Saturday, September 25, 2004
Frank Rich's Tale of Two Columns
The week got off to a twisted start with Frank Rich's column in last Sunday's New York Times.0 comments
Frank Rich wrote what is essentially: "Two! Two! Two Columns in One: One on the Outside; One on the Inside."
The inside article is the clearer and more important of the two. The stupidly inflamatory outside article, with its equally unfortunate headline, is the one that catches your eye, however, and inadvertantly proves the very point he's trying to make on the inside.
The inside article describes clearly how all mass media—with the help of, and with battering from, the Bush Media machine—has capitulated totally since September 11, 2001, and now exists simply as an outlet for the floodwaters of leaks from the administration.
The outside article begins with an attack on CNN for its exposure on the James Carville/Paul Begala/Crossfire issue, stating what a coup for FOX this is.
Yet as CNN continues its ratings free-fall, humbled by Fox and occasionally by MSNBC as well, "Crossfire" remains one of its few signature brands. No matter how long the overlap between Mr. Carville and Mr. Begala's TV and campaign roles, that brand and CNN itself are now as inextricably bound to the Democrats as Fox is to the Republicans. The network has succeeded in an impossible feat — ceding Mr. O'Reilly the moral high ground.
Nonsense. Rich never mentions, of course, that Crossfire's own Veteran Journalist Bob Novak is perfectly happy to break standing federal law and to get people killed to enable the administration's version of events by Outing a covert CIA agent who has crossed this current administration.
Five graphs into the story, though, Frank Rich shifts gears and the story shifts from CNN's supposedly playing into FOX's hands politically, to an overall look at the state of the media today. Here, the tires begin to grab hold.
Article Two begins with this graph:
What much of the other news media have offered as an alternative [to FOX] has not been an alternative at all. At some point after 9/11, the news business jumped the shark and started relaying unchallenged administration propaganda — though with less zeal and showbiz pizazz than Fox. The notorious March 2003 presidential news conference at which not a single probing question was asked by the entire White House press corps heralded the broader Foxification to come. As Michael Massing, a frequent critic of this newspaper and others, put it on PBS's NewsHour, the failure of the American news media to apply proper skepticism to the administration's stated rationale for war in Iraq is "one of the most serious institutional failures of the press" since our slide into Vietnam. Mr. Massing attributes some of this to the fear of challenging a president then at the height of his popularity. Whatever the explanation — and there are many, depending on the news organization — the net effect was that the entire press came off as Fox Lite. The motive to parrot the administration line may not have been ideological, as it was at Fox, but since the misinformation was the same, news consumers can't be blamed for finding that a distinction without a difference.
I, like many Americans, still have nightmares from spending too many hours after the initial surge into Iraq by U.S. troops and bombers, watching Wall-to-Wall Wolf Blitzer excitedly reading Republican press handouts in Kuwait (REPEAT! That's REPUBLICAN! press handouts! HERE in Kuwait!) in that annoyingly bizarre signature style of his. This Torture-by-Wolf was only broken by the slew of press briefings given by then-Press Secretary Ari Fleischer, where you waited for ANY reporter to ask something besides puffball questions which allowed Ari to end up sounding only slightly more lucid and coherent than "Baghdad Bob." We watched—hoping for a shred of hard news—as Ari worked the room as if he were surrounded by scores of hungry cats and he alone held the open bag of kibble.
Later comes a ludicrous point from Rich:
It's a damning measure of the news media's failure to provide a persuasive dose of reality as an antidote to Washington fairy tales that so many Americans came to believe that the 9/11 hijackers were Iraqis, not Saudis. A Newsweek poll just two weeks ago shows that 42 percent of Americans (among them, 32 percent of Democrats) still believe that Saddam was "directly involved" in the 9/11 attacks.
"... a damning measure ..."?
What Frank sees here are layers of residue. White House gunk which started on the very day of the attacks. Clips from the schoolroom video, and photos of the Most Powerful Man in the World staring forelornly out the window of a wandering Air Force One appeared that first day, only to disappear for years.
Instead of scratching his head and fretting over the press's "failure to provide a persuasive dose of reality," why doesn't Rich come right out and state the fact of the matter:
Starting on 9/11, the press rolled right over and assumed the position for the Bush White House.
And this masochistic industry has made only the most feeble of efforts to ask the administration to stop abusing them ever since.
Period.
As of 9/10/01, Bush's was a presidency in trouble, with poll numbers starting to drop like a stone. Over nine months, the press made efforts to present both the White House wins and losses in equal measure, which added up poorly for the new president.
As Bush loves to say: "On September 11th, everything changed."
Yes, everything.
There can be no face-saving gloss put on this, Frank. What followed was total dereliction of duty. An utter failure on the press's part of horrendous and deadly proportions.
Simply and clearly put: EVERY member of the press is fully complicit in the subsequent slaughter of tens of thousands of people over the past two years.
Period.
What would have happened in this world had the thousands of basically good and moral people within the media—the reporters, anchors, editors, publishers, columnists, etc.—actually stood up and fulfilled the basic core tenets of their profession, and performed the press's duties within a free society?
If anyone in the press asserts that they're clean from the last three years, they're lying or delusional. It's goes across the board, despite any self-serving howling from the White House. If Dan Rather is to go, then EVERYBODY goes!
Just who told these good "Americans" mentioned above—up to 70% of the population at the time, and yes, 42% of them still—to believe that there was a connection between Saddam and 9/11?
The administration, aka, "a senior administration official said today... ."
Period.
You found this tale nowhere else. You heard it from no one else.
Did ANY journalist from a mainstream press organization dig to corroborate the White House's story at the time? Or to uncover differing or conflicting facts?
No.
Was there ANY truth to the administration's story?
No, of course not.
How did the administration continue to get that story out, then?
