The 'who could have known' defense
Looking at the press’ response to Scott McClellan’s new book, "What Happened", I am struck by a remarkable similarity. The media’s response to his revelations is eerily similar to the way the Bush administration responds to unwelcome revelations.
McClellan’s book not only calls out Bush, Condoleezza Rice, Karl Rove and other top figures for starting the Iraq war, lying to the nation, outing Valerie Plame, and so on. He also calls out the press as "deferential, complicit enables" who meekly conveyed government propaganda as if it were news.
A few step up
There are a few figures in the media landscape who have acknowledged the obvious truth of these charges.
"When the lead-up to the war began, the press corps was under enormous pressure from corporate executives... higher the president's approval ratings, the more pressure I had from news executives" (Jessica Yellin on CNN, May 28 2008)
"I think [Scott McClellan is] fairly accurate...I do think we were remiss in not asking some of the right questions. There was a lot of pressure from the Bush White House" "There was such a significant march to war, and people who questioned it early on, and really as the war progressed, were considered unpatriotic, and I think it did affect the way, you know, the level of aggressiveness that was exercised by the media, I really do."
(Katic Couric on MSNBC, May 28, 2008)
The whiners
But the predominant response among media figures seems to be much more defensive. They blame everyone and everything but themselves.
On MSNBC, May 28:
"We weren’t allowed that kind of proximity with the weapons inspectors...We heard from the Pentagon on my cell phone the minute they heard us report something that they didn’t like...The tone of that time was quite extraordinary...It was still post 9/11 America." (Brian Williams)
"I think the questions were asked...There was just a drumbeat of support from the administration. It not our job to debate them, it is our job to ask the questions" (Charles Gibson)
On NBC, May 28:
"Honorable people believed that he had weapons of mass destruction, but there’s always a drumbeat that happens at that time, and you can raise your hand and put on people like Brent Scowcroft, which we did, a very credible man, who said this is the wrong decision...But there are other parts of America that also have a responsibility. How many senators voted against the war? I think twenty-three is all...He was a bad man...we raised that question [about Saddam’s links to terrorists] day after day. But this President was determined to go to war, and it was more theology than it was anything else, and that’s pretty hard to deal with...Look, I think all of us would like to go back and ask questions with the benefit of hindsight and what we know now, but a lot of what was going on was unknowable..."The White House has an unbelievable ability to control the flow of information, at any time, but especially during the time that they’re preparing to go to war.I think everybody would like to go back and not just have dotted lines but have more direct lines...All wars are based on propaganda." (Tom Brokaw)
So let’s see if I’ve got this right. If the press had been "allowed" access, if they hadn’t gotten angry calls from the administration, if there hadn’t been a "drumbeat", if more Senators had opposed the war, if the president hadn’t been so "hard to deal with", if the White House hadn’t used its "unbelievable" ability to control the flow of information, if the tone of the time, post-9/11 America had only been different...then, we are to suppose, all would have been well. The media blowhards certainly aren’t to blame. It was the tone of the time! It’s the American peoples’ fault!
The White House whine
Compare that to the Bush team’s approach to questions about its failure to prevent the 9/11 attacks. They bemoan the terrorists’ unaccountable failure to send them advance notification of their attack, including its time and place, not to mention the choice of airplanes as weapons. If only the president had been informed of these things, then of course he would have acted...
"...I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center... Condoleezza Rice, May 16 2002. Of course, that’s exactly what was predicted by the Federal Research Division in a report released just two years earlier.
"...the PDB was no indication of a terrorist threat. There was not a time and place of an attack..." George W. Bush, April 11 2004.
"If this president had known something more specific - that a plane would have been used as a missile - he would have acted on it," Ms Rice insisted (BBC News, May 17 2002)
The bottom line is the same – our hands were tied, they didn’t give us what we needed to do a better job.
The same church
No wonder the press has been so easy on the Bushites. They go to the same church, sing from the same hymnal, and are cut from the same cloth.
It’s important to understand how arbitrary the distinction between the "government" and the rest of the establishment is. Top figures in the media, academia, the legal and scientific professions, and so on shuttle back and forth all the time. This virtual state is what runs the country. The government is only part of it.
Real reporting
Going back to the media whiners for a second, it’s instructive to see what they claim, in their own defense, to have done. Note that these are the self-described "mainstream" of the American media world. They are not participating in the White House counterattack against McClellan, led by Karl Rove and picked up by the usual crew of howler monkeys, including Mary Matalin, David Gregory, et. al. These are the serious, professional, mainstream journalists. So what kind of journalism did they practice?
They "asked the questions". They "put on people like Brent Scowcroft". Well, gee whiz, okay, and then what? It doesn’t seem to cross their minds that they could have done any more than that. Anything like real reporting. Anything like developing their own sources. Anything like digging. In fact, there were people inside the military, the intelligence community, the State Department and elsewhere who saw what was happening and tried to warn us, at great risk to themselves. Some journalists actually did tell their stories, did dig up facts, did give us as much of the truth as they could possibly find. Here's a blog post from some of them – read it! Read it and weep for a country whose top "journalists" think it’s only their job to ask questions of officials, but certainly never, ever to debate! For the past six years and more, the McClatchy journalists have been doing what reporters do. We are better off, as a nation, for their efforts.
And this is just what employees of media companies can do. This doesn 't begin to address the wealth of information brought out in the blogosphere, on sites throughout the country and the world, which any journalist can read and follow up on anytime they want.
Book links
For anyone who thinks, like Tom Brokaw et al, that things were just unknowable, here are a few titles. Study up, "journalists"! There’ll be a quiz someday. And you don’t look like you’ll get a passing grade...
Lapdogs (Eric Boehlert)
Bush's War(Jim Kuypers)
Cruel and Unusual (Mark Crispin Miller)
So Wrong for So Long (Greg Mitchell)
The Greatest Story Ever Sold (Frank Rich)
Watchdogs of Democracy? (Helen Thomas)
Fraud (Paul Waldman)
Anatomy of Deceit (Marcy Wheeler)