By The Beachwood Press Failure Affairs Desk
This week we are providing a three-part excerpt from the opening chapter of When the Press Fails: Political Power and the News Media from Iraq to Katrina, by W. Lance Bennett, Regina G. Lawrence, and Steven Livingston, graciously provided to us by the University of Chicago Press and also available in full on their website. Part 1 of our series is here. Part 2 follows.
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Mission Accomplished
Consider for a moment that day in May of 2003, when President Bush, wearing a Top Gun flight suit, gave his “Mission Accomplished” speech on an aircraft carrier staged as a big-screen movie set. Nearly every major U. S. news organization reported the story just as it had been scripted. The result was the sort of public relations coup that occurs only when the news can be managed on such a scale. (We believe that the idea originated with a public relations consultant, and was then staged with the considerable resources of the White House communication office and the U.S. military.)
Beyond the irony of a president with a dubious military service record playing Top Gun, the message channeled through the news turned out to be disastrously wrong. But such details were no match for the Hollywood moments that the administration regularly rolled out with the help of Hollywood set directors and Washington PR firms. The news had become something of a reality TV program, replete with dramatic stories from top organizations such as the Washington Post, which published the following:
When the Viking carrying Bush made its tailhook landing on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln off California yesterday, the scene brought presidential imagery to a whole new level. Bush emerged from the cockpit in a full olive flight suit and combat boots, his helmet tucked jauntily under his left arm. As he exchanged salutes with the sailors, his ejection harness, hugging him tightly between the legs, gave him the bowlegged swagger of a top gun.
The fact that all of this was known to have been staged just for this effect did not detract from the amount and prominence of news coverage the media lavished on the event. To the contrary, the orchestration of the event fit perfectly with the unwritten rules of mainstream journalism in the United States, and thus helped make the coverage what it was: dramatic, unchallenged, triumphant, and resonant throughout the media. Beyond this staging, the implicit journalistic preoccupation with political power in Washington shaped the plotline of Mr. Bush’s Top Gun episode. As a result, most of the coverage of the “mission accomplished” moment was not about whether the war was really over (it wasn’t), or even if there was reason to think that things in Iraq were going particularly well (they weren’t). The story was about power in Washington, and in particular, Mr. Bush’s mastery of the imagery of success – which, at that moment, seemed to make him the odds-on favorite in the 2004 election.
The fascinating aspect of such recurrent reporting patterns is that the news itself is the completing link in the image creation process. Reporting stories according to a calculus of government power and dramatic production values often makes the news reality emanating from Washington an insular, circular, and self-fulfilling operation. News and politics loop quickly back on each other because of the press’s preoccupation with how well powerful officials manage their desired images in the news. Thus, in early Iraq coverage, potentially important contextual details such as the dubious reasons and evidence given in support of the war became incidental to the fascination with whether the Bush administration had the image-shaping capacity and the political clout to pull it off.
The Selling of the Iraq War
Consider, along these lines, another important aspect of the lead-up to the Iraq invasion. Much as the Hollywood staging of the carrier landing made for a great news event, the campaign to sell the war was designed to help the press make the administration’s story far sharper and more dramatic than the evidence on which it was based. More than a year after a seemingly manufactured case for war had been presented to the public, Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) attempted to redefine the political debate by making a speech with this bold claim: “The administration capitalized on the fear created by 9/11 and put a spin on the intelligence and a spin on the truth to justify a war that could well be one of the worst blunders in more than two centuries of American foreign policy.”
He charged that the war was marketed like a “political product” to help elect Republicans, and that “if Congress and the American People knew the whole truth, America would never have gone to war.” Kennedy was quickly dismissed by the Republican rapid-response network as a traitorous liberal throwback. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-TX) said that “[Kennedy’s] hateful attack against the commander in chief would be disgusting if it were not so sad,” adding that Kennedy had “insulted the president’s patriotism.” The story was immediately reduced to the Washington news formula of “he said/he said,” and the larger issue about selling the war based on false advertising was lost in a story about partisan sniping.
Even without the vociferous Republican counterattack, Kennedy was not likely to be a decisive player in mobilizing congressional opposition to the war, and thus did not constitute a news source with enough power to sustain another side to the story.
Equally important, Senator Kennedy’s assertion that the Bush administration had marketed the war as a partisan political product came as no news to journalists and other political insiders. A good piece of investigative reporting (characteristically not followed up by the Post or other news organizations) had already been produced six months before, establishing independent evidence for Kennedy’s charges. Two journalists for the Washington Post described a systematic media campaign that had begun in August 2002 with the formation of the White House Iraq Group (WHIG), aimed at rolling out a communication strategy for the coming war. WHIG’s “strategic communications” task force planned publicity and news events for a campaign that would start in September, after most Americans (and Congress) had returned from their summer vacations. The Post story quoted White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, from an interview that had appeared in The New York Times nearly a year earlier, on why the campaign had been launched in September: “From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.” This strong signal that the war was being promoted via a concerted communication campaign was in the news fully one and a half years before Kennedy’s assertion.
The important question is, why didn’t this journalistic “common knowledge” about the selling of the war become big news at the time it was first reported, when there was still time to debate the U.S. invasion of Iraq in public? To the contrary, when it was launched in September 2002, the administration’s sales campaign was quickly translated into the news code of the mainstream press and told as a story about how power works in Washington. The fact that the administration was selling the war as a political campaign was noted for the record and then, like much of the its image management operation, passed on to the American public according to plan: prominently featured throughout the news, and unimpeded by serious journalistic investigation of either the sales operation or its veracity. As independent journalist Michael Massing later observed, “Most investigative energy was directed at stories that supported, rather than challenged, the administration’s case.” The result is that the public was saturated with the sales pitch, which was delivered loud and clear throughout the news media.
