After W, Will the Press Get a Spine?
NEWS: Having failed to nail Bush for his fabrications and fibs, can the mainstream press do a better job of policing political and presidential prevarication this campaign season—and beyond?
By David Corn
September/October 2008 Issue
it was late into the night of September 2, 2004. I was in the near-empty bar of the Essex House hotel in New York City. George W. Bush had just delivered his acceptance speech at the gop convention at Madison Square Garden. Before a pumped-up crowd, the president had declared that Iraq had been "a gathering threat" before he launched the invasion. He blurred the line between the terrorists responsible for 9/11 and the insurgents in Iraq. He described John Kerry's vote against war funding as a vote to leave US soldiers unprotected. He claimed, "Our strategy is succeeding." As I sat in the bar writing my piece, the tables next to me slowly filled with senior reporters and top editors from the Washington Post. Typing away, I could hear them deride Bush's speech as a collection of misrepresentations. Their consensus was clear: Bush was trying to pull a fast one.
Yet the next morning, the paper's front page flatly proclaimed, "Bush Promises 'a Safer World': Acceptance Speech Sets Lofty Goals." The lead article was a straightforward account of the address, with not a hint at the well-founded skepticism of the paper's own reporters and editors. A media outfit, abiding by the conventional rules of journalism (just the quotes, ma'am), had once again enabled a president who was not being honest. And I was reminded of a 1997 remark by Ben Bradlee, the former executive editor of the Post: "Even the very best newspapers have never learned how to handle public figures who lie with a straight face."
In recent years, Bradlee's axiom has been sorely tested. And while the question of just where Bush fits in the annals of presidential prevarication will soon belong to historians, a related matter is worthy of immediate contemplation: Will the Bush experience prompt the media to perform better next time the Bradlee test is relevant?
The debate over Bush's relationship with the truth was well under way by the time the president took the stage at the Garden. By late summer 2003, a small flood of books had appeared questioning the veracity of the president and his political comrades, including my own The Lies of George W. Bush. Mainstream journalists and right-wing commentators quickly reached a consensus on why these books were being published—not because of any real problem, but because liberals had been driven to irrational hatred of the president. Writing in the New York Times, Matt Bai opined that "the new leftist screeds seem to solidify a rising political culture of incivility and overstatement." Also in the Times, James Traub—while acknowledging that Bush had served up "quite a few actual fibs"—observed, "The sudden rash of jeremiads and their stunning popularity raises a question: Why are so many liberals, including sane and sober ones, granting themselves permission to hate the president?" In Time, James Poniewozik bemoaned "the rise of the anger industry." Going further, columnist David Brooks warned that "The core threat to democracy is not in the White House, it's the haters themselves." On cnn, Tucker Carlson said the anti-Bush books were written to cater "to the paranoia and craziness of the far left" and were "selling because the Democratic Party has gone completely insane with Bush hatred."
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http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2008/09/exit-strategy-it-rhymes-with-fire.html
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