On a recent visit to South Africa, I was accosted by a fellow columnist who demanded to know why the American media have not mounted a more forceful challenge to the radical policies of the Bush administration.
So virulently was the question posed that I had the distinct sense he held me personally responsible. I therefore explained that, while I like to believe my column is required reading in the Oval Office, it would be plain hubris to suppose that the opinions of a humble media correspondent play more than a marginal role in the president’s policy agenda. Anyway, I added, George W. Bush doesn’t read the papers:
‘I rarely read the stories,” he told a Fox News interviewer in September. ‘The best way to get the news is from objective sources. And the most objective sources I have are people on my staff who tell me what’s happening in the world.”
After thus absolving myself, I quickly pointed out that, actually, ever since Bush’s dramatic announcement in May that ‘major hostilities” in Iraq were over, the American mainstream media have become noticeably less ‘objective,” on Bush’s understanding of the word – which is to say, more critical of White House thinking.
Even the major television networks – bastions of Bush’s peculiar brand of objectivity throughout Operation Iraqi Freedom – have begun casting doubt on the credibility of some of the president’s ‘most objective sources.” In particular, the sources for such stories as ‘Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction,” ‘America welcomed as liberator,” and the still-unfolding ‘Post-war reconstruction and exit strategy.”
Some TV commentators have gone so far as to ask how it is possible that considerably more American soldiers have been killed by enemy fire since the end of major hostilities than were killed during the hostilities themselves.
But while such questions do sporadically slip into cable news shows, they are hardly staple fare. Throughout late October and November, amidst a string of coordinated and deadly attacks on American, coalition and civilian targets, the major cable news channels gave equal, if not greater play to such stories as the California wildfires, the Laci Peterson trial and Paul Burrell’s new book on Princess Diana.
In the networks’ defence, the images from California were far more spectacular than anything coming out of Iraq – not least because the Pentagon, applying lessons learned in Vietnam, has banned journalists from photographing arriving coffins of U.S. dead.
And on October 26th, during the devastating terrorist attack on a Baghdad hotel that narrowly missed Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, U.S. officials in Iraq actively blocked NBC from filming the scene. The US Occupying authority later accused the NBC reporter and his team of conducting themselves ‘in a wholly inappropriate, uncaring and insensitive manner. Instead of rendering or summoning aid, they focused on gathering video footage of people in agonisingly painful situations . . . in order to boost the ratings.”
The reporter in question, Jim Miklaszewski, had a less intricate take: ‘our impression was that this was an attempt to censor the news. This event shot holes in the administration’s insistence that everything was going well in Baghdad.”
There were, however, certain occasions on which all cameras turned to the Iraq story – for instance, when the president, flanked by the White House rose garden, cited the recent spate of attacks as proof of the terrorists’ frustration at America’s successful reconstruction efforts.
But if rose-tinted news coverage of the presidency remained the order of the day on television, the same could not be said of print.
With the situation in Iraq deteriorating, opinion columns in the mainstream press have begun to echo the attitudes of an increasingly war-weary public: November polls revealed that a growing majority of Americans disapprove of Bush’s handling of the situation in Iraq. According to the Washington Post‘s media columnist, Howard Kurtz, there is a growing sense among journalists in the mainstream media that ‘we waged a war of our choosing without adequately planning for the consequences, or with a lousy plan whose weaknesses are now on display every day.”
Perhaps what we are seeing is the beginning of the end of the notion, so prevalent after September 11 2001, that it is somehow unpatriotic for publications to criticise the manner in which America is going about its ‘War on Terror” in anything other than the most guarded terms.
Or perhaps, as many right-wing commentators have claimed, the press’s newly-emboldened stance is simply proof of an insidious liberal bias, coming to the fore at a time when national misfortune can be exploited for partisan gain. David Brooks, a conservative columnist for The New York Times, went so far as to accuse the left-wing press of harbouring ‘so much hatred for Bush that they had no hatred left over for Saddam.”
Bush himself appears inclined towards the latter view. He and his aides have expressed great frustration with what they consider to be over-attention by news organisations to problems in Iraq. ‘Listen, we’re making good progress in Iraq,” Bush told a news conference in October. ‘Sometimes it’s hard to tell it when you listen to the filter.” In an interview with Hearst-Argyle Television the following week, he elaborated on the ominous-sounding ‘filter”:
‘I’m mindful of the filter through which some news travels, and somehow you just got to go over the heads of the filter and speak directly to the people.”
But before we accuse Bush of double standards, pointing out his penchant for crying foul about the media’s ‘filter” while simultaneously banning sensitive footage, perhaps we should canvass the view of an ‘objective” third party.
Barbara Bush, George’s mom, recently told NBC, ‘my gut feeling is that all the media is against George, Republicans, any Republican.”
So maybe things in Iraq aren’t really as bad as the leftie media think. After all, as columnist Michael Kinsley put it, ‘many American soldiers have not been killed since the war officially ended.”
Or perhaps the media are simply reflecting the reality that this administration can no longer rely on popular patriotic support for this war, and that the radical foreign policy which once seemed destined to secure Bush a second term is quickly becoming his greatest liability.