UPDATED: Rollback versus Roll Forward: A Reply to Jay Rosen
Since mid-April Jay Rosen (PressThink) and I have intended to discuss press coverage of the War on Terror and the battle for Iraq. At some point that discussion will happen.
But– in late July Jay asked me to respond to his post entitled “Rollback.” (The link leads to his initial “Rollback” post.)
As I analyzed Jay’s thesis, I knew my reply would be complicated. I had a couple of comments about the Bush Administration’s poisoned relationship with “the national press” in the cover story I wrote for the Weekly Standard last month. That article served as a starting point– but there was a lot more to say.
I’ve included Jay’s introduction to my reply (the one that appears at PressThink) and his response in the post below.
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From Jay Rosen:
On July 25, I sent Austin Bay (his bio, his blog) the following note:
In my post, Rollback, I argued that the Bush White House has been pro-active in pushing the press back, by: feeding it less information, answering almost none of the questions reporters choose to ask, reducing their role as interlocutor with the president, letting it be known within the White House that talking to the press would not only be frowned on but punished, and many other ways. This collection of policies I call rollback, which goes beyond wariness to change the terms of engagement with the press.
That is my view of what is happening. I think it correct but not exclusively so.
One of the benefits of doing a blog, as you know, is that you learn what people say back to you; and I know from doing PressThink that for a healthy percentage who support the President, or despise the cultural left, or believe with all their might in what we’re doing in Iraq, or think the news media hopelessly biased, “rollback” sounds like a pretty good idea. They’ve told me so, any number of times.
My questions for you. Do you think rollback has been happening to the press under Bush, 2001-05? Or is my description off? And if there is press rollback, is it a wise policy, a necessary one?
Below is what he wrote in reply. I will save my commentary to the end. We’re publishing it at both blogs today.
Special to PressThink
Roll Forward: Why the Bush White House
Needs the Press to Win the Big One
by Austin Bay
One: What “Rollback” Echoes With
In his July 16 post, Rollback, Jay selects an interesting term–a frame, really–to describe what he calls the current Bush Administration’s “press strategy.”
Here’s his definition: “Press rollback, the policy for which McClellan signed on, means not feeding but starving the beast, downgrading journalism where possible, and reducing its effectiveness as an interlocutor with the President. This goes for Bush theory, as well as Bush practice. The President and his advisors have declared invalid the ‘fourth estate’ and watchdog press model.”
What’s in a name? “Rollback” has historic echoes– including “rolling back the Communists,” a strategy Dwight Eisenhower rejected as too risky. In early 1953 Ike had his national security team wargame the Truman Administration’s strategy of “containment.” Eisenhower commissioned two teams, one tasked with evaluating containment and various related options, the other evaluating “rollback” or offensive-type strategies against the Soviet Union.
Ike had his teams examine the options in detail. Rollback’s economic costs–as well as its risk of all-out war–led Eisenhower to conclude that a modified-form of containment (a reinvigorated shield of conventional forces backed by the threat of nuclear retaliation) made the most sense.
Ike knew the Cold War would be a long, tedious test of wills, and he agreed with the Truman Administration’s assessment that the social, political, and economic vitality of the U.S. would be very effective tools in that struggle. The Hungarian revolt in 1956 was the ultimate test for Ike’s decision to forego “rollback” and stick with “containing” the Soviets. Because the U.S. didn’t intervene or back the armed revolt, Hungary suffered another 33 years of Red fascist Hell. Of course, nuclear war didn’t turn Central Europe into radioactive glass, either. And ultimately, Communism was rolled back
Jay mentioned the “long roots” of the recent spat between White House Press Secretary and the “gaggle” of reporters. The roots are longer–and thornier–than his original post suggests.
Jay and I agree that the Bush Administration and what (for the moment) I’ll call “the national press” are locked in a figurative war. Let’s stipulate that this figurative war occurs in the midst of a real (non-figurative) and ever active global conflict–both hot and cold–that is first and foremost an information war waged by an enemy that is itself a strategic information power. I speak of course of Al Qaeda. The “press conflict” and US domestic political clashes cannot be isolated from this multi-dimensional war and its harsh historical circumstances. Those who think it can deceive themselves.
