Introduction: Afraid of the Facts
It must have been an awkward encounter when Bob Woodward sat down for
two hours at his Washington, D.C., attorney’s M Street office on
November 14, 2005, to answer questions, under oath, posed by special
prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. Woodward, of Watergate and Washington Post
fame, was the most famous reporter of his generation, and Fitzpatrick,
by the fall of 2005, was the most talked-about investigator in America.
Appointed to uncover who inside the Bush administration had leaked the
identity of Valerie Plame, a CIA operative married to a prominent war
critic, Fitzgerald’s media-centric investigation had already put one New York Times
reporter, Judith Miller, behind bars. His probe had also issued
subpoenas to half a dozen influential Beltway reporters as well as most
members of Bush’s inner circle. Fitzgerald’s pursuit had become the
most fevered Beltway whodunit of the Bush presidency.
The sit-down between Woodward and Fitzgerald must have been awkward
for a variety of reasons. Awkward because Woodward had made a handsome
living starring in the role as the capitol’s velvet-gloved inquisitor
of people in power. For decades the soft-spoken Woodward had asked the
questions. Now he was told to answer them. Awkward because Woodward,
through his various television appearances during the previous months,
had made it quite clear that he thought little of Fitzgerald’s
investigation, that it was “disgraceful,” that Fitzgerald was a
“junkyard prosecutor,” and that the Plame leak had caused the CIA no
harm. And awkward also because just weeks after Fitzgerald issued
indictments in the case, targeting Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief
of staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby for obstructing justice and lying to
Fitzgerald’s grand jury, a source of Woodward’s came forward and told
Fitzgerald that he’d actually told the star reporter about Plame’s
identity long before Libby started chatting up reporters in 2003. In
other words, Woodward had been sitting on the scoop for more than two
years. Woodward insisted the information he had received about Plame
was insignificant; not newsworthy. But if his scoop had been revealed
months earlier — let alone years earlier — it would have created
enormous political and legal problems for the Bush White House. That
Woodward, who in 1972 famously kept digging into a story of White House
corruption while much of the mainstream media waved off Watergate as a
second-rate burglary, was now serving as the media elite’s unofficial
ambassador — trying to wave off the Fitzgerald investigation and
trying to keep crucial information under wraps — only hinted at the
larger ironies in play.
It was ironic that a federal prosecutor was quizzing a journalist,
trying to pry out of him sensitive information that was damaging to the
Bush White House and information the investigate reporter had refused
to share with the public, let alone his editors. The strange truth was
that, at least in regards to the Plame investigation, the special
prosecutor had supplanted the timid D.C. press corps and become the
fact finder of record. It was Fitzgerald and his team of G-men — not
journalists — who were running down leads, asking tough questions and,
in the end, helping inform the American people about possible criminal
activity inside the White House. For two years, the press had shown
little interest in that touchy task and if it hadn’t been for
Fitzgerald’s work, the Plame story would have quietly faded away like
so many other disturbing suggestions of Bush administration misdeeds.
(Lots of frustrated news consumers must have been wondering where was
the special prosecutor for Enron, Halliburton, and prewar
intelligence?) As conservative blogger Glenn Reynolds noted in the wake
of Woodward’s embarrassing revelation about his nonaction, “This is
Watergate in reverse. The press is engaged in the cover-up here. If
everybody in the press simply published everything they knew about
this, we would have gotten to the bottom of this in a week instead of
dragging it out for two or three years.”
Woodward’s decision to sit on the Plame scoop seemed to confirm that
Beltway access had trumped news reporting. (At the time, Woodward was
hard at work on his third Bush book, which required continued
entrée to administration sources.) But the puzzling inaction,
which could have extended indefinitely had Woodward’s source not
contacted Fitzgerald himself, highlighted a much more pervasive
problem: how the mainstream news media completely lost their bearings
during the Bush years and abdicated their Fourth Estate responsibility
to report without fear or favor and to ask uncomfortable questions to
people in power. And how, most dramatically, the press came to fear the
facts and the consequences of reporting them. Morphing into a status
quo-loving group, the mainstream media became trapped in a
dysfunctional hate/love relationship; the Republican White House hated
the press, but the press loved the White House. Or at least feared it.
