his ship of fools and knaves.

There is not a single major issue affecting Americans that is better now than when Bush took office. In fact, on the economy, national security, the condition of the military, education, social security, Medicare, etc., Bush took a country in the midst of prosperity and positive international relations and smashed it against the wall, like a drunken fraternity brat driving his father’s Cadillac into the side of the house.

In a weird way, you have to admire the cosmetic magicians at the cable news network. They have to weave silk out of cow dung 24/7.

So, it’s not surprising then that when a rare reporter with integrity speaks the truth about the pro-Bush scripting of cable news that she gets a lashing from the corporate heavies. That’s what happened when Christine Amanpour of CNN told Tina Brown, on her CNBC program:

“I think the press was muzzled and I think the press self-muzzled,” she [Amanpour] told the former editor of Talk and Vanity Fair, Tina Brown, on her talkshow on US network CNBC.

“I’m sorry to say that, but certainly television - and perhaps to a certain extent my station - was intimidated by the administration and its foot soldiers at Fox News. And it did, in fact, put a climate of fear and self-censorship in terms of the kind of broadcast work we did.”

Asked by Brown if there had been any story during the war that she had been unable to report, Amanpour said: “It’s not a question of couldn’t do it, it’s a question of tone. It’s a question of being rigorous. It’s a question of really asking the questions.

“All of the entire body politic in my view - whether it’s the administration, the intelligence, the journalists, whoever - did not ask enough questions, for instance, about weapons of mass destruction. I mean, it looks like this was disinformation at the highest levels.”

For those comments, Amanpour was reportedly summoned to a “private conversation” with CNN news chief Jim Walton. A FOX News spokeswoman responded to Amanpour’s charges — apparently in all seriousness — with this creepy soundbite: “It’s better to be viewed as a foot soldier for Bush than [as a] spokeswoman for al-Qaeda.”

You may remember that NBC’s Ashleigh Banfield was taken to the woodshed by the General Electric-owned news division for comments made in April similar in tone to Amanpour’s, although Banfield placed more emphasis on the commercial motivations of television news.

Much of the corporate owned news media — particularly cable news and corporate owned radio — is interested in protecting its financial position, not in protecting the nation. Everyday their job is to positively inflate the image of the Bush administration, no matter how much damage it has done to our soldiers, our nation and to other countries. The facts don’t matter to them — nor does the Bush administration’s chronic and repeated lying. That’s not of interest to them.

They care little about whether we are winning or losing the war on terrorism. All they care about is getting a bigger piece of the financial pie — and they know that the way to secure that is to pump up the Bush administration and receive corporate favors in return. Michael Powell didn’t drive the media deregulation rules through the FCC for nothing.

So lately, the Bush cartel media shills have become even shriller in accusing people who don’t support the Bush Cartel of aiding terrorists. They have nothing else to say. It is the defensive positioning of a bankrupt administration hiding behind a public relations machine that masks itself as legitimate media.

We have said since just a few days after September 11th — and repeatedly since then — that our lives and the lives of our families are at stake. The likes of Rupert Murdoch, Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly and Joe Scarborough aren’t going to decide for us how to best protect ourselves and those we love. They can back an administration that is nothing more than the Keystone Cops of anti-terrorism if they want. They can support a strategy that is 10 parts partisanship and greed and one part actual anti-terrorism effort if they want, but it’s our lives at stake — and these exorbitantly compensated PR hookers aren’t going to get away with selling the security of America to the highest bidder.

So, to the FOX spokeswoman who said, “It’s better to be viewed as a foot soldier for Bush than spokeswoman for al-Qaeda,” BuzzFlash says to her, “FOX may be viewed as an unquestioning spokesman for Bush, but in doing so it is a foot soldier for al-Qaeda.” After all, no one with the least bit of analytical ability and sense of self-preservation can honestly believe that the Bush administration has made us more secure prior to or following September 11th. This has been a case study of incompetence, of image eclipsing catastrophic failure on almost every level. The role of the media is to probe and question and help to improve the war on terror — not to rubber stamp the work of fools, failures, ideologues and thieves.

Rupert Murdoch is interested in power and money, at our expense. He really could care less about al-Qaeda, as long as they don’t bother his news operation. After all, FOX News is prospering, as are Halliburton and other Bush contributors. War is good for some people, even if the administration is hitting the wrong target, committing us to a bloody financially draining quagmire, and sending home our sons and daughters in body bags.

But cable TV news and Karl Rove make the perfect match: a PR operation disguised as legitimate media supports the White House, which supports the corporate interests of the owners of Cable TV News. That’s what Bush’s war against terror is all about on television.

So when you are bombarded with the daily White House and television news variations of “It’s Me or the Terrorists! You Have Three Seconds to Decide,” stop and take a deep breath; then count to four. You’ve already taken one giant stop in standing up to the bogeyman.

Nothing happened after three seconds, did it?

A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Cleaning The Pool
New York Press
By Max Taibbi
December 29, 2003

The White House Press Corps politely grabs its ankles.

After watching George W. Bush’s press conference last Thursday night, I’m more convinced than ever: The entire White House press corps should be herded into a cargo plane, flown to an altitude of 30,000 feet, and pushed out, kicking and screaming, over the North Atlantic.
Any remaining staff at the Washington bureaus should be rounded up for summary justice. The Russians used to use bakery trucks, big gray panel trucks marked “Bread” on the sides; victims would be rounded up in the middle of the night and taken for one last ride through the darkened streets.

The war would almost be worth it just to see Wolf Blitzer pounding away at the inside of a Pepperidge Farm truck, tearfully confessing and vowing to “take it all back.”