A quick review of Al Qaeda’s information warfare capabilities helps put the White House’s biggest challenge in perspective. Yup, Al Qaeda’s a more serious “information” challenge than the “the national press.” Let me quote from a recent column:
Al Qaeda…understands the power of perceived grievance and the appeal of Utopia. In the late 1990s Osama Bin Laden said Al Qaeda’s strategic goal was restoring the Islamic caliphate. Bin Laden expressed a special hatred for Turkey’s Kemal Ataturk, who ended the caliphate in 1924. History, going wrong for Islamist supremacists at least since the 16th century, really failed when the caliphate dissolved. Though Al Qaeda’s time-line to Utopia remains hazy, once the caliphate returns the decadent modern world will fade as Western power collapses– and presumably Eastern power as well. (Islamists are active in China’s Sinkiang province.) At some point Bin Laden-interpreted Islamic law will bring strict bliss to the entire world. If this sounds vaguely like a Marxist “Workers Paradise” that’s no accident– the Communists also justified the murder of millions pursuing their atheist Utopia.
The appeal to perceived grievance and promise of an Islamist utopia made Al Qaeda a regional information power in a Middle East where other political options were denied by tyrants. The 9/11 attacks made Al Qaeda a global information power: they became an international advertising campaign for Jihad. Four years later Al Qaeda remains a strategic information power, but little else. In every other measure of influence and success, Al Qaeda is very weak.
Our world, however, is “information-rich,” and “compressed.” I made this point in a Weekly Standard article that appeared July 22, 2005:
Oceans still spawn hurricanes, but they don’t stop ICBMs or terrorists. On 9/11 al Qaeda demonstrated that what the World War I generation called “over there” is nowadays very close to “back here.” America–according to its enemies–is everywhere, but a computer keystroke finds al Qaeda, Chinese spam, Nigerian scams, North Korean agitprop, Bhutanese rug prices, and Sudan’s hideous genocide in Darfur. An airline ticket, a sick tourist, and 22 hours moves the Asian flu from Bangkok to Denver. The upscale phrase is “technological compression,” but the down-to-Earth 21st century fact is all of us live next door.
When it comes to understanding the effects of technological compression in their area of expertise, public health officials are way ahead of journalists. No one doubts the flu is a contagion that harms us all—- though the health officials often face huge political fights when they attempt to impose quarantines that affect trade. Information isn’t a bug–health officials rely on the free flow of information to stop the transmission of infectious disease–but rapidly transmitted information can also kill. Here’s an example: A reporter’s or US military officer’s verbal slip-up on tv “live from the battlefield” can fatally compromise an on-going operation. By fatal I mean fatal for American soldiers.
Sparring between Scott McClellan and “the national press” comes in the midst of a war fought in a world where video and audio travel at the speed of light, but cultural, historical, and political contexts still move at the uncertain, iffy velocities of education, thoughtful analysis, common interests, and mutual respect, as well as accurate translation.
Two: The New York to DC to LA Axis
The first word in Jay’s definition of “rollback” is “press.”
What do we mean by “press?” I used a provisional term “national press.” But–thanks to technology–there is no “national” press, not anymore, not in a world with technological compression as a defining feature. PressThink and my web log are both international platforms. So is a cellphone with a camera. Middle school teachers know their classroom yawns can be e-photographed by the kid-in-the-back and sent to every giggling student on campus. No campus, however, is an island. The photo of the awkward yawn can end up on a computer screen in New Guinea.
Quoting The Economist, Jay describes a case of lost power:
Power is moving away from old-fashioned networks and newspapers; it is swinging towards, on the one hand, smaller news providers (in the case of blogs, towards individuals) and, on the other, to the institutions of government, which have got into the business of providing news more or less directly.
If power is moving away from the “big” news engines, the next question has to be: the power to do what? Power to make money in the same way networks and newspapers have made money for the last fifty years? Yup– that business model’s moving. Power to investigate? It’s arguable that institutions of government cracked Watergate, since we now know Woodward and Bernstein’s Deep Throat was the FBI’s deputy director. Power to transmit information? I’ll agree that this form of “press power” is more diffuse: welcome to the 21st century. As Jay notes, government websites can dispense with the press as “middle man.” Readers can interpret the press release for themselves.
Or perhaps Jay means the “national press’” power to set an agenda is fading? Jay writes:
I think Rove also knew that the press is that rare special interest group that feels constrained in how “organized” it can be to protest or strike back. In fact the national press, which is only a semi-institution to start with (semi-legitimate, semi-independent, semi-protected by law, and semi-supported by the American people) has no strategic thinking or response capability at all.
So who is “the special interest group?” Here’s what I think the Bush Administration means by “the Press,” and I think it intersects with a definition Jay would grant has a degree of validity: The NY-DC-LA (Nid-Claw) axis that dominated American political and cultural information from the late 1920s to the mid-1990s.