Yes, there were exceptions, and some within the mainstream media during
the Bush years produced shining examples of industrious reporting and
refused to adopt the telltale timidity. Many of those examples are
cited in this book. But taken as a whole, the mainstream media’s
political reporting during Bush’s first five years in office was
infected with unfortunate nervousness. The mainstream media filter
favored Bush. (For the sake of brevity, mainstream media will hereafter
be referred to as MSM.)
Abandoning their traditional role of public watchdog, the MSM
for years meekly adopted a gentlemanly tone more reminiscent of the
Eisenhower era than what was to be expected at the dawn of the
twenty-first century when the press’s investigate zeal, displayed
during the Clinton era, appeared unmatched. The forces behind the news
media’s dramatic mood swing, which conveniently coincided with Bush’s
first presidential run, were many. Key factors included the
consolidated media landscape in which owners were increasingly –
almost exclusively — multinational corporations; the same corporations
anxious to win approval from the Republican-controlled federal
government to allow for even further ownership consolidation. The press
timidity was also fueled by the Republicans’ tight grip on Congress and
the White House, mixed with the GOP’s love of hardball, and the MSM’s
natural tendency to revere Beltway power. Not to mention the
deep-pocketed Republican media noise machine, created decades ago in an
effort to denounce and distract the MSM. The timidity was also
driven by Beltway careerism; by media insiders who understood that
despite the cliché about the liberal media, advancement to
senior positions was actually made doubly difficult for anyone with a
reputation for being too far left, or too caustic toward Republicans.
On the flip side, that same Beltway career path rewarded journalists
who showed a willingness to be openly contemptuous of Democrats. And
there are many eager to do so.
Part of that seemed to be visceral. News gathering is not supposed
to be a popularity contest, but it was obvious journalists simply don’t
like or respect prominent Democrats such as Al Gore, John Kerry, Howard
Dean, and Nancy Pelosi, and the coverage reflected that. And while the MSM
might have respected President Bill Clinton’s legendary political
skills, much of the D.C. press flashed an odd, personal contempt for
him, even before the Monica Lewinsky scandal came to light. The
stunning stick-to-itiveness the press displayed in flogging the phony
Whitewater real estate scandal, for example, illustrated a deep desire
among journalists to try to find wrongdoing — real or imagined –
inside the White House. It was a desire that evaporated upon Bush’s
arrival in Washington, D.C.
And even when the press periodically awoke from its slumber to cover
one of the Bush administration’s high-profile blunders, reporters
inevitably retreated back into their shell, nervous that their
questions to the White House had been too rude. A perfect example came
in February 2006 when, in one of the most absurd events in recent White
House history, Cheney shot a man during a hunting accident and then
failed to inform the public or the press for nearly twenty-four hours.
Even White House aides privately conceded Cheney and his office had
completely mismanaged the situation. The White House’s uncommunicative
spokesman Scott McClellan came under days’ worth of attacks from
reporters who were trying to get to the bottom of the strange,
inconsistent, and secretive tale. By midweek, Bush loyalists in the
conservative press, like Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly, right-wing
syndicated columnist Robert Novak, and press-hating blogger Michelle
Malkin, began their predictable attacks on the MSM,
insisting journalists were blowing the story out of proportion and
unfairly attacking the White House. Instead of dismissing those barbs
as obvious attempts at damage control, journalists by week’s end
gathered on CNN’s Reliable Source to fret about how the news
media had been “whining” about the Cheney story, and guilty of
“overkill.” It was the type of nervous hand wringing that rarely took
place within the Beltway press corps during the 1990s.
Fearful of being tagged with the liberal Scarlet L by an army of
conservative press activists who, having codified their institutional
rage against the MSM,
stood determined to strip the press of its long-held influence, Beltway
journalists throttled way back, and made a mockery out of the
right-wing chestnut about the MSM pushing a progressive agenda.
And in November 2005, Bob Woodward, the former star sleuth, came to
symbolize the press’s stunning U-turn from attack dog to lapdog.
