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September 4, 2007
When We Try to Explain the Rout of the Press under George W. BushA few factors that tend to get overlooked...Glenn Greenwald wrote a post at Salon last weekend about the “reverence for Karl Rove” among Washington journalists. He mentions my August 14th entry, Karl Rove and the Religion of the Washington Press, in which I try to explain that savviness—“that quality of being shrewd, practical, well-informed, perceptive, ironic, ‘with it,’ and unsentimental in all things political”—is the real ideology in Beltway journalism. Rove, I said, “understood and exploited for political gain” this cult of savviness in our press corps. Glenn’s point of departure is a recent column by Gloria Borger of US News that deserves our derision because it is nothing but horse race fluff. The column also shows undue reverence for Karl Rove’s political acumen. “When Rove speaks, the political class pays attention—usually with good reason,” she writes. Greenwald observes that “nothing Borger says is ever unique or original,” which is true. Like a lot of pundits who appear on pundit shows, Gloria Borger is an interchangeable part. “She is merely channelling the deep admiration which her Beltway media colleagues have long harbored for Rove and his underlings,” says Greenwald. Admiration seems to him a pretty good explantion for things: The media virtually never takes seriously any administration lawbreaking and corruption scandals because the people at the center of those scandals are those whom they deeply admire. They do not want political operatives whom they admire to be investigated, let alone prosecuted. They do not subject White House claims to scrutiny because they hear those claims from operatives with whom they identify and for whom they have deep affection. And they adopt GOP-fed narratives and blindly recite them because they are convinced that those who feed them those claims are individuals who possess the greatest insight. I agree that the people in the press admire Karl Rove and wish they knew as much about politics as they believe he does. But I would recommend to Glenn some other factors that deserve consideration if we’re trying to explain the collapse of the press under Bush, Cheney and Rove. The most important of these is that journalists and their methods were overwhelmed by what the Bush White House did— by its radicalism. (The subject of another Greenwald post today.) There is simply nothing in the Beltway journalist’s rule book about what to do when a group of people comes to power willing to go as far as this group has in expanding executive power, eluding oversight, steamrolling critics (even when they are allies) politicizing the government, re-interpreting the Constitution, rolling back the press, making secrecy and opacity standard operating procedure, and repealing the very principle of empiricism in matters of state. That’s not an excuse for what happened, but I think it does help explain why the press got beat so badly. As one observer put it: From the Kyoto accords to the International Criminal Court, from torture and cruel and unusual treatment of prisoners to rendition of innocent civilians, from illegal domestic surveillance to lies about leaking, from energy ineptitude to denial of global warming, from cherry-picking intelligence to appointing a martinet and a tyrant to run the Defense Department, the Bush administration, in the name of fighting terrorism, has put America on the radical path to ruin. And that was from one of the administration’s own: Lawrence Wilkerson, a Republican, and former top aide to Colin Powell. I think “overwhelmed by” explains more than Glenn’s “identify with” or “affection for.” In my view the press suffered from not only a failure of nerve under Bush, and a default in leadership, but a dearth of imagination. Most of the people in the capital press—the correspondents, and their bosses— could not imagine what it was going to take to maintain any sort of watchdog role under Bush. They never dreamed that their routines could be so ill-matched to the moment. From this point of view, the reason Washington journalists don’t “call them on it” (to use a phrase heard a lot in these discussions) is not that they identify with the GOP, or want to maintain their access, or cannot bear to lose their ticket to Washington cocktail parties, or have to obey corporate masters who naturally favor the pro-business Republicans; rather, it’s that “calling them on it” in any consistent way would require such a dramatic departure from known methods of Washington journalism—methods a Gloria Borger has mastered to get where she is—that it would effectively demand a new playbook. And this new set of instructions could never be a consensus document because no consensus exists on what to do when people manage to gain power who are willing to go much further than others who held similar positions in the past. The clearest example of this is the awesome phenomenon of Dick Cheney. If the Washington press were serious about about being a watchdog, speaking truth to power, or just covering the people making the key decisions it would have long ago said to itself, “we need to put as much effort into covering the OVP as we do in covering the White House.” (OVP is Office of Vice President.) Of course it never happened— except in retrospect. And yet it had to happen if the press was to have any hope of “calling them on it.” That it didn’t happen isn’t discussed, isn’t even mentioned in press circles. Yet Cheney is routinely described—by Beltway journalists themselves—as the most powerful Vice President ever, and as extremely “secretive.” So it’s not that they are unaware of the phenomenon. But they don’t know what to do about it without overhauling rituals and assumptions that have lasted for the length of Borger’s career. Similarly, they couldn’t imagine that in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, the closer your sources were to the White House, the more likely they were to be wrong— or entirely propagandistic. It’s kind of a radical thought. And yet according to Warren Strobel, whose reporting for Knight-Ridder was more skeptical and closer to the mark, that was definitely the case. Listen to what he says: We had people talking to us [whom I call] “professionals,” I mean intelligence analysts, uniformed military and US diplomats who were expert in Iraq, expert in the Middle East, had done this stuff their whole careers. And they kept telling us over and over again that their views were being ignored, that the process was being politicized, strange things were going on, that a separate, almost alternate government was being set up, different reporting channels, and so on and so forth. And I think what happened was — They were talking to other members of the media as well, obviously they just didn’t come to Knight Ridder, but we took them a lot more seriously. We followed very aggressively on what they had to say. And in the end we found that their version of reality was more accurate than the version of reality that the White House was trying to put out. “A separate, almost alternate government was being set up.” Where’s the rulebook for that? The closer you get to the White House, the further you are from the reality of what the White House is doing. This was the unbelievable truth. Under these conditions, the normal routines of White House reporting actually lead you away from the story, and the longer you stick with those routines the further away you get. And yet you think you’ve done nothing wrong because you’re doing what you’ve always done. When an error that large is made, the overwhelming tendency is to deny or domesticate it. Just calling Bush a “conservative” (when he is actually a radical) helps. It normalizes things that are quite out of the ordinary. (Wilkerson again on Bush and company: “They are radical. They’re not conservative. They’ve stolen my party and I would like my party back.”) Which gets to another factor I want to emphasize. The press has a weakness for cyclical theories in politics. It tends to favor a view of Washington in which the pendulum may swing back and forth but the eternal truths remain true. As history this outlook is mostly junk, but it expresses well enough the view of a permanent political class that includes the press and expects to be around longer than any Administration. Republicans are in power today, Democrats tomorrow. Ideology gains for a while, but pragmatism soon takes over. Reformers may have the initiative for a while, but soon enough they will be followed by business-as-usual. And every four years “presidential hopefuls” will make the trek to Iowa and New Hampshire. What does the political class call elections? “Cycles.” In other words, if you wait long enough, politics will assume a familiar shape. The excitements of the moment are just that— momentary. People who deep down think this way are absolutely vulnerable to a game-changer like Bush the younger. And this too was a factor in the Washington journalist’s inability to cope with the current regime. I mention these things not because they account for everything or defeat other explanations, but because they tend to be overlooked when we try to explain the rout of the press under George W. Bush. Cheers. UPDATE: For the Huffington Post version, I added a new top, reflecting on the President’s surprise trip to Iraq, which produced the desired headlines about troop reductions. National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley had a good question for the White House press corps Monday, when the President—surprise!—flew to Iraq. Reporters on the plane wanted to know if they were trailing along for what was essentially a photo op. “Would you guys like us to come without you?” said Hadley. See “Would You Guys Like us to Come Without You?” (Sep. 5)
Posted by Jay Rosen at September 4, 2007 12:45 AM
Comments
Dear Jay, As usual, a very thought-provoking post. Doesn't this reading, though, require us to consider Warren Strobel's approach to be outside the playbook of status quo journalism? And is that really the case? I would say both yes and no. Yes, there is a new politically correct celebrity journalism playbook that has become the norm over the last fifteen years or so that Strobel doesn't follow. No, in that his type of investigative journalism is exactly the job that even politically correct, GOP fairness doctrine journalists still claim they are about when they go to work--except that they're not. I define the GOP fairness doctrine as the journalistic rule that even fictional statistics and verifiably revisionist history must be treated with grave seriousness if they come from the politically and ideologically powerful GOP. Read more: The GOP Fairness Doctrine Playbook Posted by: Mark Anderson at September 4, 2007 11:51 AM | Permalink “A separate, almost alternate government was being set up.” Where’s the rulebook for that? The closer you get to the White House, the further you are from the reality of what the White House is doing. The flaw in this argument is that there is indeed a precedent for reporting on a "separate, alternate government." That is an apt description of the Iran-contra affair, when a parallel offshore foreign policy, free of Congressional oversight, was organized from a basement in the White House. The adventures of Casey-Poindexter-North-Abrams et al were just as audacious as those of the current occupants. So why were inside-the-Beltway journalists able to report on missiles-for-hostages and cocaine-moneylaundering-for-contras back then, but able only tardily to report on fabricated-weapons-of-mass-destruction and nilitary-occupation-by-boondoggle nowadays? Even though this is a PressThink site, my explanation relies less on the failures of the journalistic mindset and more on old-fashioned Constitutional norms. Back in 1986, there was a division of partisan power allowing Congressional oversight of the Reagan Administration. For the first six years of this Bush Administration, the defanging of Congress was more ruthless by far than that of the press corps, as partisan interests trumped institutional ones. Remember that the height of the coverage of the Iran-contra affair occured when Oliver North testified before Congress. The mystery of the "rout of the press" from 2000 through 2006 may be no mystery at all. Its explanation may be no more complicated than Republican control of Congress--an achievement that can accurately be attributed in large measure to Karl Rove's acumen. Posted by: Andrew Tyndall at September 4, 2007 12:00 PM | Permalink Or rather the myth of Karl Rove's political acumen which relied on successful voter suppression tactics and a corrupt Supreme Court. Rove is no doubt a proven and successful dirty trickster. But to concede that successful dirty tricks are the same thing as political acumen is to reduce democracy to the beltway journalists' "savviness" doctrine of winners rule and losers drool. It is nevertheless worth repeating that the rout of Congress was ignominious and resounding and fundamentally altered the playing field for the press. That point is well taken. Posted by: Mark Anderson at September 4, 2007 12:25 PM | Permalink Jay, Scary. The kind of change you are suggesting the press would have been required to make in order to cover the Bush administration makes me wonder in which epoch's have the Press been able to change due to other forces? The introduction of radio? TV news? Maybe the introduction of blogs will force such a game change? Posted by: NewsCat at September 4, 2007 12:29 PM | Permalink "And yet you think you’ve done nothing wrong because you’re doing what