Explaining the Bush Cocoon

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Thu, 25 Aug 2005 07:50:04 -0700 (PDT)

Explaining the Bush Cocoon

 

 

consortiumnews.com

 

Explaining the Bush Cocoon

 

By Robert Parry

August 24, 2005

 

Under traditional news judgment, the lead paragraph in

American newspapers on the morning of Nov. 12, 2001,

should have read something like: " If all legally cast

votes in Florida were counted in Election 2000,

Democrat Al Gore would have carried the state and thus

won the White House, according to an unofficial tally

of disputed ballots. "

 

Indeed, the tally found that Gore would have carried

Florida's key electoral votes regardless of the

standard used for judging so-called " undervotes, "

ballots kicked out by vote-counting machines which

could detect no presidential choice. Gore won even

ignoring Florida's other irregularities – such as the

badly designed " butterfly ballots " and the improper

" felon purges " – that cost him thousands of additional

votes.

 

To put it more starkly, a recount conducted by a

consortium of major media organizations had determined

that George W. Bush, the guy in the White House, not

only lost the national popular vote but should have

lost the Electoral College, too. To be even blunter, a

pivotal U.S. presidential election had been stolen.

 

But that wasn't how the major newspapers and TV

networks presented their findings. Instead, they bent

over backwards to concoct hypothetical situations in

which George W. Bush might still have won the

presidency – if the recount had been limited to only a

few counties or if legal " overvotes, " where a voter

both checks and writes in the name of the candidate,

were cast aside.

 

Lost Purpose

 

Though the news media's recount had started with the

goal of assessing whether Florida voters favored Gore

or Bush, that purpose was lost in a rush to shore up

Bush's fragile legitimacy in the weeks after the Sept.

11 terror attacks.

 

The key discovery of Gore's victory was buried deep in

the stories or relegated to charts that accompanied

the articles.

 

Any casual reader would have come away from reading

the New York Times or the Washington Post with the

conclusion that Bush really had won Florida and thus

was the legitimate president after all.

 

The Post's headline read, " Florida Recounts Would Have

Favored Bush. " Referring to Bush's success in getting

five U.S. Supreme Court justices to stop the

vote-counting, the Times ran the headline: " Study of

Disputed Florida Ballots Finds Justices Did Not Cast

the Deciding Vote. "

 

Some columnists, such as the Post's media analyst

Howard Kurtz, even launched preemptive strikes against

anyone who would read the fine print and spot the

hidden " lede " of Gore's victory. Kurtz labeled such

people " conspiracy theorists. " [Washington Post, Nov.

12, 2001]

 

After reading these slanted " Bush Won " stories on the

morning of Nov. 12, 2001, I wrote an article for

Consortiumnews.com noting that the obvious " lede "

should have been that the recount revealed that Gore

had won. I suggested that the news judgments of senior

editors might have been influenced by a desire to

appear patriotic only two months after the Sept. 11

terror attacks. [see Consortiumnews.com's " Gore's

Victory. " ]

 

My article had been on the Internet for only an hour

or two when I received an irate phone call from New

York Times media writer Felicity Barringer, who

accused me of impugning the journalistic integrity of

then-Times executive editor Howell Raines. I got the

impression that Barringer had been on the look-out for

some deviant story that didn't accept the pro-Bush

conventional wisdom.

 

[For more on Election 2000, see Consortiumnews.com's

" So Bush Did Steal the White House. " For a broader

historical perspective, see Robert Parry's Secrecy &

Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to

Iraq.]

 

Iraq War Prelude

 

This early example of the U.S. news media building a

protective cocoon around George W. Bush's presidency

is relevant again today as many Americans try to

understand how Bush was able to lead the nation so

deeply into a disastrous war in Iraq and why the U.S.

news media has performed its watchdog duties so

miserably.

 

The history of the mis-reported Election 2000 recount

also attracted the recent attention of New York Times

columnist Paul Krugman. After referencing Gore's

apparent Florida victory in one column, Krugman said

he was inundated by an " outraged reaction " from

readers who thought they knew the history but who

really had learned only a false conventional wisdom

about how the recount supposedly favored Bush.

 

In a second column entitled " Don't Prettify Our

History, " Krugman argues that " we aren't doing the

country a favor when we present recent history in a

way that makes our system look better than it is.

Sometimes the public needs to hear unpleasant truths,

even if those truths make them feel worse about their

country. …

 

" Election 2000 may be receding into the past, but the

Iraq war isn't. As the truth about the origins of that

war comes out, there may be a temptation, once again,

to prettify the story. The American people deserve

better. " [NYT, Aug. 22, 2005]

 

Whether Americans can expect better is an open

question, however.