The purpose of “outing” Valerie Plame was to undermine the
operative’s husband, Joseph Wilson, a former U.S. diplomat whose public
critique of Bush’s war rationale had struck a nerve inside the White
House. It is a federal crime to intentionally reveal the identity of an
undercover intelligence agent. Beyond that, Wilson had been the U.S.
ambassador to Iraq under the first Bush presidency, and during the
first Gulf War. His wife was a CIA analyst working on weapons of mass
destruction. Both, in other words, had devoted their adult lives — at
no small risk — to their country’s safety. In September 2003 the
Washington Post reported there had been a concerted effort by White
House officials to spread the word to reporters that Wilson’s wife
worked at the CIA. Twenty-five months later Libby was indicted, not for
blowing her cover but for obstructing justice and lying to federal
investigators. Woodward, who enjoys access to sources at the very
highest levels of the administration, received his tip about Plame in
mid-June, 2003.
According to Woodward’s account, he only sprang into action — his
“aggressive reporting mode” — after Fitzgerald held his October 2005
press conference announcing the indictments of Libby. Fitzgerald
mentioned Libby was the first known government official to pass along
to reporters information about Wilson’s CIA wife. That’s when Woodward
said “whoa” — as he later put it — and decided he had to act because
he realized Libby was not the first official to leak the Plame info;
Woodward’s source was. Woodward contacted the source who decided to
tell all to the prosecutor. The prosecutor then called Woodward in to
testify. That it took Woodward more than two years to get into his
“aggressive reporting mode” was puzzling. The famed reporter had
countless opportunities to become engaged in the story:
- July 2003, when Wilson published an op-ed in the New York Times questioning Bush’s State of the Union Address claim that Iraq had sought to purchase uranium from Niger.
- Later that month when conservative columnist Robert Novak outed Wilson’s wife in his own newspaper column.
- September 2003, when the Post
broke the story about the criminal probe, or when White House spokesman
Scott McClellan told reporters categorically, and falsely, that nobody
from the White House was involved in the leak.
- December
2003, when Attorney General John Ashcroft unexpectedly recused himself
from the case and appointed Fitzgerald as special prosecutor.
- June 2004, when Bush met with a private attorney who advised the president on the investigation.
- February 2005, when a federal appeals court in Washington ruled the Times’s Judith Miller and Time magazine’s Matthew Cooper had to cooperate with Fitzgerald’s grand jury investigation.
- June 2005, when the United States Supreme Court refused to hear Miller’s and Cooper’s appeal.
- July
2005, when Miller began to serve her contempt sentence in jail or when
Cooper revealed Karl Rove first told him about Wilson’s wife working at
the CIA.
At any point along the way if Woodward had come forward with his
information about the Plame leak it would have been damaging for the
White House. And Woodward’s bombshell would have been especially
devastating for Bush had it come in the summer of 2005, just as it was
becoming clear the White House had lied about its involvement in the
leak, or had it come right before Fitzgerald’s indictment was announced
in October, when public attention was at its highest level. Instead,
Woodward remained mum about the facts while publicly mocking
Fitzgerald’s investigation. It seemed as though Woodward, like the Bush
White House, was hoping the Fitzgerald cloud would simply go away.
When finally forced to discuss his leak, Woodward, like lots of
politicians, was cagey with his explanation, which evolved over time.
For instance, Woodward at first said he didn’t come forward with the
vital information because he feared being subpoenaed by Fitzgerald. But
Woodward received his tip in June 2003 and Fitzgerald wasn’t assigned
the case until December of that year, and his first subpoenas were not
issued until May 2004, so there was no reason for Woodward to be
concerned about subpoenas.
When Woodward finally met with Fitzgerald, he did so because he
received a waiver from his source which allowed Woodward to lift the
confidentiality agreement that existed when their off-the-record
conversation took place in 2003. The source gave Woodward permission to
reveal his identity to Fitzgerald and to Woodward’s editor at the Washington Post, but not to the Post’s readers, which seemed too cute by half. Months earlier when Time
magazine’s Cooper received a waiver from his source — Karl Rove — and
cooperated with Fitzgerald, Cooper immediately wrote about his
testimony and informed the public who the source was. When the Times’s
Miller received a waiver from her source — Libby — she, albeit
reluctantly, wrote about her testimony and informed the public who her
source was. Woodward though, refused to talk publicly about the details
of his testimony and refused to reveal the identity of his source, who
appeared to be part of a widespread administration effort to discredit
a war critic.