you’ve always done ..." Jay, that's as good a description of the Judith Miller style of reporting as I have ever seen. We're left wondering, however, what is it that makes a Miller go one way (parrot the policy makers) and makes a Warren Strobel (interview the experts) go another way ?? I'm beginning to think that part of it is self-image. Miller's apparently was "I'm a star," whereas Strobel's apparently was a much more modest "I'm trying to get to the bottom of things." Editors everywhere need to encourage the latter and discourage the former. Posted by: Steve Lovelady at September 4, 2007 2:18 PM | Permalink There is one other factor that may seem unthinkable in the U.S. of A., but that certainly dogs journalists in other countries--fear of death. I would not for one minute put it past this administration to carry out assassinations of members of the press. Andrew: I agree that the presence of absence of opposition in Congress has a big effect on how challenging the press can be. This is often overlooked by critics. But I don't agree that the Iran-Contra mess, as disturbing as that was, comes anywhere close to what we have seen under this Bush and company as they have gone about expanding executive power, spitting at oversight, cooking the books, politicizing every arm of the government, placing a protective bubble around the president, rolling back the press, making secrecy and opacity standard operating procedure, and repealing empiricism. I do agree with Steve and Mark that explaining how and Strobel, Landy and colleagues performed differently is important. Their work at least tells us that it was not impossible for the press to do better, nor inevitable that it would be routed so thoroughly. On the other side, one has to explain a Michael Gordon, as well, who doesn't even think he was played in 2003 and who continues to report as if Strobel's lessons had never been learned. NewsCat: the historical precedent that comes to mind is the re-evaluation some people in the press undertook after they were used so effectively by Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s. If I had a spare PhD student handy, I would ask him or her to poke around in that history. Journalists realized they had been used, and they asked themselves some fairly hard questions about weaknesses in their newswriting routines that McCarthy had exploited. Posted by: Jay Rosen at September 4, 2007 2:56 PM | Permalink You should also consider the effect of the internet, aka the blogosphere. It's harder to get away with the old stuff. Dan Rather is probably still trying to figure out how he got caught. The press got overwhelmed in part because they no longer had a monopoly on the news, the facts, the narrative, and the interpretation. When you have all of that going for you, it's hard not to lose. When somebody can say, "Spying on Americans!?" ?Show me." and you can't, things are different. Newsweek got busted on the Duke case because they cooked the facts to fit the narrative, which Evan Thomas still claims is correct. The new wrinkle is...they got caught. Ditto the Koran-flushing. It's hard not to be overwhelmed in the transmission business when the traditional recipients don't trust you and fewer of them want the product. What the provider provides to you is a separate issue. But, given the level of trust the general public has in the press, and the worse level of trust the bloggers have, the media are in trouble. The hysterical and false reporting of the Katrina episode is another howler. And they earned it fair and square. Posted by: Richard Aubrey at September 4, 2007 3:29 PM | Permalink This could be a new record. This thread has already jumped the shark on 9/4/07@2:34pm with this little gem: "I would not for one minute put it past this administration to carry out assassinations of members of the press." Looks like the left has wrestled the paranoid style in American politics away from the right---and good luck with that! Posted by: QC Examiner at September 4, 2007 3:49 PM | Permalink > the re-evaluation some people in the press undertook after they were used so effectively by Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s. If I had a spare PhD student handy, I would ask him or her to poke around in that history. Journalists realized they had been used, and they asked themselves some fairly hard questions about weaknesses in their newswriting routines that McCarthy had exploited. So this hasn't already been written about? Has anyone looked at the pre-WW2 press in Germany? (I'm aware of Deborah Lipstadt's Beyond Belief for the pre-WW2 U.S. press; just wondering if there are analogous works for other times and locales when the press has failed its readers) (and apologies if this has already been covered here in the past, beyond the half-life of my memory; didn't find anything in a search for Lipstadt)
Posted by: Anna at September 4, 2007 4:03 PM | Permalink QC. Pretending to be afraid of The Man is a self-indulgent brag about how important (you think) you are. Nobody actually believes it. Eason Jordan didn't. He just bullshot because he's a journalist. It's what they do. The head of a journalists' organization (the name Linda Foley comes to mind) said the same thing and, identically, refused to provide evidence. She got busted by a real journalist with the fabulous name of Cinnamon Stilwell. Having more spine than Jordan, she refused to go away. Posted by: Richard Aubrey at September 4, 2007 4:51 PM | Permalink Jumping the shark? Take a look at Reporters without Borders to see how in danger reporters in repressive regimes are. I said it sounded like a stretch in the U.S.--but so did all the things Bush has done. And don't you think we can put away "jumping the shark?" Happy Days was a show from the 70s. Correction. It was Linda Foley. But the outer--speaker of truth to power and all that stuff you go on about when convenient--was a woman with a different but still fabulous name, Hiawatha Bray. Foley has issued a sort of apology saying she didn't mean to say it, she just said it. She actually meant something else. Great job for a wordsmith. Posted by: Richard Aubrey at September 4, 2007 4:55 PM | Permalink > "a woman with a different but still fabulous name, Hiawatha Bray" and she's a knockout - check out her website photo. Posted by: Anna at September 4, 2007 6:28 PM | Permalink Damn, Anna. Got me. I have to say, in a meager excuse, that I have been inadvertently exposed to romance languages since toddlerhood. Thus, any name ending in "a" sounds feminine. My apologies to Mr. Bray. If I'd had an editor, he'd have made me check. That having been discussed, did you read his posts on the attempt to be elected? Got five votes. Might have been his campaign slogan--something about honor--that did him in. And his posts on the affair of the murdered reporters and Linda Foley? Posted by: Richard Aubrey at September 4, 2007 6:47 PM | Permalink > "did you read his posts" Nope. He lost credibility a long time ago. Posted by: Hiawatha Bray | February 10, 2005 at 12:20 PM You're joking, Hiawatha, aren't you? Please tell me you're joking. Posted by: Dan Gillmor | February 10, 2005 at 01:50 PM Posted by: Anna at September 4, 2007 7:04 PM | Permalink re: "Savviness--that quality of being shrewd, practical, well-informed, perceptive, ironic, 'with it,' and unsentimental in all things political--is, in a sense, their professional religion. They make a cult of it. Jay, do you really see these things as *negative*??? what kind of "cult" is this? (sounds like... "the cult of the balanced people"...) -- a couple of these qualities may not be ideal but as far as I can see the package beats the reverse by far: impractical, uninformed, unperceptive, "out of it," sentimental about political things...etc. Delia So. Bray refused to get hysterical about somebody with an obscure background who asked softball questions. Surely there must be more direct roads to hell than that? Maybe not. Anyway, you are fortunate. Since you chose to pick that particular failing, it allows you to pretend Foley didn't do what she did. But, we know she did because she had an associate write about the bastards writing about it, and then apologized-not, for saying it. However, the association of Gannon and Bray allows you to pretend it all didn't happen. Problem for you is that nobody else is required to go that route. Since, as I say again, it really did happen. Posted by: Richard Aubrey at September 4, 2007 11:21 PM | Permalink "In politics, they believe, it’s better to be savvy than it is to be honest or correct on the facts. It’s better to be savvy than it is to be just, good, fair, decent, strictly lawful, civilized, sincere or humane...." Like that package too? Posted by: Jay Rosen at September 5, 2007 12:08 AM | Permalink Anna: McCarthy and the Press has been written about; what has not been done is to go back and look at that episode in light of Bushco and the press. Here is Kirkus Reviews on one such book, Joe McCarthy and the Press, by Edwin R. Bayley. You can glimpse some of the parallels.... Did the press make Joe McCarthy, as often alleged? To the extent that they allowed themselves to be manipulated by him, Bayley concludes, especially in the crucial month after the Wheeling, WV, Communists-in-the-State-Department speech. This is an exacting, bell-ringing study of the interface between journalism and politics--by an expert witness: Bayley, now dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Berkeley, was a political reporter for the (uncowed) Milwaukee Journal during the Wisconsin senator's heyday; he also comes, like McCarthy, from Appleton (in a footnote, he recalls teasing McCarthy--a ""hick,"" in bib overalls--as a boy: ""He'd lunge at us and we'd run""). Posted by: Jay Rosen at September 5, 2007 1:38 AM | Permalink Which gets to another factor I want to emphasize. The press has a weakness for cyclical theories in politics. It tends to favor a view of Washington in which the pendulum may swing back and forth but the eternal truths remain true. As history this outlook is mostly junk, but it expresses well enough the view of a permanent political class that includes the press and expects to be around longer than any Administration. I don't think you've emphasized this factor nearly enough, because it's the factor that makes Bush's policy of secrecy, not just possible, but sound tactics. The Washington press corps thinks of itself as part of a permanent political class, entitled to govern, and not removable by the process of elections -- and the existence of this belief has become known to the average American voter. Moreover, this belief is substantially correct; and the preferred policies of this class are, in a host of ways, different from those of the average American voter, and not infrequently are directly opposed. Opposition to this class, and attempts to humble it, tame it, or remove it from power, are central to the Republican platform and the desire of that party's base. Bush and Rove are radicals, in the sense that they have tried to carry out that desire; but they are not original, they did not create the emnity between the press corps and the people. The press corps did that by themselves. Posted by: Michael Brazier at September 5, 2007 2:03 AM | Permalink re: "... go back and look at that episode in light of Bushco and the press." I'd be interested to read an analysis of PressThink related to McCarthy, J. Edgar Hoover during the Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon administrations and "Bushco". It would be especially interesting to understand the "re-evaluation" that occurred after McCarthy compared to the "re-evaluation" after Kennedy/Johnson/Nixon and Watergate. re: "In politics, they believe, it’s better to be savvy than it is to be honest or correct on the facts. It’s better to be savvy than it is to be just, good, fair, decent, strictly lawful, civilized, sincere or humane...." Like that package too? ...... well, I fail to see the logic -- how do you get from: "practical, well-informed, perceptive, ironic, 'with it,' and unsentimental in all things political" to... NOT "honest or correct on the facts".... NOT "just, good, fair, decent, strictly civilized, sincere or humane"...? Delia P.S. is it NOT sincere to not be sentimental about political things? (doesn't *have to* be...) D. Whatever. I guess that post fails the Delia logic test. We'll have to throw it in with the rest of the rejects. Maybe you could ask the New Republic? Posted by: Jay Rosen at September 5, 2007 10:21 AM | Permalink I hate to disappoint you, Jay... but it's not MY logic... and you should be able to defend it if you Delia P.S. lets leave the New Republic alone: they liked it... so? (doesn't mean the underlying logic is correct) D. The way to square the circle between Jay and Delia concerning what an admiration for savviness implicitly denigrates (does it really denigrate honesty, accuracy, justice, virtue, fairness, legality, civilization, sincerity, humanity?) may be this... Savviness is not an absolute virtue for inside-the-Beltway political journalists. Its virtue only holds sway in that subset that concentrates on the horse race. Savviness has no currency, for example, in coverage of foreign policy or public policy--which is why Karl Rove was simultaneously admired for his savvy electoral success and denigrated for his tin-eared legislative failures (privatizing Social Security, offering immigrants a path to citizenship). The explanation, I believe, lies in the sports analogy that underlies the horse race. In sports--a discreet universe governed by agreed on yet fundamentally arbitrary rules--ethics are never an issue. A baserunner does not have to honest