What are the Nid-Claws most noticeable characteristics? Urban? Yes. Politically liberal? According to the received wisdom of polls, nine out of ten members of “the national press” say they are Democrats. Culturally liberal? Return to the description “urban.” When I lived on Manhattan’s Upper West Side in the early 1980s, I knew precisely six other Reagan Republicans. I was the only one who’d say it loud and say it proud.
Recently an international reporter told me (with a touch of bitterness) that his stories have to meet a specific editor’s expectations. That’s the word he used: “expectations.” Of course, you say, the editor is his boss. The reporter felt–felt, heck, he knew– important information he gleaned in the field was often cut from the account back home. Important nuances were lost. Do we blame it all on limited column inches or limited air time? Exercising good judgment, relying on professional experience, and just good, common sense editing are the upside of an information template– the affirmatives. Personal bias, ignorance of the facts, and lack of field experience are the downside– the negatives.
I’ve had way too many field reporters tell me that the people who get promoted to editor tend to be the NY and DC “stay at homes” who play the office and local political games well, but have minimal field experience themselves. It would be interesting to see some hard statistics to either dispute or support the anecdotes. The key questions wouldn’t simply be “years in the field” but “years where?”
Five years Paris, London, and Tokyo don’t score a tenth as many points as four months in Somalia, circa 1993. But I’ll wager that one type of editorial bias derives from the urban editors whose central experiences are Beltway, Manhattan and Hollywood politics or corporate gamesmanship within the media hierarchies themselves. This is a tough question to ask reporters; it could put their career on the line. However, if the “urban political milieu” affects editors, then that needs to be recognized and the bias vetted.
The memory of old institutional successes deeply affects the NY-DC-LA axis today. Two great gotcha successes drive the national press: Vietnam and Watergate. The Bush Administration thinks these “press templates” utterly distort today’s world. Some old guard media institutions operate on a “paper template”: a fossilized notion that information is still disseminated at the speed of the postman or delivery boy.
Again, from the July 22 Weekly Standard:
Unfortunately, many politicians and journalists still habitually live by 20th-century templates. Newsweek certainly thought [they’re] there and we’re here” when it ran its notorious “Koran flushing” anecdote, sparking deadly riots in Pakistan. Two other templates were also in play then: the Vietnam and the Watergate templates. Vietnam and Watergate for three decades have provided the New York-Washington-L.A. media axis with convenient–if reductive–headlines. The Vietnam and Watergate rules are simple and cynical. Rule One: Presume the U.S. government is lying–especially when the president is a Republican. Rule Two: Presume the worst about the U.S. military–even when the president is a Democrat. Rule Three: Allegations by “Third World victims” are presumptively true, while U.S. statements are met with arrogant contempt.
Yes, that’s the myth of the Noble Savage re-cast, just like “blood for oil” is a Cold War lie in jihadi clothing. Iraq is not Vietnam. Nor is Afghanistan. Nor was Desert Storm. But what’s the first template applied to any US military engagement since 1975? Vietnam.
Three: How About Rolling Forward?
The press templates are not only inaccurate, they are a disservice to the citizens the “national” press claims to serve. They are archaic domestic political frames that are particularly damaging in the midst of a global war against a strategic information power.
Editors and producers need to roll forward to the 21st century, and perhaps a new generation will. Glenn Reynolds says that 40 to 45 is the cut-off age between the graying fogies reveling in Vietnam/Watergate glory; and a newer, more acute crop of newshounds. He thinks the old boys and girls will have to retire before the templates go. I think –given the intricate and deadly global war– we don’t have that luxury.
Jay says the Bush Administration has declared the Fourth Estate and the “watchdog” press model invalid.
If there’s been a declaration I missed it. Jay’s rhetoric is a bit edgy here, but that’s the nature of blog debate. Let’s consider the core of his contention: the “watchdog” model. “Watchdog” (forgive me) begs a number of questions, including questions about the watchdog. Who does the watchdog watch? How does it watch? How does it bark? At whom does it bark? Like the dog Sherlock Holmes found strangely silent, how often does the watchdog not bark? Does the NY-DC-LA watchdog bark at Democratic and Republican presidents with equal ferocity? Is it even a watchdog, or is it a watch-pack, or watch-herd. (Herd is a more apt description of the press descending on Aruba to report on a missing tourist or hanging out in Santa Barbara while Michael Jackson faces a jury.)