Meanwhile, Woodward claimed he tried twice, once in 2004 and once in
2005, to get his source to lift his confidentiality restriction so
Woodward could “put something in the newspaper or a book.” The source,
prior to November 2005, refused. But if Woodward thought the Plame tip
was a “casual offhand remark,” as he stressed it was, why did he bother
going back not once but twice in an effort to break the confidentiality
bond? And if Woodward was simply going to use the source’s information
for his book, he wouldn’t have needed to ask his source to waive
confidentiality because, as nearly every reviewer has noted, the bulk
of Woodward’s books are based on background, or off-the-record,
conversations. The only reason Woodward would have approached his
source in 2004 and 2005 asking that their confidentiality pact be
lifted was because Woodward wanted to report the leak in the Washington Post,
which meant Woodward recognized it was news. So why, when he was
finally forced to go public with his leak information, did he pretend
it was not news?
Woodward claimed he told Walter Pincus, a Post colleague,
about the Plame tip right when it occurred in June 2003. But Pincus
says Woodward did no such thing. Besides, if Woodward felt comfortable
telling Pincus, why didn’t Woodward tell the paper’s editor? And if
Woodward was concerned that telling people about the leak would lead to
a subpoena, than why did he supposedly share the information with his
colleague?
As part of his testimony, Woodward relayed to Fitzgerald that he met
with another Bush official on June 27, 2003, precisely at “5:10 P.M.”
and that the reporter produced four typed pages of notes from the
meeting. (Woodward is famous for his meticulous note-taking.) Yet when
it came to recalling his meeting with his CIA leak source, Woodward, at
least publicly, went fuzzy, explaining that the conversation took place
sometime in “mid-June.”
Asked by CNN’s Larry King whether his source had mentioned whether
Plame worked undercover at the CIA (if the source had, that could have
meant legal troubles for the source), Woodward insisted the source had
not, and Woodward even recalled the exact language the source used to
describe Plame’s job; a WMD analyst, not necessarily undercover.
Woodward’s total recall for the language used simply highlighted the
oddity of his inability to even recall the date when the conversation
took place. And again, if the leaked information was given to Woodward
in a casual, offhanded manner, why, two and a half years later, was
Woodward able to recall parts of the discussion verbatim (i.e., that
Plame was a WMD analyst) in a way that was pleasing for the White
House?
Woodward suggested — falsely — that the Plame controversy was
really about the use of anonymous sources and noted his most famous
Watergate source, Deep Throat, had also been anonymous. The key
difference, of course, was Woodward used the information provided to
him by Deep Throat, but sat on the information provided to him by his
secret Bush administration source.
Woodward’s wandering explanations, most of which were aired during
the interview with King on CNN, represented a kaleidoscope of half
answers and misinformation.
(Following Woodward’s head-scratching appearance, one blogger
quipped, “This is the guy who brought down Nixon?”) Toward the end of
the Larry King Live
interview, Woodward assured viewers he was suddenly in hot pursuit of
the story he’d ignored for twenty-nine months: “We’ll keep chipping at
it and running at it. And people will write things, and there will be
controversy. And welcome to American journalism.”
If that’s the state of American journalism, then there is something
seriously wrong. The press enjoys extraordinary freedom within the
United States, and with that freedom comes the serious responsibility
of informing the citizens, of providing unvarnished reporting to the
day’s events. And perhaps in no area is that duty more important than
in the political arena, where the press is supposed to act as a neutral
observer, helping Americans make informed decisions about the day’s
most pressing matters, whether it’s to support a war or support
reelection. A democracy literally cannot function without a fair,
robust press corps. During the Bush years, though, the press too often
failed to provide its most important service.
The MSM itself is back on its heels, grappling with a
changing media landscape where more and more news organizations are
owned by fewer entities (which narrows career choices for journalists),
while their collective clout is usurped by new online players. The
newspaper industry, losing millions of readers each year, is
contracting at an unprecedented rate, with deep cutbacks hitting
virtually every major newsroom in the country. Meanwhile, television
news teams are under intense pressure to turn a profit, which has
driven some of the decision-making process into the ground. That’s
particularly true of the twenty-four-hour cable news channels, where
pointless high-speed car chases are occasionally broadcast live under
the guise of “breaking news.” Widespread economic uncertainty gripping
the news business means authentic job security has become scarce, which
in turn feeds an urge to follow the pack. All of that has added to the
Beltway media’s tentativeness, on display since 2000.