about whether he beat the tag; a rebounder does not have to be fair about elbowing an opponent under the basket: in sports. The supervising presence of referees relieves the participant of moral scruples. Sports journalism is another genre of reporting where savviness is rated as a virtue. So Delia is correct that within the cramped norms of political horse race journalism it is not outrageous that savviness should be validated. And Jay is correct that the validation of savviness is yet another symptom that the norms of horse race journalism are outrageously cramped. Posted by: Andrew Tyndall at September 5, 2007 10:44 AM | Permalink Covering McCarthyism: How the Christian Science Monitor Handled Joseph R. McCarthy, 1950-1954 Analyzing the first editorial about McCarthy run in the Monitor, the author notes that the tone was set for the next five years: "it denounced the smearing of individuals in the name of cleansing the government of Communists, and argued that the junior senator's methods would destroy mutual trust, which was not the answer to rooting out Communists in government." Posted by: Mark Anderson at September 5, 2007 11:22 AM | Permalink Mark, Haven't not made a real study of the McCarthy era I do want to repeat something I was told in J-School about it. That the editorials of the day were often raging against Joe but it was the headlines on the front that gave him the power. This does seem to be the case I notice with print at least. That editorials only have the power to shift the narrative if they also have agreement with the headlines. (Ie Gonzales/Craig under seige, etc). So I guess if this Christian Science Monitor's editorials were solidly pointing out what a dangerous fraud McCarthy was, it still was part of the problem if the headlines touted his latest allegations. By the way...anyone find the Washington Post article about the study debunking of myths both scary and depressing? (Jay for some reason my html tags for URLs never work...) is jay rosen living in an alternate universe? the press has been spewing hatred and animosity toward GW from the 1st day of his administration! are you sad because the country has not been in gridlock with a bunch of pointless congressional investigations or are you angry because the people of the u.s. actually want terrorists caught on the battlefield held indefinitely in military prisons rather than being released to kill americans again? Or are you upset that "we" have not cared that the govt. has prevented further terrorist attacks by such aweful means as listening to conversations from suspect individuals calling into or out of the u.s.? paranoids like jay rosen read way too much orwell and think someone really cares about his mother's chicken curry recipes. i am sure some intelligence officer has his own wife cooking it right now...if she only knew where he got it! "journalists" have been continually hacking away at gw for a long, long, time -- but some seem to have missed it or it hasn't resulted in enough blood for their insatiable thirst. jay seems to never read a paper or watch the evening news... wake-up...if you want to watch the "i hate george bush hour," just open your eyes and read, then clean your ears and listen and, viola, you will see and hear all of the anti-bush rhetoric you so long for. when people such as wilkerson write about "cherry-picking intelligence" or strobel yammers about so-called experts "whose views were being ignored" and rosen takes this as having some sort of meaning, what it really shows is that he has absolutely NO concept of analysis collection and the decision making process. EVERY TIME a decision is made a BUNCH OF VIEWS are being ignored and EVERY TIME you decide which intelligence to run with you are CHERRY-PICKING the intelligence. THAT IS the very nature of what you are doing...every time... multiplied by thousands of decisions. once again,wake-up, can you really be that easily manipulated? but this time, because the press is so stridently anti-bush, those analysts whose opinions were not followed had this huge forum to express their pathetic outrage. but jay rosen's memory lapse does not seem odd as this is a person who thought hatfield should be chased from the senate yet loved to ignore a president who was, according to most victims experts, a serial sexual harasser. and a rapist. but jay thought this was a vast right-wing conspiracy. how easy to ignore that these victims were almost all democrats. maybe you were "overwhelmed" by that administration, jay, because you seem still blinded today. and jay, don't forget the bush national guard story. finally, the raw meat you wanted! Posted by: surfnvb21 at September 5, 2007 3:16 PM | Permalink Back in 1953 "Ike" Eisenhower decided that covert operations were the way to prosecute the Cold War. Cheaper that way, or something. This meant that a false storyline was emitted by the US government. A story that it knew to be false. This started with the overthrowing of the democratically elected government of Iran and returning the Shah to the throne. I wonder what we would think of Iran if it had invaded us in 1953 and made Henry Wallis President. As time has gone on this false storyline has become very comfortable to live in. The press was use to touting the storyline while the Cold War lasted. Bushco is the logical extension of this. They live in unreality because that is what they feel comfortable in. Recall the, "we're an Empire," bit. Posted by: Jon Stopa at September 5, 2007 3:29 PM | Permalink Thanks to Jay and Mark for the McCarthy refs, and to Andrew for the fine Delia vs. Jay elucidation, and to Newscat for the headlines-vs-editorials insight and that fascinating and disturbing WaPo article (Persistence of Myths Could Alter Public Policy Approach, on research showing that what gets written isn't what gets read). We are not rational beings. Posted by: Anna at September 5, 2007 4:11 PM | Permalink Well, Jay, you've been called out. You "read way too much Orwell." Me, I didn't know there was such a thing as "too much Orwell." In fact, surfnvb21's post sent me right to my dog-eared copy of "Politics and the English Language," which I try to read at least once a year. (Proof, I suppose that there is a silver lining to every angry rain cloud that periodically swoops in and parks itself for the nonce at Press Think.) Posted by: Steve Lovelady at September 5, 2007 5:58 PM | Permalink Yeah, Steve, it's kind of like telling a comedian he's reading too much Twain. I think Mr. Surfnvb21 missed my Letter to CBS News about the Rather episode. That's how you know it's culture war theater. Everyone is a cardboard cutout; no one's an individual. There are no human views, just walking categories. Posted by: Jay Rosen at September 5, 2007 6:16 PM | Permalink I like that phrase: "culture war theater." Pretty much sums it up. Posted by: Steve Lovelady at September 5, 2007 7:14 PM | Permalink Edward Alwood Publications: Dark Days in the Newsroom: McCarthyism Aimed at the Press traces how journalists became radicalized during the Depression era, only to become targets of Senator Joseph McCarthy and other anti-Communist crusaders during the 1950s.and "Watching the Watchdogs: Spying on Journalists in the 1940s" Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 84/1 (Spring 2007): 137-150. JMCQ is the top scholarly journal in the mass communication field. Prof. Rosen. Reread your letter to CBS. Toward the end is a sentence including the words, "if you are dedicated to truth-telling..." I notice you didn't say, "since you are dedicated to truthtelling...". Many, of course, think they were not. There is a problem. Either they are professional, experienced journalists or they are not. If they are, the thinking goes, they not only wouldn't have done the TANG papers, they couldn't possibly have been fooled. The result is that either they are professional, experienced journalists who could only have done this on purpose, or they're idiots who haven't a clue. In the latter case, it could have been an accident. In any case, the "if" is interesting. Posted by: Richard Aubrey at September 6, 2007 11:55 AM | Permalink 'On the other side, one has to explain a Michael Gordon, as well, who doesn't even think he was played in 2003 and who continues to report as if Strobel's lessons had never been learned" Recently, I listened to an interview of Geneva Overholser on Media Matters with Bob McChesney (from August 26), and to my surprise I learned that Michael Gordon has been doing the same thing for 20 years! here's the bit (35 mins in, my rough transcript): Bob McChesney: ...the reliance upon official sources and what happens then is being a professional journalist or being objective simply means taking official commentary from each side of the aisle and not actually investigating who's telling the truth and who's lying. I have trouble comparing the state of journalism now vs. the pre-Bush era because it is only since 2001 that I have been able to do my own fact checking. So when Alberto Gonzales wrote an op-ed (in the NYT, I think?) explaining President Bush's executive order on military commission, I went to the WH website and read the executive order myself - so I knew that the op-ed was filled with lies. When Donald Rumsfeld said that the people we captured in Afghanistan weren't protected by the geneva conventions, I went to the ICRC website and read the geneva conventions - so i knew he was lying. And in the run up to the 2003 Iraq invasion, I could compare a Judith Miller / Michael Gordon NYT front page article with Walter Pincus' A18 article in the WaPo. Is it possible that things were much worse than I realized pre-2000, but I just didn't have the internet resources to know it? Listening to what Geneva Overholser had to say about about Michael Gordon in the '80s made me wonder. selise. I had the misfortune of serving in Air Defense in 1970-1971. It was a Nike Hercules outfit. Terrible place for a simple but honest grunt. Overholser was a sometimes good ombudsman at the WaPo but has dropped whatever objectivity she forced upon herself at the time. And, at bottom, where I arrived by nagging, the opposition had nothing to do with the supposed lack of technical ability, or cost, or any other ostensible reason. It was solely that the opponents didn't think we should be able to defend ourselves. Their actual fear was that it might work. Posted by: Richard Aubrey at September 6, 2007 4:52 PM | Permalink On the other side, one has to explain a Michael Gordon, as well, who doesn't even think he was played in 2003 and who continues to report as if Strobel's lessons had never been learned. Jay, How do we account for Gordon's continuing to run amok, impervious to correction, with the same old stenographic journalism playbook? Posted by: Mark Anderson at September 6, 2007 5:07 PM | Permalink either they are professional, experienced journalists who could only have done this on purpose, or they're idiots who haven't a clue. Richard: I would recommend to you, as one thinking person to another, that there might be a flaw in your riff... "that's so stupid they must be doing it deliberately. Or they're idiots..." You have some institutional notes missing. What I mean is that institutions can be "stupid," even though smart people run them. People with a professional conscience, who are not hacks, but who try to live up to their ideals, can do harm without deliberating about it. The sort of cultures that live in our big institutions, professional cultures, can, at times, pre-dispose intelligent, informed people to do relatively thought-less things. This is another way of saying that professionals always have blind spots. Figuring out where they are and standing right there with my flash light is one of PressThink's most elementary moves. But saying, "it's a culture," that's different than saying... "shallow, unfinformed people who are beyond their depth," and it's different than saying: gotta be deliberate! If you allow for this possibility, not as some univeral factor but an occasional and sometimes decisive one, then it is certainly possible for smart pros with a public conscience to adopt practices that are bad news for the rest of us. Posted by: Jay Rosen at September 6, 2007 7:09 PM | Permalink Richard Aubrey - do you have any links to share, so I can check it out for myself? thx. Jay, re: smart pros with a public conscience That's an excellent response to Richard. Are there any other areas besides journalism where that can be applied? If journalism reflects and drives the dominant rhetoric (noetic field) where news stories and editorials describe their subjects as "shallow, un[]informed people who are beyond their depth," and it's [] gotta be deliberate!, then is it a surprise when journalists are judged the same way? re: Overholser and reporters pointing out bolderdash I still get a kick out of the story Mike Wallace tells ... CJR 1993: Hillary and Bill Clinton took the Gennifer Flowers story and his sinking political campaign to 60 Minutes on Superbowl Sunday early in 1992 in front of the single biggest audience the Clintons would have throughout the campaign. As Hewitt rightly claims, "You hardly heard about Gennifer Flowers after that episode." [my emphasis]Booknotes 2001: LAMB: The Clintons and James Carville. Mr. Rosen: A theory of institutional or professional blind spots might explain why, say, Warren Strobel's articles on Bush's strategy for Iraq never became prominent. It doesn't explain the forged TANG memos, though. The 60 Minutes II story built on those forgeries wasn't an example of journalists following the ordinary procedures of their trade and putting out rubbish -- it was a gross breach of the canon of