Why the Press Failed

[Guest guest]

http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/19238/

 

Why the Press Failed

By Orville Schell, tomdispatch.com

Posted on July 14, 2004,

http://www.alternet.org/story/19238/

 

When, on May 26, 2004, the editors of the New York

Times published a mea culpa for the paper's one-sided

reporting on weapons of mass destruction and the Iraq

war, they admitted to " a number of instances of

coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have

been. " They also commented that they had since come to

" wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining

claims " made by the Bush Administration. But we are

still left to wonder why the Times, like many other

major media outlets in this country, was so lacking in

skepticism toward administration rationales for war?

How could such a poorly thought through policy, based

on spurious exile intelligence sources, have been so

blithely accepted, even embraced, by so many members

of the media? In short, what happened to the press's

vaunted role, so carefully spelled out by the Founding

Fathers, as a skeptical " watchdog " over government?

 

There's nothing like seeing a well-oiled machine clank

to a halt to help you spot problems. Now that the Bush

administration is in full defensive mode and angry

leakers in the Pentagon, the CIA, and elsewhere in the

Washington bureaucracy are slipping documents,

secrets, and charges to reporters, our press looks

more recognizably journalistic. But that shouldn't

stop us from asking how an " independent " press in a

" free " country could have been so paralyzed for so

long. It not only failed to seriously investigate

administration rationales for war, but little took

into account the myriad voices in the on-line,

alternative, and world press that sought to do so. It

was certainly no secret that a number of our Western

allies (and other countries), administrators of

various NGOs, and figures like Mohamed ElBaradei, head

of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and Hans

Blix, head of the UN's Monitoring, Verification and

Inspections Commission, had quite different pre-war

views of the " Iraqi threat. "

 

Few in our media, it seemed, remembered I. F. Stone's

hortatory admonition, " If you want to know about

governments, all you have to know is two words:

Governments lie. " Dissenting voices in the mainstream

were largely buried on back pages, ignored on op-ed

pages, or confined to the margins of the media, and so

denied the kinds of " respectability " that a major

media outlet can confer.

 

As reporting on the lead-up to war, the war itself and

its aftermath vividly demonstrated, our country is now

divided into a two-tiered media structure. The

lower-tier – niche publications, alternative media

outlets, and Internet sites – hosts the broadest

spectrum of viewpoints. Until the war effort began to

unravel in spring 2004, the upper-tier – a relatively

small number of major broadcast outlets, newspapers

and magazines – had a far more limited bandwidth of

critical views, regularly deferring to the Bush

Administration's vision of the world. Contrarian views

below rarely bled upwards.

 

As Michael Massing pointed out recently in the New

York Review of Books, Bush administration insinuations

that critics were unpatriotic – White House Press

Secretary Ari Fleischer infamously warned reporters as

war approached, " People had better watch what they

say " – had an undeniably chilling effect on the media.

But other forms of pressure also effectively inhibited

the press. The President held few press conferences

and rarely submitted to truly open exchanges.

Secretive and disciplined to begin with, the

administration adeptly used the threat of denied

access as a way to intimidate reporters who showed

evidence of independence. For reporters, this meant no

one-on-one interviews, special tips or leaks, being

passed over in press conference question-and-answer

periods, and exclusion from select events as well as

important trips.

 

After the war began, for instance, Jim Wilkinson, a 32

year-old Texan who ran Centcom's Coalition Media

Center in Qatar, was, according to Massing, known to

rebuke reporters whose copy was deemed insufficiently

" supportive of the war, " and " darkly warned one

correspondent that he was on a 'list' along with two

other reporters at his paper. " In the play-along world

of the Bush Administration, critical reporting was a

quick ticket to exile.

 

A Media World of Faith-based Truth

 

The impulse to control the press hardly originated

with George W. Bush, but his administration has been

less inclined than any in memory to echo Thomas

Jefferson's famous declaration that, " The basis of our

government being the opinion of the people, the very

first object should be to keep that right; and were it

left to me to decide whether we should have a

government without newspapers or newspapers without

government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer

the latter. "

 

The Bush Administration had little esteem for the

watchdog role of the press, in part because its own

quest for " truth " has been based on something other

than empiricism. In fact, it enthroned a new criterion

for veracity, " faith-based " truth, sometimes

corroborated by " faith-based " intelligence. For

officials of this administration (and not just the

religious ones either), truth seemed to descend from

on high, a kind of divine revelation needing no

further earthly scrutiny. For our President this was

evidently literally the case. The Israeli paper

Ha'aretz reported him saying to Mahmoud Abbas, the

Palestinian Prime Minister of the moment, " God told me

to strike Al Qaeda and I struck, and then he

instructed me to strike Saddam, which I did. "

 

It is hardly surprising then, that such a President

would eschew newspapers in favor of reports from other

more " objective sources, " namely, his staff. He has

spoken often of trusting " visceral reactions " and

acting on " gut feelings. " For him as for much of the

rest of his administration, decision-making has tended

to proceed not from evidence to conclusion, but from

conclusion to evidence. Reading, facts, history, logic

and the complex interaction between the electorate,

the media and the government have all been relegated

to subsidiary roles in what might be called

" fundamentalist " policy formation.