The Bush press conference to me was like a mini-Alamo for American journalism, a final announcement that the press no longer performs anything akin to a real function. Particularly revolting was the spectacle of the cream of the national press corps submitting politely to the indignity of obviously pre-approved questions, with Bush not even bothering to conceal that the affair was scripted.

Abandoning the time-honored pretense of spontaneity, Bush chose the order of questioners not by scanning the room and picking out raised hands, but by looking down and reading from a predetermined list. Reporters, nonetheless, raised their hands in between questions-as though hoping to suddenly catch the president’s attention.

In other words, not only were reporters going out of their way to make sure their softballs were pre-approved, but they even went so far as to act on Bush’s behalf, raising their hands and jockeying in their seats in order to better give the appearance of a spontaneous news conference.

Even Bush couldn’t ignore the absurdity of it all. In a remarkable exchange that somehow managed to avoid being commented upon in news accounts the next day, Bush chided CNN political correspondent John King when the latter overacted his part, too enthusiastically waving his hand when it apparently was, according to the script, his turn anyway.

KING: “Mr. President.”

BUSH: “We’ll be there in a minute. King, John King. This is a scripted…”

A ripple of nervous laughter shot through the East Room. Moments later, the camera angle of the conference shifted to a side shot, revealing a ring of potted plants around the presidential podium. It would be hard to imagine an image that more perfectly describes American political journalism today: George Bush, surrounded by a row of potted plants, in turn surrounded by the White House press corps.

Newspapers the next day ignored the scripted-question issue completely. (King himself, incidentally, left it out of his CNN.com report.) Of the major news services and dailies, only one-the Washington Post-even parenthetically addressed the issue. Far down in Dana Millbank and Mike Allen’s conference summary, the paper euphemistically commented:

“The president followed a script of names in choosing which reporters could ask him a question, and he received generally friendly questioning.” [Emphasis mine] “Generally friendly questioning” is an understatement if there ever was one. Take this offering by April Ryan of the American Urban Radio Networks:

“Mr. President, as the nation is at odds over war, with many organizations like the Congressional Black Caucus pushing for continued diplomacy through the UN, how is your faith guiding you?”

Great. In Bush’s first press conference since his decision to support a rollback of affirmative action, the first black reporter to get a crack at him-and this is what she comes up with? The journalistic equivalent of “Mr. President, you look great today. What’s your secret?”

Newspapers across North America scrambled to roll the highlight tape of Bush knocking Ryan’s question out of the park. The Boston Globe: “As Bush stood calmly at the presidential lectern, tears welled in his eyes when he was asked how his faith was guiding him.” The Globe and Mail: “With tears welling in his eyes, Mr. Bush said he prayed daily that war can be averted.”

Even worse were the qualitative assessments in the major dailies of Bush’s performance. As I watched the conference, I was sure I was witnessing, live, an historic political catastrophe. In his best moments Bush was deranged and uncommunicative, and in his worst moments, which were most of the press conference, he was swaying side to side like a punch-drunk fighter, at times slurring his words and seemingly clinging for dear life to the verbal oases of phrases like “total disarmament,” “regime change,” and “mass destruction.”

He repeatedly declined to answer direct questions. At one point, when a reporter twice asked if Bush could consider the war a success if Saddam Hussein were not captured or killed, Bush answered: “Uh, we will be changing the regime of Iraq, for the good of the Iraqi people.”

Yet the closest thing to a negative characterization of Bush’s performance in the major outlets was in David Sanger and Felicity Barringer’s New York Times report, which called Bush “sedate”: “Mr. Bush, sounding sedate at a rare prime-time news conference, portrayed himself as the protector of the country…”

Apparently even this absurdly oblique description, which ran on the Times website hours after the press conference, was too much for the paper’s editors. Here is how that passage read by the time the papers hit the streets the next morning:

“Mr. Bush, at a rare prime-time press conference, portrayed himself as the protector of the country.”

Meanwhile, those aspects of Bush’s performance that the White House was clearly anxious to call attention to were reported enthusiastically. It was obvious that Bush had been coached to dispense with two of his favorite public speaking tricks-his perma-smirk and his finger-waving cowboy one-liners. Bush’s somber new “war is hell” act was much commented upon, without irony, in the post-mortems.

Appearing on Hardball after the press conference, Newsweek’s Howard Fineman (one of the worst monsters of the business) gushed when asked if the Bush we ‘d just seen was really a “cowboy”:

“If he’s a cowboy he’s the reluctant warrior, he’s Shane. because he has to, to protect his family.”

Newsweek thinks Bush is Shane?

This was just Bush’s eighth press conference since taking office, and each one of them has been a travesty. In his first presser, on Feb. 22, 2001, a month after his controversial inauguration, he was not asked a single question about the election, Al Gore or the Supreme Court. On the other hand, he was asked five questions about Bill Clinton’s pardons.

Reporters argue that they have no choice. They’ll say they can’t protest or boycott the staged format, because they risk being stripped of their seat in the press pool. For the same reason, they say they can’t write anything too negative. They can’t write, for instance, “President Bush, looking like a demented retard on the eve of war.” That leaves them with the sole option of “working within the system” and, as they like to say, “trying to take our shots when we can.”

But the White House press corps’ idea of “taking a shot” is David Sanger asking Bush what he thinks of British foreign minister Jack Straw saying that regime change was not necessarily a war goal. And then meekly sitting his ass back down when Bush ignores the question.

They can’t write what they think, and can’t ask real questions. What the hell are they doing there? If the answer is “their jobs,” it’s about time we started wondering what that means.

Volume 16, Issue 11
http://www.nypress.com/16/11/news&columns/cage.cfm

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)