journalism's ethics, condemned by everyone but its perpetrators. What does explain it is a theory of journalists as part of a dominant political class. Mapes and Rather thought they could accuse Bush of shameful behavior, using documents they hadn't verified, because they belonged to the Establishment and Bush was an outsider. To doubt the word of CBS News, they thought, is tantamount to questioning the legitimacy of the Press itself -- who would dare do such a thing? And Bush was unlikely to put up an effective defense, for as a Texan, a Republican, and a President, his word was suspect to anyone whose views Mapes and Rather heeded. They saw no need to check their work because they thought nobody else would do so, and be heard. It's exactly the attitude of a ruling elite that thinks itself irreplaceable and unaccountable. Posted by: Michael Brazier at September 6, 2007 11:56 PM | Permalink No, I am not with you on any of that. Bush the blueblood and son of a president, grandson of a US senator an outsider? The 60 minutes story was a shameful lapse of professionalism by people who thought they might have the goods proving the president a liar. Rather was shamefully unaware of how weak parts of his story were. There were multiple mistakes, lots of denial, criminal lack of awareness, unforgivable confidence when questions were raised, and on and on. The press as "dominant" overclass attempting to do in the rebel and outsider, Bush? I am not there. I'm not anywhere near there. Bush is a son of the ruling class, if there is a ruling class. Posted by: Jay Rosen at September 7, 2007 2:01 AM | Permalink Brazier and Aubrey appear to refute the thesis that the inside-the-Beltway press corps has been "routed" by the Bush Administration by citing a single, discredited, story by Mapes and Rather on 60 Minutes II. Even if all the flaws of Mapes-Rather are stipulated, that lone story is thin gruel to stand as evidence of an ethos of robust oppositional journalism that managed not to be "overwhelmed" by the White House, as Rosen puts it. Rosen makes large claims--that the routing of the press has enabled this radical administration to expand its powers, to elude oversight, to steamroller critics, to politicize government, to reinterpret the Constitution, to make secrecy and opacity a standard operation procedure and to repeal "the very principle of empiricism." This general list seems to me to be an attempt to make abstractions of two concrete criticisms: that President Bush has led the country into an unjust and futile war in Iraq; that he has used the rubric of his War on Terrorism to trample on human rights and civil liberties. Apart from those two core concerns, there are plenty of other controversial decisions--some opposed by conservatives, others by liberals, some by centrists--by this administration that have not required a "routed" press in order to be successfully enacted. Examples of Bush's achievements include the expansion of the federal bureaucracy (Homeland Security), a transfer of wealth to the hyper-rich (tax cut policy), a realignment of the Supreme Court (Roberts, Alito), a partial privatization of the armed forces (Halliburton, Blackwater et al). Examples of Bush's inactions include a failure to maintain domestic infrastructure (New Orleans levees), a failure to reform entitlements (Social Security privatization), a failure to normalize the status of the immigrant workforce (path to citizenship), a failure to establish a realistic energy policy (global warming climate change). All of these successes and failures were debated in the open, reported on adequately--in an un-routed fashion--and approved or defeated legally. Apart from military privatization, it is hard to argue that the press has been missing in action in covering any of them. Rosen's complaints are ostensibly against inside-the-Beltway journalists for their failure to hold this President accountable. Just below the surface it appears that his true complaint is directed not at the press but at the President himself. Posted by: Andrew Tyndall at September 7, 2007 9:44 AM | Permalink Bull. Andrew: what happened to your concretizing skills? What's abstract about a vast expansion of executive power, an agenda Bush never announced, never defended and yet without question pursued? The press took a long time to catch on to that and never made a beat out of it. What's abstract about politicizing the government with such relentlessness, and beyond all normal bounds, that it required weak and inexperienced appointees who would fold under pressure to prove their loyalty to the White House's political operation? The press reported how astonished people in both parties were at the incompetence of the regime, but it never examined this aspect of the "why" of it. And it never really caught on that the politicizing of everything went way further under Bush than prior presidents. There was no precedent for the Bush Bubble, Andrew. And no press to tell us that, either, except Froomkin screaming in the Wilderness. Too abstract for you? Let me concretize. If you're an American and not a Bush loyalist you couldn't get in the hall to hear your president speak at the local "town meeting." Finally, I didn't say that it was the routing of the press that enabled Bush to do these things. Bush did these things because he wanted to, intended to. He has many many enablers. His enablers in the Republican Party have more to answer for than enablers in journalism. The press was routed because it was unable to come to clear terms with a precedent-busting, balance-of-power destroying, radically disruptive Administration, just as you are. Posted by: Jay Rosen at September 7, 2007 11:08 AM | Permalink I thought readers would be interested in this. It's an actual pool report from reporters on the plane to Iraq. A pool report is necessary when only a small number (5-6) reporters can accompany the President, usually because of space or security concerns. The pool report is considered common property and distributed to all the WH press, who can use it as if theirs. It's raw material, in other words. I split it into two posts.... Pool Report #1, 9/3/2007 POTUS VISITS IRAQ’S AL-ANBAR PROVINCE In a trip shrouded in secrecy, President Bush made a surprise visit to Iraq’s al Asad Air Base Monday. The base is in the heart of al-Anbar Province, which Bush has often pointed to as an example of the success of his troop surge in creating space for grassroots political reconciliation. At the huge, isolated, Saddam-era base—which has a 21 kilometer perimeter and is home to some 10,000 U.S. troops—Bush was to meet with Gen. David Petraeus, Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker, Defense Secretary Robert Gates—who traveled to Iraq on his plane ahead of Bush-- Admiral Fallon, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who was aboard AF1. Afterward, Bush was to meet with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and other members of the central government. Bush was to make a statement after that. Then, Bush was to follow that session with a meeting with Sunni tribal and provincial leaders who have taken the lead in battling al Qaeda and who are beginning to make political progress in this ethnically homogenous area of Iraq. POTUS was to cap his six hours on the ground here with a short address—maybe 10 or 15 minutes—to about 750 troops, Dana Perino said. After that, we are on our way to Australia, with a refueling stop at Diego Garcia. First a bit more about the base: It is located in northern Iraq, about 180 kilometers west of Baghdad and 12 kilometers southwest of the Euphrates river. The base was captured by Australian special forces in April 2003, and is now a major coalition air base. In a gaggle, National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley said the idea for the Bush visit to Anbar was hatched “five or six weeks ago” as part of the administration’s thinking about how to approach its upcoming report to Congress on the progress of the war. Bush’s third trip to Iraq since the start of the war was a tightly held secret at the White House, with aides told on a need-to-know basis, Perino said. Reporters in the pool were called over the weekend and summoned for individual, face-t0-face meetings with Perino or Gordon Johndroe, the NSC spokesman. We were told to report for their pool duty not Monday morning, as had been publicly announced, but Sunday between 6:00 and 6:30 p.m. Reporters were given maps of Andrews with our rallying point highlighted. We were told to come in through the main gate, not the usual Virginia Gate entrance. We also were told to tell only one editor at our respective news organizations, and not to do so by cell phone. Also, that editor had to be asked to not tell anyone. In addition, we were told that we could tell spouses about the impending trip, but no one else. A manifest with the names of those on the trip was with a security aide at the gate, and reporters and staff drove their cars to a parking lot adjacent to some tennis courts on the base, not far from the usual press lot at the air terminal. There, Secret Service swept everything we carried and held on to our luggage, computers and other electronic devices. We then boarded two passenger vans and were driven to the spotless hangar that houses the two planes that usually serve as Air Force One. The steps were down on one of the planes and we got on board in time to see our bags and other belongings coming up the conveyor belt onto the plane. The shades were drawn on the plane’s windows in the press compartment and we sat and waited until we felt the plane being pushed back at 7:47 p.m., about an hour after we had boarded. By 8:05 p.m., we were wheels up. Johndroe told us that POTUS slipped out of a side door of the White House and then off the White House grounds by car—we don’t now whether it was his limo—and made his way to Andrews. Only one other car accompanied him, not his usual motorcade, in an effort to keep the subterfuge going. (Johndroe also added when asked that Mrs. Bush’s pinched nerve, which was cited as the reason for her not making the trip, is real.) About a half hour into the flight, Johndroe came back to tell us we could go down to the baggage area and retrieve our computers and overnight bags, but he asked us to disable the wireless function while we were in flight, on the off chance that the signals could be tracked. Meanwhile, the agents held onto our BlackBerrys and phones, which we were returned to us a half hour before we landed. About an hour after that, a casually dressed Stephen Hadley came back to gaggle, joined by war czar Gen. Douglas Lute, who wore his military fatigues, Perino, and counselor Ed Gillespie.
Much of this will be moot by the time I can file, and there was no transcript. But I will provide a summary and the most relevant excerpts below. The stuff in quotes is verbatim from my recorder. Dana started by announcing that the president’s visit will involve a series of three meetings and would last about six hours. She then introduced Hadley. Hadley: “The idea for this visit arose about five or six weeks ago. We began thinking about next week and the focus on the Petraeus and Crocker testimony. The report that is due to the Congress on Sept. 15. It calls, of course, for a review of where we are on Iraq. And we began to think about how the president should prepare himself for his own role in that process. Obviously, he wants to hear from Petraeus and Crocker directly about how they assess progress on the ground, what their recommendations are for going forward. He will have an opportunity to do that meeting with them face-to-face during this trip. And, obviously, it is an advantage for him to be able to do that face-to-face. There has been a lot of talk about both the security situation and the political progress—both the issue of so-called top-down progress out of Baghdad on the national level and also bottom-up progress in places like Anbar Province. And of course this gives the president an opportunity first hand to hear from people directly involved and make his own assessments at the same time. So he will be meeting with Prime Minister Maliki who will be coming to Anbar Province. Possibly other leaders will as well from the national government…He will obviously congratulate them for the statement that was issued about a week ago indicating a way ahead among the key leaders of the Sunni, Shia and Kurdish groups, talking about how they will work with one another, strengthening the cooperation between the prime minister and the presidency council. Talking about a sub-Cabinet, if you will, to try and focus on the reform agenda and talking about the provincial law and de-Baathification and preparing legislation in other areas for the Parliament when in reconvenes this month. So this is an important development of a week ago. So the president will want to hear from them directly about how they see things going forward at the national level. He will also be meeting with those national leaders and representatives of the Anbar Provincial Council. Again, it will be an opportunity then for him to hear what has been really a remarkable story in Anbar Province.” Hadley went on to say that a year ago al Qaeda was in control of the capital of Ramadi, the province, as well as many of the major cities. He recalled a military intelligence officer who said, “Anbar Province is lost.” “The president saw an opportunity to turn that situation around, “ he said, adding that the president talked about that opportunity in his speech back in January. At the time, POTUS announced that he would put 4,000 more troops in Anbar to aid the bottom-up reconciliation process.