The nation’s talk shows on the weekend after Labor Day 2002 were filled with Bush administration officials staying on message and reading from a script that pumped fear through the media echo chamber. On NBC’s Meet the Press, Vice President Cheney raised the specter that Saddam’s arsenal of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons presented an immediate danger to the United States. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice acknowledged on CNN’s Late Edition that solid evidence was scarce, but that waiting only increased the risk. Her punch line: “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” And Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld warned on CBS’s Face the Nation: “Imagine a September 11 with weapons of mass destruction. It’s not 3,000, it’s tens of thousands of innocent men, women, and children.”
In short, a war being promoted through a sales campaign was not the story the news highlighted. The focus of the story was on power – the effectiveness of the campaign in pressuring Congress (and the United Nations) to support the war initiative – not the truth or the propriety of the effort. Here is The New York Times’ account of the opening weekend of the campaign:
WASHINGTON, Sept. 8 – Led by Vice President Dick Cheney, who warned grimly that “time is not on our side,” President Bush’s top national security officials said nearly in unison today that Saddam Hussein’s efforts to build an arsenal of immensely destructive weapons left the United States little choice but to act against Iraq.
“There shouldn’t be any doubt in anybody’s mind that this president is absolutely bound and determined to deal with this threat, and to do whatever is necessary to make certain that we do so,” Mr. Cheney said. He said that Iraq was sparing no effort to revive its nuclear weapon program and that in light of the terror attacks of last Sept. 11, its history with nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs directly threatened the United States.
In almost identical language that signaled a carefully coordinated campaign to move Congress and the United Nations in their direction, Mr. Bush’s other top national security officials said on television news programs today that the president would seek support from Congress and the United Nations for action, including a possible military strike. . . .
It was Mr. Cheney, in a nearly hour-long interview on Meet the Press, who outlined the darkest picture of Iraq’s potential threat, not only of Mr. Hussein’s efforts to acquire nuclear weapons but of his possible connections to al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups.
Mr. Cheney cited what he called a credible but unconfirmed intelligence report that Mohamed Atta, one of the Sept. 11 hijackers, had met at least once in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence official a few months before the attacks.
Of Mr. Hussein’s efforts to develop nuclear weapons, Mr. Cheney said, “All of the experience we have points in the direction that, in the past, we’ve underestimated the extent of his program.” He added that he hoped more intelligence about such efforts could soon be made public, without compromising sources, to help persuade allies, Congress and the public of the need for action.
“One of the real concerns about Saddam Hussein, as well,” he said, “is his biological weapons capability, the fact that he may at some point try to use smallpox, anthrax, plague, some other kind of biological agent against other nations, possibly including even the United States. So this is not just a one-dimensional threat.”
These allegations were sufficiently vague and unsupported to warrant serious questioning, yet they passed through their talk-show conduits into mainstream news reports largely as scripted. Why? For starters, the story was being told by the vice president of the United States himself – the kind of source to which journalists typically show deference in matters of national security. It also helped that this was the most dramatic story of the new millennium. More important, as noted above, the implicit journalistic logic of following the trail of government power drove the media’s own storytelling: the Bush administration was on a course to war, and the issue in the news was not whether the grounds for war were reasonable or honestly presented, but whether they would be opposed and thus derailed by Congress. The eventual failure to win support from the UN was insufficient to introduce serious challenges into the story, because the UN did not have, or was not perceived to have, the power to stop the administration from attacking Iraq.
As it turned out, there was no decisive domestic political opposition sufficient to block the path to war. There was, of course, significant opposition among European publics, but, like the UN resistance, those opponents lacked the perceived power to derail the administration’s war plans. The underreporting of numerous possible challenges to the war campaign effort boiled down to the simple fact that the administration’s claims were largely unopposed by the kinds of powerful officials or decisive institutional actors (the opposition party or key administration defectors) who might have rated another side in the news as it is constructed in the United States.
Journalists, of course, may point to a scattering of investigative reports as evidence that they entered independent concerns into the public record. While this may be strictly true, it does not address the larger issue of why the stories that attempt to hold officials accountable for gaps and outright deceptions often get such small play compared to the stories containing the gaps and deceptions. Unless the press reports sustained challenges to inadequate or deceptive government actions, several important democratic dynamics are unlikely to occur: (1) public opinion will not become meaningfully engaged in deliberation about important competing political considerations; (2) knowledgeable insiders may be reluctant to be whistleblowers absent the protective context of ongoing critical coverage; and (3) ill-considered policies formed and defended by “groupthink” operating inside the circles of power are unlikely to receive critical reexamination. As a result, key claims in the Bush administration’s sales campaign were repeated in the news time and again, with notable effects on public opinion, despite little supporting evidence.
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Coming Thursday: WMDs, al-Qaeda, and the Downing Street Memo: The intelligence failure of the press.
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Copyright notice: Excerpt from pages 13-28 of When the Press Fails: Political Power and the News Media from Iraq to Katrina by W. Lance Bennett, Regina G. Lawrence, and Steven Livingston, published by the University of Chicago Press. ©2007 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of U.S. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that this entire notice, including copyright information, is carried and provided that the University of Chicago Press is notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the University of Chicago Press. (Footnotes and other references included in the book may have been removed from this online version of the text.)
Posted on June 27, 2007