Yet to hear Bush’s former flak Ari Fleischer tell it, the durable
D.C. press corps is “one of the toughest, sharpest, most skeptical
groups anyone will encounter.” Fleischer insists newsrooms feed off
conflict: “Conflict is juicy, conflict sells, the public is interested
in conflict, and the White House press corps respond by providing it.”
There was a time the D.C. press corps mostly lived up to the hype –
skeptical scribes at the top of their game. But in covering the Bush
White House, too many journalists walked away from their traditional
role as referee, freeing the Bush administration up to tackle all sorts
of extraordinary press initiatives, like producing phony, look-alike
newscasts to run on local television stations, paying pundits to hype
White House initiatives, severely restricting the government’s public
flow of information, sponsoring a partisan crusade against public
television, prosecuting journalists, and giving special White House
press privileges to a former GOP male escort who was waved into the
Bush White House — minus the FBI background check — while
volunteering for a right-wing propaganda website. All of it was
designed to undercut the Fourth Estate. But who could blame the White
House for adopting such a radical media agenda? In five-plus years the
press failed again and again to assert itself and hold the
administration accountable.
The MSM’s unique brand of journalism, unveiled just for
Bush, represented precisely the kind of clubby, get-along reporting
that would have been roundly mocked by journalists themselves just a
few years earlier. During the Clinton years, the D.C. newsroom
sin was to be seen as soft on Democrats — “a Clinton apologist” — and
journalists went to extraordinary lengths to prove their mettle by
staying up late chasing Whitewater rumors and trying to prove the White
House gave away weapons secrets to the Chinese in exchange for campaign
contributions. The phrase “double standard” barely begins to describe
the titanic shift that occurred in how Bush and his Republican
administration were covered by the suddenly timorous press corps. It’s
hard to believe the Bush-era slumbering press was the same one that a
decade earlier shifted into overdrive when bogus allegations flew that
President Clinton caused commercial airplanes to back up at Los Angeles
International Airport while he received a $200 haircut from a celebrity
stylist aboard Air Force One in 1993. Federal Aviation Administration
records later showed no such delays occurred, but that didn’t stop the Washington Post
from referencing the silly incident fifty-plus times in less than
thirty days, treating the hoax as a serious political story. (The Post
staff managed to squeeze in nearly one hundred Clinton haircut
references during the 1993 calendar year.) Then again, just four months
into his first term, the Post published a lengthy, mocking
feature on Clinton’s soft approval ratings. (“The Failed Clinton
Presidency. It has a certain ring to it.”) Yet in 2005 when Bush’s job
approval rating plunged into the 30s, the Post refused to print
the phrase “failed presidency” to describe Bush’s second term. To do so
would simply invite conservative scorn; something the newsroom seemed
to go to extraordinarily lengths to avoid.
It’s all part of the double standard adopted for Bush and
Republicans that became the unfortunate news norm and that produced
endless, head-scratching anomalies. It’s why, despite the avalanche of
Iraq coverage between 2002 and 2005, not one major news outlet went
back and highlighted this incriminating August 27, 2000, quote from
Vice President Dick Cheney, uttered on network television, regarding
the wisdom of U.S. forces taking over Iraq:
I think it would be a mistake for us to go on to
Baghdad [during the first Gulf War]. I think it would have sundered the
coalition. None of our Arab allies was prepared to do that. We would
have been all alone in Baghdad and we would have switched from being
the international organizer of this coalition that defeated aggression,
to a situation in which we were sort of a colonialist power — an
imperialist power coming in taking down governments and replacing them.
That would have been a very big mistake for us.
It’s why in the fall of 2003 Time printed the White House’s
insistence that Karl Rove was not involved in the CIA leak of Valerie
Plame, despite the fact at least three Time reporters working
on the article knew that denial was a lie because they had firsthand
knowledge that Rove was the source. As blogger Jane Hamsher asked,
“Under what journalistic principle is a magazine obligated to print
bold, outright lies perpetuated by Administration spokesmen that it
knows for a fact are untrue?”
It’s why amid the 2004 national nominating conventions, Bush’s
interview blunder when he told NBC’s Matt Lauer the War on Terror might
not be winnable received a fraction of the coverage lavished on Teresa
Heinz Kerry’s trivial, caught-on-tape “shove it” barb tossed toward a
reporter.
It’s why an obvious bulge seen under Bush’s suit jacket during the
first presidential debate was deemed to be not worth serious attention
from mainstream reporters.