“The president wants to see that for himself. Wants to hear from and talk to the Iraqis that have been at the forefront of that pretty remarkable event.” Finally, he said, it would be “useful for him [POTUS] to meet together both with the provincial leaders and the leaders from the government in Baghdad” because a critical element of success in the future will be for the “bottom up to meet the top down. For the government in Baghdad to extend assistance and support-- economic, political support, to continue to provide security support to what is happening in Anbar Province. There are indications that that is what is happening. And the president, of course, will want to hear about that and encourage it. ” “And also for the local leaders in Anbar Province to increase their ties with the Iraqi government,” he added. One of the things we are looking forward to is “lay the groundwork for provincial elections.” Finally, of course, the president will want to talk to our men and women in uniform. He, of course, will want to thank them for their work and their sacrifice.” “We think it is the kind of thing the president needs to do in order to go into the following week and make the kinds of decisions he needs to make. The president heard about this idea and instantly took to it and that’s why we’re doing it.” Posted by: Jay Rosen at September 7, 2007 11:42 AM | Permalink Pool Report #1, 9/3/2007 (continued....) AFTER HADLEY SPOKE, LUTE, GILLESPIE, JOHNDROE AND PERINO TALKED TO US. WTH LUTE AND HADLY JUMPIN IN AT TIMES. SUMMARIES AND QUOTES FOLLOW: Gen. Lute: He described al Asad as a Saddam-era airbase built in the 1970s that t he coalition has been using since 2003. It is halfway between Baghdad and the Syrian border, right along the Euphrates River Valley, he said. “This is the middle of the middle of the great desert in al Anbar province, but it is geographically close to the center of the province itself. “ The troops here include 7,000 Marines and 3,000 Army. He also outlined the meetings that were noted above. The Marine air wing is headquartered here. Ed Gillespie: He said there would be a photo release from the POTUS meeting with Petraeus and Crocker. There will be a statement from POTUS after the Maliki meeting, and at the beginning of the meeting with the tribal leaders there could be a pool spray, if it is amenable to them. After that, there’s the president are the president’s remarks to the troops. Gillespie said the Bush statement would be on the political progress that has been achieved in Iraq. The remarks to troops will focus more on the military progress, he said. Officials said that the president’s remarks—both in the statement and in the remarks to troops—would be piped to D.C. and to Hawaii. Asked how he expected the visit to affect the debate in D.C. over the war, Ed said: “It is hard to tell. I think there has been a lot of information that has been added over the course of August. Because so many members of Congress have come over to see for themselves, as well, and this will be a part of it.” On the president’s trip, he added, “There is no substitute for that kind of first-hand experience and seeing directly for yourself and talking directly to not only to national leaders but provincial leaders. I think the information that he gets here, hopefully, will be a contribution to the discussion that we will have in September.” Steve Hadley on the idea that while Anbar and Baghdad are better, other areas are worse off: He pointed out that before the surge, 80 percent of the sectarian violence was within 100 kilometers of Baghdad. “There was a risk that Iraqis were losing control of their capital and all the rest of the country was watching.” So the reinforcements were needed to stabilize things in Anbar and Baghdad. “We’re seeing the fruits of that effort,” he said. Lute: Said the progress in Anbar has three factors: Sunni tribal leaders, the nature of al Qaeda and the surge. “Al Qaeda was decisive here, but not the way he intended to be decisive. He was so intimidating. So brutal, that actually the Sunni leaders decided they were not going to put up with it.” …Also, the Sunni momentum was broadened by the troops from the surge. Can we cement the provincial progress by way of top down connections? Lute asked before answering his own question by listing some things that need to happen: “Enlisting the tribal security forces into the Iraqi security forces, which, of course, only the central government can authorize. This has to do with allocating the central budget—largely oil revenues-- down to the provinces.” He said Anbar has a $107 million FY ’07 budget, which has been allocated to it. “We got to make sure that money gets down there, it gets designated and it gets spent. This is all Iraqi money.” Anbar has asked for additional funding above and beyond the $107 million, and Lute said: “So we will be watching carefully to see if the Maliki government can fund that. These are the sorts of top-down to the bottom-up connections that Steve was mentioning.” Hadley on why the central government is wary of empowering what are, essentially, Sunni militias: “We have been concerned, of course, about the militias operating outside of the government. So the government is obviously concerned that we do not create or allow to be created militias operating outside of the governmental authority. “ And that is why it important for local militias “to get organized, vetted and then become part of the Iraqi security forces,” Hadley said. “This connection between the bottom up and top down is beginning to be made. And it will be an opportunity when the president meets with representatives of the national government and representatives from the provinces for him to encourage that process,” Hadley said. Asked what would he say to those who would call the trip a big photo-op, a big publicity stunt, Hadley said: “One, the president, having to make some important decisions, felt it was important for him to come first hand. Hear from his commanders first hand. Hear from Prime Minister Maliki and the other national authorities. And hear from these people in Anbar who are making it go. There is no substitute for sitting down, looking him in the eye, and having a conversation with him. The president felt this is something he had to do in order to put himself in a position to make some important decisions.” That is why members of congress have been coming to Iraq, Hadley said. “This is an important debate and everyone needs to be prepared as best they can to participate in it.” It makes sense to come to Anbar, because it is one of two areas of focus of the president’s January speech, Hadley said. Asked again about it being a photo-op, Hadley said: “Would you guys like us to come without you? Sure, we’re going to bring press along and people are going to see it.” Asked about the group that planned and executed the trip, Hadley said himself, Lute, Gillespie, Rove, Kaplan, Bolten and Vice President Cheney all participated in conceiving and planning the president’s trip. Asked whether al Asad is a safe place for Bush to go, Lute answered: “This is a large base, well secured, 10,000 U.S. troops there. It is relatively secure.” Asked whether Iraqis knew Bush was coming, Lute stepped up only to demur. “We left that part of this equation to Ryan Crocker,” he said. Asked if the president would be safe going to a nearby town, Lute again demurred: “I think one of the reasons we are going here is to get that kind of fidelity from people on the ground. So that is a great question to ask of one of the Marine general officers or one of the senior Marines there.” Asked why no time for POTUS off base, Lute said: “ He is on a tight timeline. We didn’t really approach it like he is going to leave the base.” “He has to get into Australia for the APEC meeting,” Gillespie added. Johndroe: He said that Gates is on his own plane and should arrive an hour before Bush. He mentioned that Bush had no motorcade to Andrews, and that AF1 took off after dark, with POTUS and Rice aboard. He said he did not know when asked whether there would be any fighter escorts during the trip. Perino, unprompted, taking another swing to knock down the idea that the trip is publicity stunt: “There are some people who might try to derive this trip as a photo opportunity. We wholeheartedly disagree. This is an opportunity for the president to meet with his commander on the ground and his ambassador on the ground while they are in fact all on the ground together. It’s also a chance for him to meet with Prime Minister Maliki and other national government leaders. And he will be able to look Prime Minister Maliki in the eye and talk with him about the progress that is starting to happen in Iraq, what we hope to see and the challenges that remain.” “He will also be able to meet with some of the provincial leaders who have put their lives on the line, their families on the line in order to help fight against what is a common enemy which is al Qaeda. A year ago, al Qaeda was in charge of running Anbar and our Marines have made a remarkable turnaround in this area, working with these tribal sheiks. They’ve had a tremendous accomplishment. The president wants to come see it for himself, hear from them as well as thank them for all that they have done.” “Of course, he is not going to be leaving the air base and he will be safe. But he will have the same opportunity that members of Congress who have come to Iraq throughout the month of August --as they should-- in order to be well informed before we have what everybody is anticipating to be a hearty debate about the future of this conflict. So I think it is only right and appropriate that we take advantage of this opportunity for the president to meet with these folks and, of course, we always bring you along.” AF-1 touched down at 3:45 p.m. Iraq time. POTUS was greeted upon arrival by Ambassador Crocker, Secretary Gates, Gen. Peter Pace, Admiral Fallon, Gen. Petraeus, Gen. Odierno, Major Gen. Walter Gaskin, Brig. Gen. Timothy Hanifen, commanding general 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing (forward), and Sgt. Maj. Lewis Bell, of the 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing. Posted by: Jay Rosen at September 7, 2007 11:44 AM | Permalink Professor-- I insist that our disagreement is at the level of the abstract and not a failure of my "concretizing skills." We are both discussing the same series of concrete actions taken by this administration--violation of the separation of powers, incompetence of the bureaucracy, political favoritism in the executive, secret warrantless erosion of civil rights, abrogation of international law--and drawing a different conclusion about the abstract phenomenon that underlies them. I see echoes and precedents from previous Presidents. I have already mentioned the Iran-contra affair. The crimes of Watergate also come to mind. You see relentless busting of precedents and destruction of the balance of power. Your complaint that the press never examined the "why" of this administration's incompetence amounts to a complaint that journalists have not shared your abstract conclusion--that Bush's incompetence is radical, innovative and deliberate, a silent coup d'etat, as it were. You may be right. I may be in denial, unable to "come to terms" with the reality of what underlies this administration. But you may be wrong. This administration's incompetence may be just that--incompetence--and not a ruse to destroy the republic. Posted by: Andrew Tyndall at September 7, 2007 11:50 AM | Permalink Andrew. That I cited only the TANG stories does not mean they are the only example of the press screwing the pooch. But it is the one requiring the least explanation and which is most likely to resist deliberate obtuseness, and about which so much is agreed--reluctantly on the left but inevitably--that I can mention it without having to argue the facts all over again. Other stories can be obfuscated by those who know they're true arguing irrelevancies and making up facts. So the TANG story is most useful because it's most efficient when mentioned. But it is by far not the only one. Selise. I can't give you cites because the original debate and my following it took place before the web. I read it on dead tree, in newspapers and magazines. I called institutions who opposed it--one Protestant church insisted they opposed it because its ultimate cost was unknown, so I asked for a list of other items they'd opposed on the same grounds, which was not forthcoming--and went to meetings. But to give you some examples of the lies: Some said it takes a day or half a day or whatever for a space shuttle to match a space station, or the Hubble 'scope which it might be repairing. True, but deliberately misleading. The point with a warhead is to hit it at a jillion miles an hour, not to match gently, which does take time. What was most telling was a conversation I had with a U-Mich physics prof who opposed it. He felt it would be dangerously destabilizing. So I asked him what about the Sovs and their ABM battle management radar at Krasnoyarsk--illegal under the ABM treaty--and if the Sovs had good ABMs, wouldn't that be destabilizing and what would he be prepared to do about it. Nothing. He was, he said, "tired". So, for whatever reason, the Sovs having this capacity was okay with him, but not us having it. Speaking of Krasnoyarsk, when the subject arose, opponents who took the we're-just-as-bad-at-best-but-usually-worse vis-a-vis the Sovs pointed to two warning radars we were building and said those were illegal, huh? Huh? No. The treaty allowed for radars on the perimeter looking outward. One of ours was in Greenland and the other in the UK. You can look up Krasnoyarsk's location for yourself. But the biggest lie, lasting to today, is to insist that when a test fails, the entire thing is impossible so we should stop trying. That's never said about other endeavors. And when a test succeeds, to say that it was only a test and doesn't prove anything so we should stop immediately. The Detroit News used to have a columnist who had his own section--border and all--in the news section telling us how things were in DC. We got the real facts, by golly. His particular bete noir was SDI and he said some really silly things. One day, what he said was contradicted by a straight news article. What he said didn't work the straight news said did work. I called up his editor and told him part of the editor's job is to spike hard news that contradicts the editorials. I was being a jerk, but I was pissed. Posted by: Richard Aubrey at September 7, 2007 11:53 AM | Permalink Selise: Correction. The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS, not UCR) may have archives going back that far. Posted by: Richard Aubrey at September 7, 2007 11:56 AM | Permalink Prof. Rosen, Ref your distinction between smart people and occasionally stupid institutions. That may be true in some cases. But the TANG case, it was positive lying, not inadvertent mistakes due to institutional momentum. Whatever your point on that issue, the problem is the excuse. It was, we're not crooks. We just screwed up. Smart people/stupid institution, whatever. Either you are a crook or you screw up. Given that choice--the only one given--which is better? Clearly, the second. Anybody can screw up. The problem the press has is that they think every time they use the we-screwed-up excuse, we are supposed to think it's the first time. Not so. The excuse is accumulating some serious mass, considering all the times it's used. So. You're not crooks. You just keep screwing up. So to tell me about smart people and stupid institutions is not much comfort. In fact, it makes it worse. We have institutions which can take smart people and make them do stupid things. Boy, I'd risk my--this penny I just found on the floor--with a bunch like that. You bet. Posted by: Richard Aubrey at September 7, 2007 12:07 PM | Permalink Andrew: I would cheerfully admit that my interpretations may be wrong, or badly overdrawn. They may dramatize things that are a lot less different than my sentences today say. Not