Michiko Kakutaniコミュの（8）Attack the Messenger

November 11, 2005
'Attack the Messenger'
How Politicians Turn You Against the Media
By Craig Crawford
179 pages. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc. $22.95.


Bushes' Wars Against Media
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

In his timely new book about the relationship between politicians and the media, the Congressional Quarterly columnist Craig Crawford describes a television showdown between Dan Rather of CBS News and Vice President George H. W. Bush, the father of the current president. The Jan. 25, 1988, interview came as questions were being raised about what role Mr. Bush might have played in the Iran-contra scandal, and he was prepared to go on the offensive. Near the start of the interview, Mr. Bush brought up an embarrassing episode from the anchorman's own past - when he'd walked off the set out of anger at the pre-emption of his show for a sporting event.
"It's not fair to judge my whole career by a rehash on Iran," Mr. Bush asserted. "How would you like it if I judged your career by those seven minutes when you walked off the set in New York?" The remark, Mr. Crawford reports, was not spontaneous: Mr. Bush read it from a cue card being held up by his campaign manger, Roger Ailes - the same Roger Ailes who would go on to head Fox News Channel.
In fact, Mr. Crawford writes, one of the carefully planned strategies of the elder Bush's 1988 presidential campaign was to run against the news media, which the candidate insistently portrayed as being out of sync with Middle America. His "crusade to turn the public against the media," Mr. Crawford goes on, would be finished by his son, George W. Bush, whose White House treats the news media as "just another special interest group," rather than as a "surrogate for the American people."
"Attack the Messenger" isn't nearly as comprehensive or incisive as the reader might want: Eric Boehlert of Salon, Frank Rich of The New York Times, Michael Massing in The New York Review of Books, Eric Alterman of The Nation and Ken Auletta in The New Yorker have all written about aspects of the Bush administration's relationship with the press, and done so with far greater acuity and depth than this volume demonstrates.
Still, Mr. Crawford's book serves as a useful introduction to the issue at hand, providing a persuasive, if incomplete, sketch of how the current White House, with assists from its two predecessors and a changing media landscape, has worked to undermine the mainstream press.
Although the news media now enjoy higher approval ratings than President Bush, Mr. Crawford notes that the media's standing with the public has fallen sharply from its high during the Watergate era. And he argues that the falloff in trust stems from "the vilification of the news media by politicians," combined with a host of other developments: the proliferation of Internet sites and cable television outlets, many of them highly partisan in attitude and content; a series of self-inflicted wounds on the part of the press (including Dan Rather's flawed reporting of a CBS story about the younger Mr. Bush's National Guard service, the Jayson Blair scandal at The New York Times and the Jack Kelley scandal at USA Today); public distaste for the salacious details of the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky affair, which was covered at length by an increasingly gossip-hungry media; and the nation's post-9/11 mood, which was exploited by the current administration to depict any questioning of the war against Iraq as a sign of disloyalty and lack of patriotism.
Meanwhile, the press has often unwittingly aided politicians by flagellating itself. As Mr. Crawford astutely notes, journalists "seldom defend" themselves. In addition, they allow themselves, on occasion, to be distracted from covering the news made by politicians and government officials to engage in cannibalistic navel-gazing - a phenomenon fueled by Internet bloggers, cable news pundits and talk radio partisans like Rush Limbaugh, who are intent on promoting themselves at the expense of the mainstream media.
As a result of all this, Mr. Crawford suggests, politicians now "have the advantage in defining truth." "Armies of press aides, pseudojournalists and well-funded advocacy groups, are in place as an alternative to the traditional news media," he writes. "The great irony is that the rise of this propaganda machine feeds on the belief that the news media is biased. Yet often there is no one more biased than those who hurl the charge."
Indeed, one of the favorite mantras of the current Bush White House and its conservative allies is that the media suffer from a "liberal bias" - a constantly repeated accusation designed to drill this notion into the public consciousness while putting the press on the defensive. Recent history flies in the face of this assertion. Fox News established itself as the dominant cable news network last year, while Mr. Limbaugh and other conservative voices continue to dominate talk radio. To the dismay of Democrats, the media vigorously pursued stories about Mr. Clinton relating to impeachment charges and the Whitewater scandal. And the press's failure to more aggressively question prewar allegations that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction was in large measure a result of its overreliance on sources aligned with the administration.
At the same time, Mr. Crawford points out, the Bush administration has been engaging in what can only be called propaganda. It paid the conservative commentator Armstrong Williams (who did not tell his audience about the arrangement) $240,000 to help promote the president's No Child Left Behind act; produced videos supporting White House initiatives and then disguised them as television news reports; and has relied heavily on carefully choreographed photo-ops and stage-managed town hall meetings to get its agenda out. This highly secretive White House has also tried to circumvent the mainstream press by limiting reporters' access, keeping President Bush's press conferences to a minimum and going over the head of the national media to local outlets (which tend to push less strenuously on matters like foreign policy and national security).
For that matter, the Bush administration has advanced the notion that the press is an irritant or at best a sideshow. Mr. Bush has said he may glance at newspaper headlines but rarely reads the articles, asserting that "the best way to get the news is from objective sources," and "the most objective sources I have are people on my staff who tell me what's happening in the world." One of his senior advisers dismissed a reporter he was talking to as a member of "the reality-based community," a supposedly obsolete life-form, given the aide's assertion that "we're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality."
The administration's argument that the press is a filter that must be circumvented to get its own message out to the public is predicated on the conviction that there is no such thing as truly independent reporting, or even a set of mutually agreed-upon facts - that "fair and balanced" is nothing but an ironic phrase in quotation marks, as used by Fox News. It suggests that there are no distinctions between willfully partisan hacks and media outlets that genuinely strive to achieve the best obtainable truth, that reporters are all as agenda-driven as the politicians they cover. For conservatives, who have long scorned relativism as the province of multicultural and postmodernist historians, it's a curiously ... well, relativistic view.
It's also, as Mr. Crawford notes in his provocative but all too slender book, a self-serving view that stifles the public's right to know and "aids politicians in their never-ending quest to keep their own version of the truth in charge."
"By undermining the credibility of the news media," he writes, "politicians get the upper hand in defining what 'is.' Far from targeting only bad actors, these politicians seek to undermine our best journalists in hopes of muzzling the truth."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/11/books/11book.html?ex=1135746000&en=b89e2f539ecd8af8&ei=5070