 

Just as the free exchange of information plays little

role in the relationship between a fundamentalist

believer and his or her God, so it has played a

distinctly diminished role in our recent parallel

world of divine political revelation. After all, if

you already know the answer to a question, of what use

is the media, except to broadcast that answer? The

task at hand, then, is never to listen but to

proselytize the political gospel among non-believers,

thereby transforming a once interactive process

between citizen and leader into evangelism.

 

Although in the Bush political universe, freedom has

been endlessly extolled in principle, it has had

little utility in practice. What possible role could a

free press play when revelation trumps fact and

conclusions are preordained? A probing press is

logically viewed as a spoiler under such conditions,

stepping between the administration and those whose

only true salvation lies in becoming part of a nation

of true believers. Since there was little need, and

less respect, for an opposition (loyal or otherwise),

the information feedback loops in which the press

should have played a crucial role in any functioning

democracy, ceased operating. The media synapses that

normally transmit warnings from citizen to government

froze shut.

 

Television networks continued to broadcast and papers

continued to publish, but, dismissed and ignored, they

became irrelevant, except possibly for their

entertainment value. As the press has withered, the

government, already existing in a self-referential and

self-deceptive universe, was deprived of the ability

to learn of danger from its own policies and thus make

course corrections.

 

A Universe in Which News Won't Matter

 

Karl Rove, the president's chief political advisor,

bluntly declared to New Yorker writer Ken Auletta that

members of the press " don't represent the public any

more than other people do. I don't believe you have a

check-and-balance function. " Auletta concluded that,

in the eyes of the Bush Administration, the press

corps had become little more than another

special-interest lobbying group. Indeed, the territory

the traditional media once occupied has increasingly

been deluged by administration lobbying, publicity,

and advertising – cleverly staged " photo ops, "

carefully produced propaganda rallies, preplanned

" events, " tidal waves of campaign ads, and the like.

Afraid of losing further " influence, " access, and the

lucrative ad revenues that come from such political

image-making, major media outlets have found it in

their financial interest to quietly yield.

 

What does this downgrading of the media's role say

about how our government views its citizens, the

putative sovereigns of our country? It suggests that

" we the people " are seen not as political

constituencies conferring legitimacy on our rulers,

but as consumers to be sold policy the way advertisers

sell product. In the storm of selling, spin, bullying

and " discipline " that has been the Bush signature for

years, traditional news outlets found themselves

increasingly drowned out, ghettoized and cowed.

Attacked as " liberal " and " elitist, " disesteemed as

" trouble makers " and " bashers " (even when making all

too little trouble), they were relegated to the

sidelines, increasingly uncertain and timid about

their shrinking place in the political process.

 

Add in a further dynamic (which intellectuals from

Marxist-Leninist societies would instantly recognize):

Groups denied legitimacy and disdained by the state

tend to internalize their exclusion as a form of

culpability, and often feel an abject, autonomic urge

to seek reinstatement at almost any price. Little

wonder, then, that " the traditional press " has had a

difficult time mustering anything like a convincing

counter-narrative as the administration herded a

terrified and all-too-trusting nation to war.

 

Not only did a mutant form of skepticism-free news

succeed – at least for a time – in leaving large

segments of the populace uninformed, but it corrupted

the ability of high officials to function. All too

often, they simply found themselves looking into a

fun-house mirror of their own making and imagined that

they were viewing reality. As even the conservative

National Review noted, the Bush administration has " a

dismaying capacity to believe its own public

relations. "

 

In this world of mutant " news, " information loops have

become one-way highways; and a national security

advisor, cabinet secretary, or attorney general, a

well-managed and programmed polemicist charged to

" stay on message, " the better to justify whatever the

government has already done, or is about to do.

Because these latter-day campaigns to " dominate the

media environment, " as the Pentagon likes to say,

employ all the sophistication and technology developed

by communications experts since Edward Bernays, nephew

of Sigmund Freud, first wed an understanding of

psychology to the marketing of merchandise, they are

far more seductive than older-style news. Indeed, on

Fox News, we can see the ultimate marriage of news and

PR in a fountainhead of artful propaganda so well

packaged that most people can't tell it from the real

thing.

 

For three-plus years, we have been governed by people

who don't view news, in the traditional sense, as

playing any constructive role in our system of

governance. At the moment, they are momentarily in

retreat, driven back from the front lines of

faith-based truth by their own faith-based blunders.

But make no mistake, their frightening experiment will

continue if Americans allow it. Complete success would

mean not just that the press had surrendered its

essential watchdog role, but – a far darker thought –

that, even were it to refuse to do so, it might be

shunted off to a place where it would not matter.

 

As the war in Iraq descended into a desert quagmire,

the press belatedly appeared to awaken and adopt a

more skeptical stance toward an already crumbling set

of Bush administration policies. But if a bloody,

expensive, catastrophic episode like the war in Iraq

is necessary to remind us of the important role that

the press plays in our democracy, something is gravely

amiss in the way our political system has come to

function.

© 2004 Independent Media Institute. All rights

reserved.

View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/19238/