only possible, but something that has happened to me before. It will be interesting to see what "camp" wins out in the battle of interpretations: the Bush exceptionalists, like me, or the de-exciters like you. I like my chances of prevailing over the long haul, but I am quite aware that it can turn out the other way as more comes out and a picture, once shadowy as news, is filled in with documents and back story, and more people talk so you kno way more. And... I freely admit that I offer interpretations, arguments, and some of my frustrations come from seeing those interpretations missing from the narrative the press is putting together. What else are you supposed to do with the makers of your biggest public narratives except argue with them about they ought to be telling the nation? Posted by: Jay Rosen at September 7, 2007 12:40 PM | Permalink re: exceptionalists vs. de-exciters I'd like to think that's a false dichotomy and there are more camps than two. Every administration is unique, but very few are exceptional. The exceptionalists use terms like "unprecedented" and "no precedent." They don't make an argument from history, but rather make assertions based on the present (and worse). When there are clear precedents, the exceptionalists refuse to address them by claiming ignorance of such precedents or denying they apply. You see very few essays comparing the Bush administration to previous administrations with a reasoned examination of the similarities and differences. There were a few: Bush and FDR, Bush and Woodrow Wilson, ... Much more common are comparisons of Bush with Hitler, which should be offensive to everyone. The one PressThink essay that sticks in my mind with historical relevance concerned the history of the White House Press and Teddy Roosevelt in the comments. "The 60 minutes story was a shameful lapse of professionalism by people who thought they might have the goods proving the president a liar. Rather was shamefully unaware of how weak parts of his story were. There were multiple mistakes, lots of denial, criminal lack of awareness, unforgivable confidence when questions were raised, and on and on." Yes; and that's what needs to be explained -- how it happens that people at the top of professional journalism could lapse from the professed standards of journalism, and persist in their lapse long after it and they were exposed. A theory of the press as partisan left-wingers explains the 60 Minutes II story, but it doesn't explain the press' readiness to believe "important members of the Administration". Contrariwise, a theory of the press as worshippers of "savviness" explains its gullibility, but not the recent rash of frauds perpetrated by journalists on their own initiative. (The 60 Minutes II story doesn't stand alone, you know.) But a theory of the press as a conscious part of America's ruling class, admiring the techniques that perpetuate its rule, detesting the radicals who wish to deny it its rightful power -- that covers all the phenomena, subsuming both partisanship and worldliness. "Bush the blueblood and son of a president, grandson of a US senator an outsider?" Where'd you get the notion that a ruling elite has to choose its members by inheritance? If you go by ideas, Bush is very much an outsider. "Brazier and Aubrey appear to refute the thesis that the inside-the-Beltway press corps has been "routed" by the Bush Administration by citing a single, discredited, story by Mapes and Rather on 60 Minutes II." No, I'm not attempting to refute that thesis. As far as the facts are concerned, I don't object to Rosen's account; I agree that the Washington press corps has been utterly ineffective in its reporting on the Bush Administration. Where I differ from Rosen is in the moral question. He thinks, if I understand him aright, that the press ought to be a guardian of the public trust, using its power to humiliate officials as a check on the government; he reproaches the Washington press corps for its failure to do so, and condemns Bush for subverting the press as an institution. It's my view that the press as an institution is not able, and never will be able, to act as Rosen wishes it would; that its real political role is to protect the irrational biases of the American elites from a fatal encounter with reality; and that the wide belief in the press as a check on official hubris is dangerous to the republic and should be removed. So I regard Bush's conduct towards the press not as deplorable, but as a well-deserved and necessary purgative. It isn't that I want Bush to govern without public oversight; I merely think the public doesn't need the press to provide the oversight, and that the press couldn't provide any even if the public so willed. Posted by: Michael Brazier at September 7, 2007 10:13 PM | Permalink Michael Brazier: If you go by ideas, Bush is very much an outsider. Jay Rosen: Bush is a radical. That appears to be a point of agreement. Michael Brazier: "its real political role is to protect the irrational biases of the American elites from a fatal encounter with reality" Could this be broadened to meet Cline's Status Quo bias? I don't think so, Tim; the "narrative bias" on that list is closer to what I had in mind -- the one that organizes events as they occur into a plot, with protagonist and antagonist roles assigned, and sticks with that plot even if events don't. There was no trace of the "status quo" bias in the reporting of Hurricane Katrina, for instance; the plot seized on then was "the system is not working at all, and it's all the President's fault!", which was the reverse of reassuring. It was also false in every particular -- but as a protection of official incompetence, it worked wonderfully. Posted by: Michael Brazier at September 8, 2007 6:58 AM | Permalink Jay Rosen, Lawrence Wilkerson, Brent Scowcroft: Bush and Cheney are radicals. Posted by: Jay Rosen at September 8, 2007 7:41 AM | Permalink Michael Brazier: OK, got it. That helps me track your "theory of the press as a conscious part of America's ruling class." Jay Rosen: Agree you're not alone in the radical camp. Don't agree that makes the Bush administration unprecedented or exceptional. For the Huffington Post version, I added a new top, reflecting on the President's surprise trip to Iraq, which produced the desired headlines about troop reductions. Here's how it starts: National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley had a good question for the White House press corps Monday, when the President--surprise!--flew to Iraq. Reporters on the plane wanted to know if they were trailing along for what was essentially a photo op. "Would you guys like us to come without you?" said Hadley. See "Would You Guys Like us to Come Without You?" (Sep. 5) Posted by: Jay Rosen at September 8, 2007 10:17 AM | Permalink Conservatives have been giving the admin hell for not making their case for the Iraq war, or the WOT in general. The pres didn't do propaganda in Iraq. He met with people on their ground--Iraqi officials--and the troops, the latter being a presidential obligation/privilege. Propaganda is showing things that are either false or inconvenient to whoever is using the term. Going to Anbar shows the big difference and is inconvenient. The press didn't have to go for this to be a big deal. The admin has photographers, too and public relations folks. All the press could have done then is refuse to talk about the thing. So, Prof. Rosen, if the pool hadn't gone, would you have suggested the media not mention this "propaganda"? It would be propaganda with or without the pool on scene. Oh, yeah. It would help if the media quit setting themselves up as targets for a name-that-party laugh. Posted by: Richard Aubrey at September 8, 2007 11:43 AM | Permalink Contra Richard,The New York Times' Michael Gordon has got Bush/Cheney/Petraeus's back on the surge propaganda front. Posted by: Mark Anderson at September 8, 2007 2:32 PM | Permalink "Whether the press did their bit in the dance or not is irrelevant." I agree. That's why my counsel would have been to let Bush go to Iraq without the press. Let the Administration's photographers and PR staff report the visit, and record what he said; then if anything significant emerges reporters can source it to whitehouse.gov. There was no need for the press to be there at all. The propaganda mission had to do with everything Bush said publicly. His private meetings with commanders and Iraqi pols are another matter. Possibly quite useful. But the presence of reporters only interferes with that. Posted by: Jay Rosen at September 8, 2007 3:42 PM | Permalink Michael: [Rosen] thinks, if I understand him aright, that the press ought to be a guardian of the public trust, using its power to humiliate officials as a check on the government; he reproaches the Washington press corps for its failure to do so, and condemns Bush for subverting the press as an institution. It's my view that the press as an institution is not able, and never will be able, to act as Rosen wishes it would; that its real political role is to protect the irrational biases of the American elites from a fatal encounter with reality; and that the wide belief in the press as a check on official hubris is dangerous to the republic and should be removed. So I regard Bush's conduct towards the press not as deplorable, but as a well-deserved and necessary purgative. It isn't that I want Bush to govern without public oversight; I merely think the public doesn't need the press to provide the oversight, and that the press couldn't provide any even if the public so willed. Interesting perspective, and not as far from my own as you may think. I agree that the Washington press, as currently organized, is not capable of acting as a check on the Bush government; and that is has not done so. It cannot live up to its code or do what it claims to do for the American public. I fault it for not recognizing this, for self-delusion, and for not even trying to come up with a response to the challenge of covering the Bush machine. I don't agree that the public doesn't need oversight from the press. It does. It needs oversight from Congress, too. From independent watchdog groups outside the government and the media. And from the government's own oversight troops, like the Department of Justice's Office of Professional Responsibility. The public needs oversight conducted by itself, too; that is probably most important. As for Bush's conduct toward the press, Michael... it is only part of a much larger disagreement he has with you. Bush believes in zero oversight of his actions-- from the public, Congress, the press, allies, party: you name it. Loyalists can listen to him explain why he's just, good, and totally in the right. And that's his vision of public dialogue in a democracy. It's friends of Bush inside the hall, listening; everyone else in the parking lot. His treatment of the press is actually a small part of that general attitude. This is rank speculation, of course, but I think the reason he evolved this policy... never apologize, never explain, loyalists only, no one really has the right to question what the decider does, though they may try... is that he actually has no confidence that he can explain himself. He feels he sucks at it. He also feels bad about sucking at it. So he tries to avoid it. And he reserves special scorn for those who would explain him. The whole idea, going back almost to Magna Carta, that power, to be just, ought to give reasons for what it does, is something Bush intuitively rejects, though I doubt that he knows that he rejects it. Reason-giving mystifies him. He has the right intentions, he has the power to decide; to him that's all there is. Posted by: Jay Rosen at September 8, 2007 4:19 PM | Permalink Prof. Rosen, Why would Bush be interested in giving reasons to an institution whose goal is to humiliate public figures? Would he think he'd be likely to get a fair shake? After all, this is the bunch who tried to throw an election in war time with forged documents. Which, from time to time, blames him for international issues whose dates are before he was elected. Which lies and lies and lies about the Iraq war. He may give reasons in speeches to the American public, but it would be foolish to depend on journalists to tell the truth about him and his reasoning. On form, it would be sheer idiocy. Posted by: Richard Aubrey at September 8, 2007 11:27 PM | Permalink Send me a card, Richard. I'd be curious to see what another planet's postmarks look like. Posted by: Jay Rosen at September 8, 2007 11:36 PM | Permalink About reason-giving and the contempt for it that Bush has, another Republican loyalist has spoken out on it. That would be Jack L. Goldsmith, hired in October 2003 to head the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department. No one has a closer view of the administration's attempts to expand executive power. He argues that Bush's contempt for explanation and deliberation weakened his cause, and is going to end up costing future presidents power. This is from Jeffrey Rosen's article in the New York Times: The heroes of Goldsmith’s book — his historical models of presidential leadership in wartime — are Presidents Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Both of them, as Arthur Schlesinger noted in his essay “War and the Constitution,” “were lawyers who, while duly respecting their profession, regarded law as secondary to political leadership.” In Goldsmith’s view, an indifference to the political process has ultimately made Bush a less effective wartime leader than his greatest predecessors. Surprisingly, Bush, who is not a lawyer, allowed far more legalistic positions in the war on terror to be adopted in his name, without bothering to try to persuade Congress and the public that his positions were correct. “I don’t know if President Bush understood how extreme some of the arguments were about executive power that some people in his administration were making,” Goldsmith told me. “It’s hard to know how he would know.” Italics mine. Also see this in Slate by Goldsmith, which is very revealing of the executive branch radicalism I spoke of earlier in this thread. Posted by: Jay Rosen at September 9, 2007 12:52 AM | Permalink Regarding Bush's visit to Anbar: There was no need for the press to be there at all. But the WH press corps couldn't allow themselves to see that they weren't needed in Anbar, for there's no important difference between the President in Anbar and the President in Washington. There are few thoughts more disquieting that the thought that your adult life has been wasted in futility. I don't agree that the public doesn't need oversight from the press. It does. It needs oversight from Congress, too. From independent watchdog groups outside the government and the media. And from the government's own oversight troops, like the Department of Justice's Office of Professional Responsibility. The public needs oversight conducted by itself, too; that is probably most important. Well, I quite agree that the public ought to oversee the government, that special interests should oversee its actions on their special issues, and that the branches of government ought to oversee each other. And we have agreed that the press does not oversee the government, and as currently constituted hasn't the ability. I think the point where I don't agree with you, then, can be stated thusly: if "the press" is conceived of as an institution or profession, then its special duty must be to perform oversight in the place of the public. That is, by existing at all it conveys to the public that the duty of overseeing the government is one the public cannot discharge itself; that must be left to the "professionals" who have been specially trained for it. Yet in fact no such special training exists. A profession of journalism, separate from the public, can exist only as an adjunct to a dominant elite, and will examine that elite only so far as the elite is willing to examine itself. In short, I trace the manifest failure of the Washington press to inform the public to, precisely, its self-concept as a corps