Which leads to another point where Jay and I agree: The Bush Administration despises the “national press.” Key members of the current group despised the press prior to 9/11. I’ve presented the argument that “rollback” or “containment” by the Bush Administration, in the context of the War On Terror and 21st century information technologies, makes a kind of strategic sense. The “Vietnam” and “Watergate” templates distort. The White House leads the war effort, not a press clique dedicated to “playing gotcha” and/or “setting the agenda.” However, lurking behind the “rollback/containment” policy is a deep, abiding anger—and an anger that isn’t in the best interest of America.
Let’s not totally disparage anger as an emotion. The KosKidz at the DailyKos thrive on anger. Jay’s Rollback post displays an occasional flash of anger; and from the perspective of a journalism professor who knows, personally and professionally, that honest reporting protects and strengthens our democracy, his anger is just. The reporters snapping at Scott McClellan during the press conference Jay analyzes are angry; they believe they’ve been misled or lied to.
Key members of the Bush Administration believe they have been the victims of lies or victims of a relentless, decades-long selective reporting and commentary by members of the big media axis. Are Republicans ticked at Ambassador Joe Wilson’s truth challenged New York Times essay? One reason they are ticked is because they have seen this same kind of canard before. Recall Gary Sick and his nut-case story that George H W Bush flew to Paris on an SR-71 to negotiate with Iran? (See this, and Daniel Pipes with his Wall St Journal response; this link shows the conspiracy theory Sick pushed was first “reported” by Lyndon Larouche.)
The 1983 “Euro-Missile Crisis” is another bitter memory: the rhetorical hokum that Bush is “more dangerous than bin Laden” is 1983 recast. Oh, the accusations of 1983! Ronald Reagan was stupid. Reagan was a dangerous cowboy, a warmonger seeking the nuclear destruction of the USSR. Reagan was — good heavens — a unilateralist. In 2003 the Mayor of London called Bush “the greatest threat to life on the planet,” but then Ken Livingstone isn’t called “Red” because of his hair color. Hollywood also repeated a refrain. In 1983 ABC TV produced “The Day After,” a lousy piece of video propaganda that basically argued US nuclear forces would inevitably destroy the planet. In 2004 Michael Moore produced “Fahrenheit 911,” an even more explicitly anti-American film asserting Bush conspired to launch the 9/11 attacks.
Ironically, the Euromissile Crisis proved to be the last big political battle of the Cold War. In 1989, the Berlin Wall cracked, and the communists’ workers’ paradise was exposed as the Red Fascist gulag it always was. The repetition of 1983’s political scams by Democrats and their media allies—political scams that events would prove to be strategically foolish and historically wrong– receives little media attention outside of the Wall Street Journal, Washington Times and Fox News Network.
Republicans look, listen, and remember with chagrin. And chagrin–in the George W. Bush White House–has turned to disdain. At the human level it’s understandable. Why give such a biased, and myopic bunch a break?
Here’s a good reason: America must win the War On Terror, and the poisoned White House—national press relationship harms that effort. History will judge the Bush Administration’s prosecution of the War On Terror. A key strategic issue for the current White House–perhaps a determinative issue for historians–will be its success or failure in getting subsequent administrations to sustain the political and economic development policies that truly winning the War On Terror will entail.
The Bush Administration needs the dying, withering, but still powerful press axis to do this.
Four: Bridging the Political Cycle
Jay’s post quotes an unidentified Bush Administration minion who says:
We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality, judiciously, as you will, we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors, and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.
I think Jay includes this story for several reasons. The man’s arrogance is supposed to indict the administration, and to a degree it does. His demeanor reminds me of the snooty, brat presumptiveness of George Stephanopoulos during his stint at the Clinton White House. (And for that matter, his continued brat act at ABC.)
If America is an empire it is an empire without precedent, which suggests the word is at best an inadequate description. America is a creative idea that defies geography, but I doubt this Bush minion understands that.
I also doubt our minion has ever served in the military; certainly he never served under fire. His are the words of a third-order actor. The minion’s soliloquy is a decadent and degraded version of Teddy Roosevelt’s critique of the critic. TR wrote, and I quote at length:
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.
Shame on the man of cultivated taste who permits refinement to develop into fastidiousness that unfits him for doing the rough work of a workaday world. Among the free peoples who govern themselves there is but a small field of usefulness open for the men of the cloistered life who shrink from contact with their fellows. Still less room is there for those who deride or slight what is done by those who actually bear the brunt of the day; nor yet for those others who always profess that they would like to take action, if only the conditions of life were not exactly what they are. The man who does nothing cuts the same sordid figure in the pages of history, whether he be a cynic, a fop, or a voluptuary.