The press, Frank. The wire services, the network news programs, the cable news channels, newspapers like yours, and local newspapers which only reprint wire stories. All the good water carriers. The White House said it; the media dutifully carriied it verbatim to the American people. On the air; over cable; in print. On the record, and off.
How often did the press run that fiction?
As many times a day as the White House would say it. After every briefing, speech and sound bite.
Did the mainstream press investigate the administration's claim?
No.
Simply parrot it?
Yes.
Did the alternative press investigate this story?
Eventually, yes.
Was that covered by the mainstream press?
Eventually, but not for a long time. And only when the facts the alternative press dug up became too clearly self-evident.
Were the facts as they emerged embraced by the maintream press?
No.
The press followed right along—as they still do today, it's still Accuse Any Messenger Who Dares to Accuse the White House—rather than taking an in-depth look at the original allegations, which tend to usually end up making the White House look rather bad.
The Bush Was AWOL story is a perfect case-in-point. I'm weary of the revisionist history surrounding this story. The original allegations have been presented by investigators who have spent years finding these facts and wrestling with federal government agencies under the Freedom of Information Act. The White House spin and rebuttal stories are mostly written by junior reporters who started their careers within the last four years.
No, Young Writers of America, this is NOT OLD NEWS! American voters were NOT fully focused on Bush's lack of service in 2000, and DID NOT fully vet and absorb it, as you insist on writing again and again. It emerged in the Boston Globe and on a couple of Internet sites. It was then slammed with every Karl Rove frontal-assault tactic in the book, and was quickly buried as the work of a few Al Gore-lovin', left-wing crackpots. Some voters were aware that the allegation was out there, but few, if any, actually took the time to read it or follow the saga. Besides, 2000 was a peaceful, prosperous time. What difference could it possibly make? As a story in 2000, it had a VERY small, VERY short shelf-life.
What a difference four years, a wrecked economy and over ten thousand lives lost makes!
Today the White House still gets everyone to focus on the "axe-to-grind" angle of the accusor. The WH simply ignores the fact that you have in the White House today: a "war president" who ignored this country's best intelligence professionals and failed to prevent the carnage of the 9/11 attacks; a president who later gave up on the "Dead-or-Alive" hunt to track down Osama bin Laden—the actual killer of over 3,000 Americans that day; a president who has been directly responsible for the deaths of over 1,050 U.S. military men and women under his command in Iraq—a country which posed no threat to the U.S.; a president who drove our most powerful allies from our door; a president who drove the country broke with his insane agenda of cutting taxes while paying for a war; and a president who turns out to have never fulfilled even what little was asked of him by his country, while his not-so-well-connected fellow young Americans without deferments were either dying at the rate of 1,000 a month in Vietnam, leaving the country for life or going to prison for 5 to 10 years. This "war president" chose to spend HIS affluent wartime service chasing Southern women, playing tennis, driving around in his Triumph convertible and falling off bar stools after too many lines and Jim Beam. An all-around heroic All-American Boy.
And, somehow, these stories are all about Dan Rather? Or James Carville?
Even though the basic facts of 9/11's being an operation of Saudi Arabian nationals—with no Saddam connection whatsoever—emerged, and the country started catching on, the press ignored it, instead dutifully reporting their AMAZEMENT that the majority of the American people still believed ("REPEAT! They STILL BELIEVED!") that it was an Iraqi ("REPEAT! That's an IRAQI!") attack. ("That's an AMAZING, AMAZING statistic!")
And the ignorance continues.
After the administration's blurbs and spins were thoroughly and completely debunked, did an embarrassed and revitalized press go on the offensive and dig into exactly what happened—on an array of issues?
Well, yes, but only as far as the administration would let them. The press corps would come up with information damning to the administration, the administration would simply go, "All lies!" and admit nothing, and the press would drop it. They'd simply go back to the Talking Point of the Day memo handed out by the White House Communications Director earlier that morning. Or they'd feel victorious from making Press Secretary Scott McClellan look stupid on any given day (not an overly difficult task, that; something I assume the local dry cleaners may actually do on a weekly basis), although they wouldn't have actually gotten Scott to say anything new or substantive about the accusation du jour. Then, again, they'd drop it. Not exactly dogged attempts on the press's part.
Has the press steadfastly repelled any further attempts by the White House to bamboozle the American public?
You're joking, right?
Only if you consider it to be forceful journalism to still run Shadow President Dick Cheney's ongoing, tired repetitions of his discredited "It was All-Saddam; All-the-Time" fantasies—AS NEWS—without any challenge or bucketful of caveats.
To be the proper buffer between the American people and a rogue administration, the press would have to refuse to carry—again, as news, no less—the ongoing GOP sleazy campaign rubbish of slimy innuendo and personal attack. Crap like: the fake terror alerts every time Bush's poll numbers drop more than two points, or "The terrorists want the Democrats to win!", "Kerry shot HIMSELF to get his medals! Yeah, that's it; that's the ticket!" etc., etc., ad nauseam.
And the press—after simply ignoring that baseless Personal-Attack-of-the-Day GOP talking point—would have to press the administration and its surrogates on their record of the last four years, or the current daily actions of the White House and its GOP-strangled Congress, or their detailed plans for where they hope to take the country in the next four years.
And perhaps even have the temerity to ask:
"What will this country actually look like after another four years of Bush/GOP control?"
and
"What will this country actually look like after four years of a John Kerry administration?"
Or more importantly:
"What would this country look like if the press were not to follow the iron-fisted lead of Rupert Murdoch, Richard Mellon Scaife and Tom DeLay?"
You've become a far better political writer than you ever were a theater critic, Frank. And I understand the impulse to catch up for lost time on the political beat.
But, please, just write one column at a time.
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posted by Gotham 3:02 PM
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