of professionals, with a special duty to keep the public informed. It's a paradox, of course. But it refutes as unworkable the very idea of professional journalism ... Bush believes in zero oversight of his actions-- from the public, Congress, the press, allies, party: you name it. Again, it's not your facts I dispute; but I see another reading of them. You're presenting Bush as basically a fanatic, a man so certain of his convictions that he sees no need to listen to other people. What I see, however, is a man inept in the arts of rhetoric, who believes that other people will refuse to listen to him. And I rest this on the great reluctance Bush has shown to explain his actions in any venue. The true fanatic, in my experience, often avoids debates in which his convictions might be seriously challenged; but he isn't inclined to conceal his convictions from the public. Fanatics talk, or write, at great length; they seek out prospective converts. Bush doesn't do this -- he avoids public speaking, and confines himself strictly to prepared texts when he must speak to an audience. That speaks of a man with no talent for persuasion who needs all the help he can get. Posted by: Michael Brazier at September 9, 2007 5:40 AM | Permalink re: Regarding Bush's visit to Anbar: There was no need for the press to be there at all. And yet, neither the White House could not invite them nor could the press not go. This isn't because of the "palace press," but rather the institutional press. Goldsmith's points fascinate me. Over the past 3-4 decades, more of the democratic function of political persuasion has moved into the courts to be argued by lawyers and decided by judges rather than in the legislative and executive branches. This reliance on judicial supremacy, and gamble on judicial activism, has damaged the relationship between the legislature and executive in addition to shifting the focus from public persuasion to judicial persuasion. Based on recent history, every administration can expect to have every decision challenged in the courts by special interest groups. Does this diminish or increase the need for a President that is a "Great Communicator" (as Clinton and Reagan were dubbed)? Brazier says: if "the press" is conceived of as an institution or profession, then its special duty must be to perform oversight in the place of the public. There seems to be too much civics and too little journalism in this discussion. Granted, the news media like to cite their Constitutional role as established by the First Amendment to claim special status and privilege--but let us not get carried away by taking those claims literally. The true "special duty" of journalists is not to perform oversight but to deliver news. Sometimes the news may consist of an expose of government failures resulting from the the enterprising work of a news organization...but that turns out to be an exception not a rule. Often the news media's role in "oversight" consists of granting publicity to the work done by others, or framing that work in headlines to make that oversight seem dynamic not bureaucratic, or translating it into a vernacular vocabulary that is accessible to the citizenry at large. And sometimes the news media's role has no oversight function whatsoever but merely a documentary one--for example, documenting that a President traveled to a war zone to stage a photo-op to try to seize the initiative in an upcoming Congressional debate about troop levels. Posted by: Andrew Tyndall at September 9, 2007 10:29 AM | Permalink Andrew Tyndall: There seems to be too much civics and too little journalism in this discussion. Granted, the news media like to cite their Constitutional role as established by the First Amendment to claim special status and privilege--but let us not get carried away by taking those claims literally.A civics lesson: There is NO constitutional role for the media established by the First Amendment to the Constitution. None. Not documentarian, not witness, not watchdog, not overseer, not objective, not professional, not partisan, not amateur, ..., nothing. There is absolutely nothing in the Constitution to tell us what the press/media should or should not "be" and the press has been all of those and more in our country's history. There is no "special duty" except those that scholars/critics argue and the public supports. What the First Amendment to the Constitution does do is put in writing that Congress may not legislate a role for the press. Tim--point taken. I was not trying to suggest that the "special duty" of journalists to "deliver news" was Constitutionally mandated. Instead I was arguing that news delivery--rather than oversight--is the journalist's task by definition. However, it is hard to assert that the Constitution does not grant the press "special status" when its First Amendment singles it out as an institution whose freedoms may not be abridged. The other freedoms in the Bill of Rights belong to individuals. The press is the only institution cited. And that is indeed a privilege. Posted by: Andrew Tyndall at September 9, 2007 11:11 AM | Permalink Prof. Rosen: Do you take the position that CBS' lies about the TANG affair are meaningless in judging the press? Are we required to consider it a one-time thing, never happened before, never will happen afterwards? And if he's not going to get a fair shake, why should he bother? You will have to demonstrate that the president can confidently assume his views will get a fair transmission to the public. Give us some reasons for that presumption. BTW: Haditha. Time mag, informed by a stringer working for the other side. Atrocity. The DoD's insistence on throwing a few junior EM under the bus in each war in a hopeless attempt to placate the hippies ran into a crunch in the proceedings. Why? Posted by: Richard Aubrey at September 9, 2007 11:21 AM | Permalink Michael, Tim, Andrew: Thanks for one of the best flurry of posts I have seen in a PressThink thread. As I read them, I was agreeing with all of you. Michael writes: If "the press" is conceived of as an institution or profession, then its special duty must be to perform oversight in the place of the public. That is, by existing at all it conveys to the public that the duty of overseeing the government is one the public cannot discharge itself; that must be left to the "professionals" who have been specially trained for it. Yet in fact no such special training exists. I am with you on this. The idea of the press as a professional guardian of democracy, a Fourth Estate, a quasi-offical "branch" of government with a watchdog or truthtelling function, a permanent part of the balance of powers, doesn't hold anymore, if it ever did. Certainly it died under Bush, and given how thinly it is grounded in history, law and politics, we are probably better off without this illusion if we can strengthen two other, more foundational ideas that, taken together, might leave us with some measure of oversight. One foundation is Andrew's idea: News! Finding out what's going on inside the government and in the surrounding world, and telling the public. What I think he was suggesting is that this idea goes along way when you take it seriously. The other pillar comes down to free speech, as against herd thinking. We need journalists who are free thinking, open-minded, independent as a matter of character, skeptical but also willing to believe when there is evidence that belief is warranted. Basically, it's intellectual honesty and seriousness we need in journalism, the kind we expect of the best critics. But whereas in the academic world those virtues are cultivated in a peer community of scholars, in journalism the tricky part is that communication is with the public, or it ain't journalism. If we had a press that was really good at both we wouldn't need the professional fictions that have been so devastating under Bush. Where this discussion comes together with my other work--creating pro-am alternatives like NewAssignment.Net--is this passage from Editing Horizontally: James Surowiecki, who wrote a book on the subject, says that “in smart crowds, people cooperate and work together even when it’s more rational for them to let others do the work.” What professional journalism says to its audience, at least in the U.S., is you haven’t the time or inclination to hang around the halls of government or go where news is happening. It’s more rational to let us, the press, do that for you. Go out there and live your life, we’ll keep you informed. Posted by: Jay Rosen at September 9, 2007 12:25 PM | Permalink Andrew Tyndall: "... First Amendment singles [the press] out as an institution ..." I assert it doesn't [that wasn't hard]. I'll even provide a quote from First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, 435 U.S. 765,798 that is in the annotations of the link I provided earlier: I perceive two fundamental difficulties with a narrow reading of the Press Clause. First, although certainty on this point is not possible, the history of the Clause does not suggest that the authors contemplated a "special" or "institutional" privilege. See Lange, The Speech and Press Clauses, 23 UCLA L. Rev. 77, 88-99 (1975). The common 18th century understanding of freedom of the press is suggested by Andrew Bradford, a colonial American newspaperman. In defining the nature of the liberty, he did not limit it to a particular group:"But, by the Freedom of the Press, I mean a Liberty, within the Bounds of Law, for any Man to communicate to the Public, his Sentiments on the Important Points of Religion and Government; of proposing any Laws, which he apprehends may be for the Good of his Countrey, and of applying for the Repeal of such, as he Judges pernicious. . . .Indeed most pre-First Amendment commentators "who employed the term `freedom of speech' with great frequency, used it synonomously with freedom of the press." L. Levy, Legacy of Suppression: Freedom of Speech and Press in Early American History 174 (1960). I don't think the First Amendment singles out as the press as an institution, although journalists constantly contend that it does. It's a reference to printing itself and of course to the licensing and jailing of printers, which was common in 18th century Europe. Posted by: Jay Rosen at September 9, 2007 8:03 PM | Permalink Well. It's always good to catch Aubrey at 10 o'clock at night. More bracing -- and more confounding -- than a snifter of brandy. So: As I understand the argument, Time magazine and the Department of Defense conspired to create the Haditha convictions "to placate the hippies." Does this mean Haditha didn't happen ? Hard to tell. Aubrey makes no attempt to address that question. More important, though, is ... who are these hippies ? Do we have names? Phone numbers? E-mail addresses? (Me, I haven't seen a hippie since about 1976 -- and I try to keep my eyes open. ) And how did these hippies simultaneously gain command over America's premier newsmagazine and the government agency in charge of our entire military ? Curious minds want to know. Posted by: Steve Lovelady at September 9, 2007 10:34 PM | Permalink Steve. Dumb question. You already know the answer. And, no, there is no conspiracy. Merely a set of instructions (metaphorically speaking) everybody knows to follow. During the Panama invasion, the Army court-martialed a First Sergeant who had shot a prisoner who'd come up with a pistol. Clear as could be, no blame, but they tried him anyway. He was acquitted, but at least they put somebody on trial. But, just for grins and to exercise all this intellectual energy, you might want to find out how come nobody could find Norman Hsu for fifteen years and where he got all that money. If you don't, somebody might think the Clintons have rolled you guys worse than Bush did. Posted by: Richard Aubrey at September 10, 2007 12:34 AM | Permalink On admiration of Rove & savviness, a book(PDF) recommendation - Bob Altemeyer's The Authoritarians. Utterly fascinating, and he has data. and boy does it shed light on some recent coffeehouse conversations... Posted by: Anna at September 10, 2007 1:54 AM | Permalink I can see admiring Rove for his savviness, if savviness is your thing. But has anybody stopped to think that the Clintons are far, far savvier? How else could the avalanche of scandals, from the travel office to foreign money in campaigns, go down the media memory hole, if the media weren't dry-mouthed, short-of-breath, weak-in-the-knees with admiration for savviness? More to the point, the Clintons are even rottener, which, apparently, is one of the attractions to those whose courage is strictly vicarious. So where was Hsu? His Indian counterpart who got a heck of a deal from the FDIC after a hefty donation? Where do they get their money? Since a Clinton might very well become president, you can't say this is of secondary importance, compared to the capabiities of a retired WH adviser. Posted by: Richard Aubrey at September 10, 2007 8:15 AM | Permalink Steve. Almost since the beginning of the Haditha investigation, there were rumors that the NCIS had been screwing the pooch wrt exculpatory evidence. Newsmax has a full report today, based on the release of a good many documents. NCIS edited a recon tape to make the Marines look bad, and that was all they gave to the defense. Kept the exculpatory stuff away from them. That's not how discovery is supposed to work (see Nifong). So Time did their thing, the DoD did their bit, the libs were followed the script. As I said. Posted by: Richard Aubrey at September 10, 2007 10:50 AM | Permalink Why does everyone seem to believe that the press only started ignoring Bush's egregious flaws after 9-11? Like many analysts Mr. Rosen ignores the fact that the media had decided during the 2000 election that Mr. Bush was their cool-guy fave and gave him a pass while hammering Gore all for supposed flaws, no matter how trivial? (See the October Vanity Fair article by Evgenia Peretz for some good examples.) They acted like a bunch of high school kids trying to curry the favor of the popular class clown, being flattered by the idiotic nicknames he gave them and reporting that he was the kind of guy you'd like to have a beer with, while ignoring his deceptions and serious flaws. Gore, on the other hand, was the class nerd who made them feel inferior because he was smarter than they were, so they picked on everything they could find - true or not - to bring him down to their level. For example, in one debate, Bush flat-out lied about his support for the strong patient bill of rights that had been enacted while he was governor of Texas. He had, in fact vetoed the first version and refused to sign the second. It became law over his strenous opposition only because it had passed by a bi partisan veto-proof margin. After the debate, there was no discussion of this blatant falsehood but there was a lot about a minor mistake made by Gore concerning who he had accompanied on a trip to a natural disaster site. Posted by: Bernie O at September 10, 2007 2:13 PM | Permalink Richard -- I'm still trying to figure out how Hsu get thrown in with Karl Rove and Haditha. What's next -- Larry Craig ? I hate to play English composition prof, but Richard, you've got to start spending more time on your transitions. Even a simple "And speaking of atrocities ..." would help. Actually, I think the press has done a pretty good job so far on the opening chapter of the Hsu mystery, allthough clearly there is still much more to be learned. Of course, one could say the same about Rove. There is still much more to be learned. Even though Rove has had far more impact on the body politic, not to mention the past 7 years of the country's path, than a Hsu -- a small-time bagman if ever there was one -- could ever dream of. Still, let me assure you, even as we speak, battalions of reporters are sniffing Hsu's trail. It's not because they're "liberal" or "conservative." It's because the Hsu story (like the Larry Craig story) has a strong "WTF ??" aspect to it, which is every reporter's dream. Complete with, in each case, astonishing pratfalls by a law enforcement agency.
