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Read all About it! 'Amazing' ‘Revelations’!
Did the mainstream press get it wrong then or are they wrong now? Whose side are they on, anyway? Which way is the wind blowing?
I’ve been furious with the press for a long time. But I am particularly angered by the current frenzy of fury at President Bush---not because I don't think he deserves a time out, but because I happen to think that the press have played a key role in enabling exactly the sort of policies and practices for which they are now pillorying the Administration. It makes me crazy to see them all, "The scales have fallen from our eyes!" and turning on Bush like a pack of dogs when the lead dog is down. “If they finally got with the program, don’t crap on them,” one of my progressive friends said to me brusquely. “Be glad they finally did. It's high time.” But I don't see it that way. If what they are now saying reflects the facts, and if they are indeed getting it all right for the first time, I think the members of the mainstream press has failed in their way as outstandingly as they are now claiming that Bush has failed in his.
During an interview with Anderson Cooper during Real Time, Bill Maher (my personal hero) noted that Katrina seems to have given us back our press. Anderson Cooper seemed miffed by the remark; I was miffed too, for different reasons. If Katrina has given us back the press, where has it been in the interim? What sort of courage does it take to suddenly become bold in attacking an Administration in the face of declining public approval?
Now that they are clutching their pearls around their lily white necks and injecting whispery gossip about his personal failing into their reports of the disaster, it’s really hard to take them seriously. It seems to me that we’ve had a very painful demonstration that they
The gossip, by the way, is all about the President’s alleged personal policy of remaining in a state of pure, clear, untainted ignorance concerning any news out there in the world that he might find upsetting. It would upset me very much to get this information now if the rumors were new. They are not.
Tim Grieve in Salon asks the question that should be troubling everyone who still retains a shred of faith in the disinterestedness of the mainstream press: Have magazines like Time and Newsweek known all along who the president really is, or is new information coming to light? If it’s the former, why haven’t reporters shared their insights before?
And in a Salon article dated September 7, Eric Boehlert discusses the ‘jolting’ of the Press by Katrina. And he exactly tracks the criticism that I’ve been hearing for years from the non-mainstream media and from my progressive friends:
Forgive some of us for not celebrating the press's coming-out party. The fact that this kind of aggressive questioning of people in power during times of crisis now passes as news itself only highlights just how timid the mainstream press corps has been during the Bush years.
It's hard to decide which is more troubling: that it took the national press corps five years to summon up enough courage to report, without apology, that what the Bush administration says and does are often two different things, or that it took the sight of bodies floating facedown in the streets of New Orleans to trigger a change in the press's behavior.
But now they are all knocking each other over now to tear strips out of his teflon coating. Though the fact that they mention the following points only in passing indicates that they, along with the rest of America, are still underestimating and understating the significance of the following information about the president’s accessibility (and access to critical information).
These rumors about Bush’s management style have been around for a long time. Are they true? I don’t know. But I do know that these allegations are not new.
Exhibit A: A Newsweek article by Evan Thomas is called 'How Bush Blew It.' Note the following:
It's a standing joke among the president's top aides: who gets to deliver the bad news? Warm and hearty in public, Bush can be cold and snappish in private, and aides sometimes cringe before the displeasure of the president of the United States....
President George W. Bush has always trusted his gut. He prides himself in ignoring the distracting chatter, the caterwauling of the media elites, the Washington political buzz machine. He has boasted that he doesn't read the papers. His doggedness is often admirable. It is easy for presidents to overreact to the noise around them.
But it is not clear what President Bush does read or watch, aside from the occasional biography and an hour or two of ESPN here and there. Bush can be petulant about dissent; he equates disagreement with disloyalty. After five years in office, he is surrounded largely by people who agree with him. Bush can ask tough questions, but it's mostly a one-way street. Most presidents keep a devil's advocate around. Lyndon Johnson had George Ball on Vietnam; President Ronald Reagan and Bush's father, George H.W. Bush, grudgingly listened to the arguments of Budget Director Richard Darman, who told them what they didn't wish to hear: that they would have to raise taxes. When Hurricane Katrina struck, it appears there was no one to tell President Bush the plain truth: that the state and local governments had been overwhelmed, that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was not up to the job and that the military, the only institution with the resources to cope, couldn't act without a declaration from the president overriding all other authority.
