When on May 26 the editors of the New York Times
published a mea culpa for the paper's one-sided
reporting on weapons of mass destruction and the Iraq
war, they admitted to "a number of instances of coverage
that was not as rigorous as it should have been". They
also commented that they had since come to "wish we had
been more aggressive in re-examining claims" made by the
administration of US President George W Bush.
But we are still left to wonder why the Times,
like many other major media in this country, was so
lacking in skepticism toward administration rationales
for war. How could such a poorly thought-through policy,
based on spurious exile intelligence sources, have been
so blithely accepted, even embraced, by so many members
of the media? In short, what happened to the press's
vaunted role, so carefully spelled out by the Founding
Fathers of the United States, as a skeptical "watchdog"
over government?
There's nothing like seeing a
well-oiled machine clank to a halt to help you spot
problems. Now that the Bush administration is in full
defensive mode and angry leakers in the Pentagon, the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and elsewhere in the
Washington bureaucracy are slipping documents, secrets,
and charges to reporters, our press looks more
recognizably journalistic. But that shouldn't stop us
from asking how an "independent" press in a "free"
country could have been so paralyzed for so long. It not
only failed to investigate administration rationales for
war seriously, but little took into account the myriad
voices in the online, alternative, and world press that
sought to do so.
It was certainly no secret that
a number of America's Western allies (and other
countries), administrators of various non-governmental
organizations, and such figures as Mohamed ElBaradei,
head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and Hans
Blix, head of the United Nations' Monitoring,
Verification and Inspections Commission, had quite
different prewar views of the "Iraqi threat".
Few in the US media, it seemed, remembered I F
Stone's hortatory admonition, "If you want to know about
governments, all you have to know is two words:
Governments lie." Dissenting voices in the mainstream
were largely buried on back pages, ignored on op-ed
pages, or confined to the margins of the media, and so
denied the kinds of "respectability" that a major medium
can confer.
As reporting on the lead-up to war,
the war itself, and its aftermath vividly demonstrated,
the US is now divided into a two-tiered media structure.
The lower tier - niche publications, alternative media
and Internet sites - hosts the broadest spectrum of
viewpoints. Until the war effort began to unravel this
spring, the upper tier - a relatively small number of
major broadcast outlets, newspapers and magazines - had
a far more limited bandwidth of critical views,
regularly deferring to the Bush administration's vision
of the world. Contrarian views below rarely bled upward.
As Michael Massing pointed out recently in the
New York Review of Books, Bush administration
insinuations that critics were unpatriotic - then White
House press secretary Ari Fleischer infamously warned
reporters as war approached, "People had better watch
what they say" - had an undeniably chilling effect on
the media. But other forms of pressure also effectively
inhibited the press. The president held few press
conferences and rarely submitted to truly open
exchanges. Secretive and disciplined to begin with, the
administration adeptly used the threat of denied access
as a way to intimidate reporters who showed evidence of
independence. For reporters, this meant no one-on-one
interviews, special tips, or leaks being passed over in
press conference question-and-answer periods, and
exclusion from select events as well as important trips.
After the war began, for instance, Jim
Wilkinson, a 32-year-old Texan who ran Centcom's
coalition media center in Qatar, was, according to
Massing, known to rebuke reporters whose copy was deemed
insufficiently "supportive of the war", and "darkly
warned one correspondent that he was on a 'list' along
with two other reporters at his paper". In the
play-along world of the Bush administration, critical
reporting was a quick ticket to exile.
A
media world of faith-based truth The impulse to
control the press hardly originated with George W Bush,
but his administration has been less inclined than any
in memory to echo Thomas Jefferson's famous declaration,
"The basis of our government being the opinion of the
people, the very first object should be to keep that
right; and were it left to me to decide whether we
should have a government without newspapers or
newspapers without government, I should not hesitate a
moment to prefer the latter."
The Bush
administration had little esteem for the watchdog role
of the press, in part because its own quest for "truth"
has been based on something other than empiricism. In
fact, it enthroned a new criterion for veracity,
"faith-based" truth, sometimes corroborated by
"faith-based" intelligence. For officials of this
administration (and not just the religious ones,
either), truth seemed to descend from on high, a kind of
divine revelation begging no further earthly scrutiny.
For the president this was evidently literally the case.
The Israeli paper Ha'aretz reported him saying to
Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian prime minister of the
moment, "God told me to strike al-Qaeda and I struck,
and then he instructed me to strike Saddam [Hussein],
which I did."
It is hardly surprising, then,
that such a president would eschew newspapers in favor
of reports from other more "objective sources", namely
his staff. He has spoken often of trusting "visceral
reactions" and acting on "gut feelings". For him as for
much of the rest of his administration, decision-making
has tended to proceed not from evidence to conclusion,
but from conclusion to evidence. Reading, facts,
history, logic and the complex interaction among the
electorate, the media, and the government have all been
relegated to subsidiary roles in what might be called
"fundamentalist" policy formation.