It’s why during the Terri Schiavo right-to-die debate, ABC News
released a poll on the morning of March 21, 2005, showing 67 percent of
Americans thought politicians, including Bush, intervening in the case
were doing so simply “for political advantage.” Yet that night’s ABC World News Tonight,
which led with a Schiavo story and aired four separate reports on the
issue, made no mention of its own bad-news-for-Bush poll results.
It’s why in 2005, despite the fact well-known national pollster John
Zogby had found that 53 percent of Americans were in favor of Congress
considering impeachment proceedings against Bush if he lied about the
reasons for taking the nation to war, the Washington Post refused even to poll on the issue of impeachment because the question was “biased” and “not a serious option.”
“Accommodating passivity” is how Mark Hertsgaard described the media in his landmark 1988 book, On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency.
Despite the incessant chatter even then about the “liberal media,” that
Reagan, the so-called Teflon President, received fawning press coverage
was common knowledge among his top aides, such as former communications
director David Gergen. “A lot of the Teflon came from the press. They
didn’t want to go after him that toughly,” Gergen told Hertsgaard.
Today’s crop of pundits and reporters passed the accommodating
passivity marker a long time ago — Bush’s Teflon coating grew much
thicker than any press protection Reagan ever enjoyed.
The stakes during the Bush years couldn’t have been higher for the
press and the public. With the Republicans’ one-party rule in
Washington, D.C., and the GOP’s decision to end Congressional oversight
of the executive branch, the press’s watchdog role was all the more
vital, and especially pronounced during the run-up to the U.S.-led
invasion of Iraq, Bush’s unique war of choice, where credible
information and an honest, vigorous debate would have helped Americans
make informed decisions. The country needed the press to report
aggressively and clearly, to be unafraid of the facts and to be
unafraid of being unpopular. Instead, the press ceded to Bush, while at
the same time treating his opponents, be it Democrats or antiwar
activists, with open disdain. Or, as Daniel Okrent, the former public
editor, or ombudsman, of the New York Times,
described it, “The general rolling over on the part of the American
press allowed the war to happen.” It’s hard to imagine a news media
failure more grave than that.
The press’s rampant timidity towards Bush was not simply a
reflection of the flag-waving patriotism that surrounded a wartime
culture either, because some of Bush’s most supine and pleasing
coverage came between the fall of 2004 and the fall of 2005, long after
the national shock of 9/11 had worn off and long after television
anchors removed the American flag lapel pins that were donned during
the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
That Bush would receive pleasing press coverage as president from faithful courtesans came as no great shock. The MSM
signaled their affection for Bush during the 2000 campaign, showering
him with accolades for being authentic and fun to be around, while at
the same time mocking and ridiculing his opponent Al Gore at nearly
every turn. (Just ask conservative cable TV talker Joe Scarborough:
“In the 2000 elections, I think [the media] were fairly brutal towards Al Gore.”) And the MSM’s
personal affection for Bush remained strong for years, even after the
president’s popularity plummeted during his second term. On the
November 28, 2005 telecast of MSNBC’s Hardball, host Chris
Matthews insisted “Everybody sort of likes the president, except for
the real whack-jobs, maybe on the left.” Matthews’s thinking likely
reflected a simple yet firmly held belief inside the Beltway among the
courteous press corps: Bush, good; his critics, bad. But as the
watchdog group Media Matters for America noted, polling data at the
time of Matthews’s comment showed a clear majority of Americans not
only didn’t approve of the job Bush was doing as president, but they
did not like him personally and they did not think he was honest.
Sobering results, but at least Bush could count on celebrity pundits to
vouch for him while insulting his critics as “whack-jobs.”
The MSM flip-flop was duly noted. “The press is missing in
action, with all due respect,” complained Senator Hillary Rodham
Clinton in 2004. “Where are the investigative reporters today? Why
aren’t they asking the hard questions? I mean, c’mon, toughen up, guys,
it’s only our Constitution and country at stake.” Thin-skinned Beltway
pundits quickly derided Clinton’s comments, but members of the MSM had heard that same complaint loud and clear. Note this exchange between Washington Post political reporter Jim VandeHei and a reader during a newspaper-sponsored online chat:
Reader: Why is the national media easy on Bush and his boys? It
doesn’t seem that the media goes after Bush and his boys like they used
to go after Clinton and his boys!