From the same article:
There are a number of steps Bush could have taken, short of a full-scale federal takeover, like ordering the military to take over the pitiful and (by now) largely broken emergency communications system throughout the region. But the president, who was in San Diego preparing to give a speech the next day on the war in Iraq, went to bed.....
Bush was told at 5 a.m. Pacific Coast time and immediately decided to cut his vacation short. To his senior advisers, living in the insular presidential bubble, the mere act of lopping off a couple of presidential vacation days counts as a major event. They could see pitfalls in sending Bush to New Orleans immediately. His presence would create a security nightmare and get in the way of the relief effort. Bush blithely proceeded with the rest of his schedule for the day, accepting a gift guitar at one event and pretending to riff like Tom Cruise in "Risky Business."....
Late last week, Bush was, by some accounts, down and angry. But another Bush aide described the atmosphere inside the White House as "strangely surreal and almost detached." At one meeting described by this insider, officials were oddly self-congratulatory, perhaps in an effort to buck each other up. Life inside a bunker can be strange, especially in defeat.
And in Exhibit B Time has had this to say about that (in an article by Mike Allen):
In addition, former aides say there has always been enormous pressure on White House officials to take only the most vital decisions to Bush and let the bureaucracy deal with everything else. Bush does not appear to tap sources deep inside his government for information, the way his father or Bill Clinton did, preferring to get reports through channels. A highly screened information chain is fine when everything is going well, but in a crisis it can hinder. Louisiana officials say it took hours for Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco to reach Bush (although when she did, he talked to her soothingly, according to White House officials). "His inner circle takes pride in being able to tell him 'everything is under control,' when in this case it was not," said a former aide. "The whole idea that you have to only burden him with things 'that rise to his level' bit them this time."
A related factor, aides and outside allies concede, is what many of them see as the President's increasing isolation. Bush's bubble has grown more hermetic in the second term, they say, with fewer people willing or able to bring him bad news--or tell him when he's wrong. Bush has never been adroit about this. A youngish aide who is a Bush favorite described the perils of correcting the boss. "The first time I told him he was wrong, he started yelling at me," the aide recalled about a session during the first term.
"Then I showed him where he was wrong, and he said, 'All right. I understand. Good job.' He patted me on the shoulder. I went and had dry heaves in the bathroom."
Grieve cites a January 2004 story in Newsweek by Richard Wolff demonstrating its previous deference toward the Bush Administration and produces, as the facts in evidence, quotes indicating the ‘previous deference’ of the mainstream press toward this Administration:
Witness its cover story by Richard Wolffe from Jan. 24, 2005, timed to coincide with the president’s second inaugural….
Wolffe described the president as a man whose "leadership style belies his caricature as a disengaged president who is blindly loyal, dislikes dissent and covets his own downtime" -- a caricature that looks like a dead ringer after the vacationing president’s reaction to Katrina. …
Wolffe: Bush is "a restless man who masters details and reads avidly" and "digs deep into his briefing books." When he’s not "poring over white papers," he also enjoys the occasional novel…..
Wolfe: Bush’s "style in policy briefings is to narrow the debate with a series of questions, crystallizing the competing opinions and exploring the disagreements between his staff."
In short: If the reports currently in circulation are true, did Time and Newsweek and all who sail in them really not know? And if they have been true all along, how could they not? And if they did, how could they not report it as soon as they knew?
Did they get it wrong then or have they got it wrong now? Or---much more disturbingly----have they just been telling us all along what they think we want to hear? Or---even more disturbingly---what they think they can get away with? What's the story behind the stories? The President is what he is, but what the hell has been going on with the mainstream press?
And---to be fair---it's OF COURSE not just Time and Newsweek; they're just the easiest targets at the moment; there are plenty of other examples. It's the press generally. And the mainstream press---to ensure 'access'? to keep from pissing off advertisers or shareholders? to keep from losing viewers or subscribers?---apparently not been doing its job, unless it is misleading us all now.
I really don't see how they can have it both ways, can you?
So as there is evidently plenty of blame to go around, let's put a big chunk of it on the press which---assuming arguendo that their reports are accurate--- has all along been enabling the very policies and practices for which the Administration is now being pilloried.
And as for celebrating their 'courage,' I'll celebrate when I see whether it lasts through the next change in the political wind.
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