Just as the
free exchange of information plays little role in the
relationship between a fundamentalist believer and his
or her god, so it has played a distinctly diminished
role in America's recent parallel world of divine
political revelation. After all, if you already know the
answer to a question, of what use are the media, except
to broadcast that answer? The task at hand, then, is
never to listen but to proselytize the political gospel
among non-believers, thereby transforming a
once-interactive process between citizen and leader into
evangelism.
Although in the Bush political
universe, freedom has been endlessly extolled in
principle, it has had little utility in practice. What
possible role could a free press play when revelation
trumps fact and conclusions are preordained? A probing
press is logically viewed as a spoiler under such
conditions, stepping between the administration and
those whose only true salvation lies in becoming part of
a nation of true believers. Since there was little need,
and less respect, for an opposition (loyal or
otherwise), the information feedback loops in which the
press should have played a crucial role in a functioning
democracy ceased operating. The media synapses that
normally transmit warnings from citizen to government
froze shut.
Television networks continued to
broadcast and papers continued to publish, but,
dismissed and ignored, they became irrelevant, except
possibly for their entertainment value. As the press has
withered, the government, already existing in a
self-referential and self-deceptive universe, was
deprived of the ability to learn of danger from its own
policies and thus make course corrections.
A
universe in which news won't matter Karl Rove,
the president's chief political adviser, bluntly
declared to New Yorker writer Ken Auletta that members
of the press "don't represent the public any more than
other people do. I don't believe you have a
check-and-balance function." Auletta concluded that, in
the eyes of the Bush administration, the press corps had
become little more than another special-interest
lobbying group. Indeed, the territory the traditional
media once occupied has increasingly been deluged by
administration lobbying, publicity, and advertising -
cleverly staged "photo-ops", carefully produced
propaganda rallies, pre-planned "events", tidal waves of
campaign ads, and the like. Afraid of losing further
"influence", access, and the lucrative ad revenues that
come from such political image-making, major media have
found it in their financial interest to yield quietly.
What does this downgrading of the media's role
say about how the US government views its citizens, the
putative sovereigns of the country? It suggests that "we
the people" are seen not as political constituencies
conferring legitimacy on our rulers, but as consumers to
be sold policy the way advertisers sell products. In the
storm of selling, spin, bullying and "discipline" that
has been the Bush signature for years, traditional news
outlets found themselves increasingly drowned out,
ghettoized and cowed. Attacked as "liberal" and
"elitist", disesteemed as "troublemakers" and "bashers"
(even when making all too little trouble), they were
relegated to the sidelines, increasingly uncertain and
timid about their shrinking place in the political
process.
Add in a further dynamic (which
intellectuals from Marxist-Leninist societies would
instantly recognize): Groups denied legitimacy and
disdained by the state tend to internalize their
exclusion as a form of culpability, and often feel an
abject, autonomic urge to seek reinstatement at almost
any price. Little wonder, then, that "the traditional
press" has had a difficult time mustering anything like
a convincing counter-narrative as the administration
herded a terrified and all-too-trusting nation to war.
Not only did a mutant form of skepticism-free
news succeed - at least for a time - in leaving large
segments of the populace uninformed, but it corrupted
the ability of high officials to function. All too often
they simply found themselves looking into a fun-house
mirror of their own making and imagined that they were
viewing reality. As even the conservative National
Review noted, the Bush administration has "a dismaying
capacity to believe its own public relations".
In this world of mutant "news", information
loops have become one-way highways; and a national
security adviser, cabinet secretary, or attorney
general, a well-managed and programmed polemicist
charged to "stay on message", the better to justify
whatever the government has already done, or is about to
do. Because these latter-day campaigns to "dominate the
media environment", as the Pentagon likes to say, employ
all the sophistication and technology developed by
communications experts since Edward Bernays, nephew of
Sigmund Freud, first wed an understanding of psychology
to the marketing of merchandise, they are far more
seductive than older-style news. Indeed, on Fox News, we
can see the ultimate marriage of news and public
relations in a fountainhead of artful propaganda so well
packaged that most people can't tell it from the real
thing.
For three-plus years we have been
governed by people who don't view news, in the
traditional sense, as playing any constructive role in
our system of governance. At the moment, they are
momentarily in retreat, driven back from the front lines
of faith-based truth by their own faith-based blunders.
But make no mistake, their frightening experiment will
continue if Americans allow it. Complete success would
mean not just that the press had surrendered its
essential watchdog role, but - a far darker thought -
that, even were it to refuse to do so, it might be
shunted off to a place where it would not matter.
As the war in Iraq descended into a desert
quagmire, the press belatedly appeared to awaken and
adopt a more skeptical stance toward an already
crumbling set of Bush administration policies. But if a
bloody, expensive, catastrophic episode like the war in
Iraq is necessary to remind us of the important role
that the press plays in US democracy, something is
gravely amiss in the way America's political system has
come to function.
Orville Schell is
dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the
University of California, Berkeley. This piece is
adapted from the preface to a collection of New York
Review of Books articles on the media's coverage of the
war in Iraq by Michael Massing. It will be published
soon as a short book, Now They Tell Us (The New
York Review of Books, 2004).
(Copyright 2004
Orville Schell. This article appeared on July 14 on TomDispatch.com and is reposted
here by permission.)