 

A strong argument even could be made that Krugman is

wrong suggesting that the news media just wanted to

" prettify " American history or that I was wrong in

speculating that the distorted reporting on the

Election 2000 recount was just a case of putting

patriotism over professionalism.

 

A harsher interpretation is that journalists put their

careers – not their love of country – ahead of their

duty to tell the American people the truth. In other

words, big media personalities may have understood

that challenging Bush would put their big pay checks

in harm's way. [see Consortiumnews.com's " The Answer

Is Fear. " ]

 

At Powell's Feet

 

That also appears to have been the pattern during the

run-up to war with Iraq. It was safer for journalists

to toe the line on Bush's case for war with Iraq than

to contest the dubious arguments presented by the

likes of then-Secretary of State Colin Powell.

 

One only needs to look back at the op-ed pages in the

days after Powell's speech to the United Nations

Security Council on Feb. 5, 2003, to see the lock-step

thinking of columnists across the mainstream political

spectrum.

 

Even though Powell's speech was riddled with

falsehoods and questionable assertions, none of the

many journalists who safely positioned themselves at

Powell's feet suffered professionally for their lack

of professional skepticism. Many of the same

columnists are still holding down lucrative jobs on

the Washington Post op-ed page or as pundits on TV

talks shows.

 

There's also little indication that skepticism has

been ramped up to the levels that would seem justified

by the long list of Bush's discredited war rationales.

 

 

Last March, for instance, many commentators –

including New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman and

the Washington Post's David Ignatius and the editorial

boards of the Times and the Post – were hailing Bush's

new Iraq War rationale, that is was the instrument to

advance " democratization " in the Middle East.

 

Just as the pundits had bought into the WMD claims in

2002-2003, they fell for Bush's argument that the

invasion of Iraq would spread democracy across the

Islamic world and thus destroy Islamic extremism. [see

Consortiumnews.com's " Neocon Amorality " or " Bush's

Neocons Unbridled. " ]

 

Since then, as the optimism about " democratization "

has receded – from Egypt and Saudi Arabia to Iraq and

Lebanon – the Bush administration and the pundit class

have shifted rationales again, this time to a modern

version of the " domino theory " – that a quick

withdrawal from Iraq is unthinkable because it would

undermine U.S. credibility.

 

Just as it was nearly impossible to find a prominent

U.S. pundit who challenged Bush's original WMD claims,

there's now a scarcity of commentators who dare to

make the argument that a U.S. military withdrawal from

Iraq might undercut Islamic terrorism (by driving a

wedge between Iraqi Sunni insurgents and outside

jihadists who have come to Iraq to kill Americans).

That wedge, in turn, could help stabilize Iraq, while

Washington could focus on removing other root causes

of Islamic anger, such as the Israel-Palestinian

conflict. [see Consortiumnews.com's " Iraq & the Logic

of Withdrawal. " ]

 

Repositioned Pundits

 

Still, self-interest remains the driving force behind

Washington punditry. So, some columnists seem to be

repositioning themselves in the face of Bush's

slipping popularity, by sniping at Bush about style

while continuing to support him on substance.

 

For instance, a Washington Post column by New Republic

editor Peter Beinart chides Bush for refusing to meet

with Cindy Sheehan, a mother of a soldier who died in

Iraq. But Beinart, who supported the Iraq invasion,

adds that Bush " is right to refuse " Sheehan's call for

a U.S. withdrawal because " it would be a disaster for

national security and a betrayal of our responsibility

to Iraq. " [Washington Post, Aug. 18, 2005]

 

David Ignatius, another Post columnist and war

supporter, struck a similar theme: " Let's look at what

the president is doing right: At a time when anguished

Americans are calling for a quick withdrawal from

Iraq, Bush is telling them a painful truth. `Pulling

the troops out [now] would send a terrible signal to

the enemy,' [bush] said. " [Washington Post, Aug. 17,

2005]

 

Perhaps one of the most remarkable facts about the

Iraq War is that despite all the errors and

misjudgments, the Washington pundit class, which

cheered the nation off to war, remains remarkably

unchanged.

 

Though the Iraq War may be the most glaring example in

decades of the U.S. government and the national news

media letting down the American people and especially

the troops sent off to fight, virtually no one

responsible for this catastrophe has been punished.

 

While journalists have been fired for far-less serious

errors, there's been no known case of a media

personality being publicly punished for buying into

the Bush administration's bogus arguments for invading

Iraq. Instead, many of these same media personalities

continue to lecture the American people about what

needs to be done in Iraq.

 

But this Bush cocoon started years ago, when

journalists forgot that their first duty in a

democracy was to give the people the truth as fully

and fairly as possible, even if some Americans didn't

want to hear it.

 

 

 

--

 

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in

the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His

new book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush

Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at

secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at

Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History:

Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.'