VandeHei: If I had a dollar for every time I get asked that question, I could retire.
The newsroom retreat did not occur in a vacuum. It was fueled by the fact that America’s consolidated MSM
had “their ears cocked to the right,” as historian Todd Gitlin put it
in 2005. “They know where political power lies.” Conservative activists
have perfected the art of media intimidation through its deep-pocketed
noise machine (Matt Drudge, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and an army of
bloggers) that wields extraordinary power in its ability to keep press
attention fixed on whatever given story the right deems urgent or
vaguely newsworthy. When the right yelled jump, as in the right-to-die
saga of Terri Schiavo or the bogus GOP-fed Swift Boat Veterans for
Truth attacks, the press asked how high? Alternately, when the right
begged silence, as in the bizarre tale of conservative White House
correspondent/male escort Jeff Gannon, or the embarrassing prewar
revelations from the Downing Street memo, the MSM whispered how soft?
The press bullying from the right is not new, but the ferocity is. (Fox
News anchor: “Is the liberal media taking up the defense of Saddam
Hussein?”) The tough talk has worked. Journalists have acknowledged the
intimidation at play. At a 2004 media panel held at Harvard University,
NBC anchor Tom Brokaw discussed how conservative activists “feel they
have to go to war against the networks every day.” The late Peter
Jennings of ABC News added, “I hear more about conservative concerns
than I have in the past. This wave of resentment rushes at our
advertisers, rushes at our corporate suites. I feel the presence of
anger all the time.” And CBS’s Dan Rather, describing the toxic
atmosphere, noted the press haters are “all over your telephones, all
over your e-mail, all over your mail,” creating “an undertow in which
you say to yourself, ‘You know, I think we’re right on this story. I
think we’ve got it in the right context, I think we’ve got it in the
right perspective, but we better pick another day.’ ” And that was
before he became the target of right-wing rage following CBS’s botched
use of memos in its 2004 report on Bush’s Texas Air National Guard
service.
On the eve of the first presidential debates during the 2004
campaign, influential conservative blogger, and former Nixon Library
director, Hugh Hewitt wrote a preemptive threat against moderator Jim
Lehrer of PBS, warning him that if activists thought he went easy on
Kerry (i.e., if they saw “any detectable bias on Lehrer’s part”) the
results would be “a cyber-tsunami headed towards PBS affiliates across
the country,” with activists “canceling their pledges to local PBS
affiliates.” Taking their cue from the White House, which regularly
attacked news organizations by name, and whose chief of staff Andy Card
once announced the press corps was nothing more than another special
interest group seeking access, the press haters during the Bush years
– buoyed by a wartime culture that rendered reporters unusually docile
– moved in for the kill.
“You have to be prepared before you go up against these guys,” warned Chris Satullo, editorial page editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer,
who became the target of a Republican attack campaign following the
paper’s endorsement of Kerry in October 2004. “It was a tough month,
trying to deal with the storm they created,” said Satullo.
“This particular anti-press campaign is not about Journalism 101,” wrote Washington Post
columnist E. J. Dionne. “It is about Power 101. It is a sophisticated
effort to demolish the idea of a press independent of political parties
by way of discouraging scrutiny of conservative politicians in power.”
The “new postmodernists” on the right want to “shift attention away
from the truth or falsity of specific facts and allegations — and move
the discussion to the motives of the journalists and media
organizations putting them forward,” wrote Dionne. In other words, the
goal is to create a news culture where there are few if any agreed upon
facts, thereby making serious debate impossible.
Bring back the Ben Bradlee of 1978, the hard-charging editor of the Washington Post,
who fired off a letter to Accuracy in Media founder Reed Irvine, a
conservative press critic who pioneered the art of
intimidation-meets-fabrication. In his missive to Irvine, Bradlee
referred to him as a “miserable, carping retromingent vigilante.” As
Bradlee’s correspondence illustrates, coordinated conservative efforts
to undermine the press have been underway for decades. (Accusing the MSM
of having a liberal bias is like referring to Social Security as the
third rail of American politics; it’s become the ultimate
cliché.)
The press’s accelerated retreat under Bush not only manifested
itself in the soft coverage, but in a lot of other disturbing ways.