Posted by: Steve Lovelady at September 10, 2007 3:11 PM | Permalink Steve: there's nothing perplexing or mysterious about Larry Craig's story. It's sensational and scandalous, and that's why the press ran with it; but it isn't mysterious. And Norman Hsu wasn't a small-time bagman. Moreover, there are two mysteries about his operations: where he got the money that he gave clandestinely to the Clinton campaign; and why, given his known history of dodgy finances, the Clintons were willing to take money from him. The former suggests that somebody wished to corrupt a President of the USA; the latter, that a President was willing to be corrupted. Both of those are considerably more alarming, to my mind, than anything Karl Rove ever did. As for the press' record on the story, yes, they're reporting it now. The question is, why didn't the press notice the anomalies of Hsu back in the 1990s, when it might have affected Bill Clinton's administration? And are reporters looking at Clinton's campaign records for other anomalous donors? Posted by: Michael Brazier at September 10, 2007 3:55 PM | Permalink Charlie Savage on the breath-taking radicality of the Bush-Cheney presidency: The full sweep and implications of the administration’s project came into sharp focus for me. Like many reporters, I had been focused in on a close-up of one or two controversies, but had been missing the broader context. Now, the camera had zoomed way out to bring the full panorama into view. Suddenly, what the Bush administration had been doing across a huge range of issues made much more sense – not just the 9/11-related controversies, but Cheney’s fight to keep his energy task force papers a secret, the attacks on open-government laws such as FOIA and the Presidential Records Act, the use of executive orders instead of legislation to push the faith-based initiative, the decision to pull out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty without consulting the Senate, the choices for Supreme Court nominations, unprecedented efforts to impose greater White House control over Justice Department lawyers and other executive branch bureaucrats, and many other things. These disparate controversies were all connected. The administration, from its very beginning, had set out to set precedents and take actions that would permanently expand presidential power for the long-term, even when such tactics brought them extra short-term difficulties. A quiet but sweeping constitutional revolution was well underway. Posted by: Mark Anderson at September 10, 2007 4:00 PM | Permalink Steve, I'm glad journos are looking into Hsu. I'd be interested in journos looking into why no journos were looking into Hsu for the preceding fifteen years. "smalltime" refers to total money? But that obscures the question of where he got it. Initial reports of his visible affairs indicate that's not where he got it. The investigation of Hsu may also obscure another big-time (money) small time bag man with no visible means of support and a number of courts looking for him. He was originally from India and, while here, got a hell of a break from the FDIC after a healthy campaign donation. The reason I bring up the Clinton issues is to demonstrate that Bush isn't the first, nor even the most effective, press roller. Don't feel bad. Anybody can roll you guys. I brought up Haditha because Prof. Rosen seemed to think it was an issue from another planet--when I mentioned the MSM lying about Iraq and, in that case, why Bush should expect any better treatment. I trust this answers your questions. Posted by: Richard Aubrey at September 10, 2007 4:05 PM | Permalink > Charlie Savage on the breath-taking radicality of the Bush-Cheney presidency: Thank you Mark. "I do not think that presidential power is a partisan issue. Although we are having this discussion in the context of a Republican administration, we have had Democratic presidents in the past and we will have them again in the future. These future Democratic presidents will be able to invoke the same novel powers that the Bush administration has pioneered in order to unilaterally impose their own agendas. Thus, preserving the Founders’ system of checks and balances is in the long-term interest of all Americans, regardless of their party affiliation or policy preferences." I wish all could grasp this...
Posted by: Anna at September 10, 2007 4:18 PM | Permalink
It says it all. Posted by: Steve Lovelady at September 10, 2007 4:34 PM | Permalink Michael -- Oh, come on. The idea that a campaign contribitor (even on Hsu's two-bit level) expected to "corrupt a President of the USA" is ludicrous. Maybe said contributor (like all the rest of us who contribute to any election campaign) just hoped the guy would be elected. p.s. Permit me to exclude Halliburton & its dizzying array of various and sundry subsidiaries from the above statement. Now we're talking about real money. Posted by: Steve Lovelady at September 10, 2007 4:48 PM | Permalink Steve Lovelady is attempting to dismiss the importance of a very strange case. Must mean he knows there's some really, really serious stuff going on. C'mon, Steve. Give us a hint. Just a taste, until the whole thing comes out. For your friends. Posted by: Richard Aubrey at September 10, 2007 8:25 PM | Permalink Richard -- Oh, it's strange, alright. That's why, as I said above, reporters will love it. But serious ? If on a scale of 1 to 10 in seriousness -- with $9 billion in US cash shipped to Iraq disappearing (see current issue, Vanity Fair) ranking a 10 -- Norman Hsu barely breaks 1.5. You heard it here first -- friend. Posted by: Steve Lovelady at September 10, 2007 8:36 PM | Permalink Steve, there's an important moral difference between the usual campaign contributions and Hsu's donations. Hsu concealed his gifts -- both their existence and their origin. If someone gives a politician money, in such fashion that both the donor and the politician can deny the money was given, the obvious explanations are that the money is dirty, or that the donor expects the politician to return the favor, in an equally clandestine fashion. Contributors who only mean to endorse a politician on general principles contribute openly. Also, until we know where Hsu got the money from ... can you be sure he was the only one? Or that all the others like him are gone? Posted by: Michael Brazier at September 10, 2007 8:52 PM | Permalink Michael Brazier. Steve knows this. He knows it exactly. It's why he's attempting to minimize it. Posted by: Richard Aubrey at September 10, 2007 8:56 PM | Permalink Finally, someone put the pieces together for the case I was callling Bush exceptionalism: Charlie Savage. As with Thomas Ricks and Fiasco, Savage in book form corrects for scattered, incident-by-incident news coverage that taken as a (fractured) whole gave a misleading impression. Like many reporters, I had been focused in on a close-up of one or two controversies, but had been missing the broader context. Now, the camera had zoomed way out to bring the full panorama into view. Outsider Savage focuses on the same forces that insider Goldsmith does: The Cheney project, one calls it. The terror presidency, says the other. Both describe a ruthless attempt at expanding executive power that never sought a mandate for that agenda and thus required secrecy, subterfuge and the manufacture of enemies. Posted by: Jay Rosen at September 10, 2007 9:18 PM | Permalink Of course in your culture war theater Charles Savage manufactures his own enemy as does the Democratic Party, Bush. Although I am defending Bush to a point, Bush like most politicians is dirty. The question is how dirty. The press has little interest in fixing this as illustrated by Steve Lovelady’s minimization of the Hsu contributions. It does service to no one, which gets back to why the press is broken. Speaking Truth to Power, what happens to the little “t” truth in this process. You illustrate this yourself when you say “pros with a social conscience.” Why a social conscience, why not just a conscience? I’d like my press with just a plain conscience please. It seems to me a social conscience leads to choosing between the lesser of two evils. Which leads to overlooking or minimizing the sins of one party while, trumpeting the sins of another. Trading honesty for the “greater good” which, of course, is what you believe in. Eventually, a social conscience turns into not much of a conscience at all. This may explain why a press with a social conscience can admire the unethical savviness of a Rove, or dare I say Carville. While someone with just a plain conscience might be unimpressed with them both. Finally, I know it is nice to have a hobgoblin, but I really think Bush is a mediocre man caught in extraordinary times. It is not Bush the press was unprepared, for it was 9/11. There was no big “T” truth to speak to power only the little “t” truth, bad men came here to kill us. Narratives broke down, so did the press. Katrina allowed the press to start functioning again, because all the old narratives of “pros with a social conscience” could work again. And maybe instead of the coverage of the press being too narrow on the war, the truth of the whole story from Iraq might interfere with speaking Truth to Bush’s power. Perhaps it is good social conscience, but it is bad professionalism. Posted by: abad man at September 10, 2007 11:37 PM | Permalink Why a social conscience, why not just a conscience? I’d like my press with just a plain conscience please. Good point. I could have and probably should have written pros with a conscience. What makes you think I disgree with... "Bush is a mediocre man caught in extraordinary times?" Mediocre men becomes tools and enablers for those more cunning. Mediocre men need bubbles. Mediocre men are too weak to stand much questioning. Mediocre men grab for power and fail to grasp what it is. If you don't think mediocre men can be dangerous you never absorbed the lesson of Eichmann. Posted by: Jay Rosen at September 11, 2007 12:26 AM | Permalink Prof. Rosen, There have been men of 'great intellect' and therefore great potential that accomplished little of value--although they undoubtedly looked down upon those that had not their pedigree. There have been men that had perhaps less intellectual ability and yet have had profound impact. There have been men thought little of by their peers that have turned out to be men of incredible influence through the ages. There have been men that have been the toast of the elite that don't even get a footnote in a book. What is your standard of mediocre? And what if your standard differs from history's standard? If mediocre men are able to wield such influence--what does that say of you or anyone else that labels a man mediocre? I don't see how the use of the term mediocre in anyway helps any dialogue or analysis of a person, a time, a movement. It seems rather a way to dismiss someone. Posted by: swats at September 11, 2007 3:55 PM | Permalink Bush and Eichmann. Wow. Must be a journalist about. Posted by: Richard Aubrey at September 11, 2007 11:37 PM | Permalink There is a problem. Either they are professional, experienced journalists or they are not. If they are, the thinking goes, they not only wouldn't have done the TANG papers, they couldn't possibly have been fooled. Rich. That's a better expression of my view that the excuse, upon getting caught at something, "we're not crooks, we're stupid." is, cumulatively poison. Maybe the fib is they're professional journalists? No. They get paid to do this stuff and they give each other awards at dinners and stuff. Boy. This is a tough one. Posted by: Richard Aubrey at September 12, 2007 8:17 AM | Permalink Yow. I thought Rosen's original posting was hysterical. But the Bush~Eichmann analogy takes the cake! And to think that just a few short weeks ago, it was Rosen calling someone else an "embarrassment to [his] profession." I call Godwin. Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at September 12, 2007 5:17 PM | Permalink I drew no analogy between Bush and Eichmann. That's just sloppy and inattentive--or alternatively, silly and slack jawed--on your part. I said mediocre people can do great damage and that was the lesson of Eichmann. New post: The Master Narrative that Went Missing During the Bush Years Turns Up in Charlie Savage's Book. This thread is closed. Thanks to all participants. Posted by: Jay Rosen at September 13, 2007 10:57 PM | Permalink |
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