Determined not to offend Republicans, reporters began to worship at the
altar of “balance.” Not necessarily “fairness,” which is a prerequisite
for all serious journalism, but the manufactured need to be balanced,
which when it came to political reporting translated into a
he-said/he-said recitation of accusations, while too often tentatively
refusing to inform news consumers which set of facts were accurate. “It
used to be we, as the press, would adjudicate the facts of the battle,”
said Scott Shepard, a political correspondent for the Cox newspaper
chain who covered his fifth presidential election in 2004. “We don’t do
that anymore. Now we present attacks. That’s troublesome to me. We’ve
gotten the idea if we say something is ‘fact’ than somehow we’re
biased. The attacks have worked. People are intimidated.”
After seeing his 2004 campaign reporting on Republican efforts to
suppress voter turnout in Missouri appear as part of a larger, watered
down, everybody-does-it campaign dispatch, Los Angeles Times
investigative reporter Ken Silverstein complained to his editors in an
email: “I am completely exasperated by this approach to the news. The
idea seems to be that we go out to report but when it comes time to
write we turn our brains off and repeat the spin from both sides. God
forbid we should…attempt to fairly assess what we see with our own
eyes.”
That fear of conservative press critics — and the desire to mollify
them — also explains why right-wing extremists are treated like
serious commentators by the MSM and so rarely challenged. Interviewing Fox News’s chronic fabricator Bill O’Reilly, ABC’s Good Morning America
co-host Charlie Gibson cooed, “I always have a good time talking to
him.” Previewing a November 2005 speech Bush was giving on Iraq’s
future, NBC’s Today show invited O’Reilly on the program to
comment on world affairs, despite the fact O’Reilly announced he had no
intention of listening to Bush’s Iraq speech. O’Reilly did, though,
compare Democrats to Hitler sympathizers on Today, a tasteless
attack that host Katie Couric let pass without comment. (It was left to
a late-night comedian, David Letterman, weeks later, to actually press
O’Reilly on his hateful rhetoric when O’Reilly appeared on CBS’s The Late Show.)
In November 2005, CNN turned to esteemed military strategist Ann
Coulter to discuss troop withdrawal proposals for Iraq. Weeks later CNN
entered into discussions with former Reagan education secretary Bill
Bennett to become an on-air political analyst. A self-styled values
czar who had to admit to a monstrous gambling addiction, Bennett’s CNN
deal came just months after he told radio listeners that,
hypothetically, aborting “every black baby in this country” would help
reduce the crime rate. CNN welcomed Bennett within weeks of announcing
it had hired former GOP congressman J. C. Watts to be yet another
right-wing pundit in the CNN stable. Meanwhile, in January 2006, CNN Headline News signed right-wing radio talker Glenn Beck to a nightly hour-long talk show. Announcing the new hire, Headline News
president Ken Jautz, trying to take the edge off Beck’s fringe past,
described the host as “cordial” and “not confrontational.” Yet the
previous year, when not fantasizing about killing filmmaker Michael
Moore (“I’m wondering if I could kill him myself, or if I would need to
hire somebody to do it”) Beck told his listeners that Hurricane Katrina
survivors trapped in New Orleans were “scumbags,” and that he hated
“9/11 victims’ families.” He also labled antiwar protester Cindy
Sheehan a “pretty big prostitute.”
So much for being “cordial.”
It’s not just the name-calling that journalists fear from the right,
it’s the career track implications the “liberal bias” allegations
carry. “When I covered the White House I had the unlimited backing of
the late [ABC News president] Roone Arledge,” recalled Sam Donaldson,
who famously shouted some of the few tough questions posed to Reagan
during his term. “One time I got a raise because of what he considered
to be unwarranted criticism of my work. Today, not all the bosses
support their reporters. So if you’re a reporter at the White House and
you’re thinking about further successes in the business and you’re
nervous about your boss getting a call, maybe you pull your punches
because of the career track.” Conversely, those in the MSM who play nice with the White House are compensated. Noted New York Times
columnist Paul Krugman: “Let’s be frank: the Bush administration has
made brilliant use of journalistic careerism. Those who wrote puff
pieces about Mr. Bush and those around him have been rewarded with
career-boosting access.”
Whatever the specific motives, the timidity became entrenched and the results plain to see. And that’s what Lapdogs documents in detail.
Copyright © 2006 by Eric Boehlert
Simon & Schuster