This is how the Administration’s raconteur casts himself, as a man “in the arena,” though I strongly suspect his arena of conflict is the Beltway, not in Baghdad or Al Anbar Province. It is the United States of America, however, that is actually “in” the arena. The Bush Administration knows this. Here’s how I put it in the recent Weekly Standard article:
Al Qaeda’s jihadists plotted a multi-generational war in the early 1990s our enemies began proselytizing London and New York mosques and in doing so began planting cadres throughout the world. If the US leads a successful global counter-terror war many of these cadres will turn gray, get fat, and rot. But that must be a multi-generational war, which means a multi-administration war, which means bridging the whipsaw of the US political cycle.
The Bush Administration has not done that, at least not in any focused and sustained fashion.
9-11’s strategic ambush sought to force America to fight on Al Qaeda’s terms, to suck the United States into a no-win Afghan war, to bait the United States into launching a “crusade against Islam.” Osama bin Laden believed he possessed an edge in ideological appeal, “faith based” strength against what he perceived as U.S. decadence. U.S. failure in Afghanistan would ignite a global “clash of civilizations” pitting all Muslims against America.
Toppling Saddam and bringing the hope of democracy to the Middle East strategically changed Al Qaeda. Time is now turned against Al Qaeda, in the form of a New Iraqi Army, in the political shape of a new, pluralistic Iraqi government, examples of what General Abizaid calls Iraqis taking control of their own lives.
So the rats have come to Iraq to fight. Building a New Iraq and defeating those who would destroy it is the grand strategy, but the Bush Administration didn’t make that case explicit. It suggested the case but not at the center of its public diplomacy. In retrospect that was a long-term political mistake. The Bush Administration must revitalize its public diplomacy, and that means “rolling forward” and establishing a new, more mature relationship with the press. Someone much higher up the food chain than Mr. Empire Creating His Own Reality has to make that call.
But the NY-DC-LA axis must also “roll forward.” It’s in their institutional interest as well as simple survival. Joe Wilson hasn’t gotten away with the game as cleanly as Gary Sick did, and Dan Rather, well, he’s like Conrad’s Mistah Kurtz, only he doesn’t know it. The Internet is doing precisely what Jay says it’s doing. Here’s Jay’s quote from Patrick Healty writing in the May 22 edition of the NY Times:
Scrutiny is intense. The Internet amplifies professional sins, and spreads the word quickly. And when a news organization confesses its shortcomings, it only draws more attention. Also, there is no unified front - no single standard of professionalism, no system of credentials. So rebuilding credibility is mostly a task shouldered network to network, publication to publication.
Network to network, publication to publication. No, the big city press axis is no single outfit, but it is a club. There may be no single standard, but there are club leaders. So let’s pick on the leaders.
Here are a few things The New York Times can do to heal itself and set a new standard for White House-press relations in the midst of war. (And don’t say I’m confusing reporting with the editorial page. Joe Wilson and Gary Sick began on the editorial page, and their allegations fed national reporting. As I recall, Sick ended up on The PBS News Hour, chatting with Jim Lehrer.)
First off, Fire Paul Krugman and replace him with a real economist like Arnold Kling or Walter Williams. Krugman’s been predicting economic doom for four years. He needs to get a sign and walk the streets, not write a newspaper column. Turn Maureen Dowd into a gossip columnist. Replace Dowd with someone like Froma Harrop (a New Yorker who has moved to Providence). The Times could also fire the op-ed editor who inserted Bush Hate into Phil Carter’s column. (See my post for the details.)
Here are a few other suggestions for The Axis:
* Find Dan Rather’s missing Lucy Ramirez, the source for his fake but accurate documents. If they can’t find Lucy then that’s a big story, too.
* Get us a copy of the still-unreleased Eason Jordan tape where the CNN bigwig accused the US military of targeting (meaning murdering) journalists.
* Remove Linda Foley as national president of The Newspaper Guild. Linda Foley repeated Jordan’s slander.
* When Roger Ailes gets dissed for running Fox News (Why, he’s a Republican!) mention the news presence of George Stephanopoulos and Tim Russert and Chris Matthews and Bill Moyers in the very next exhalation.
* When Abu Ghraib rates a story or report, include a historical comment on FDR’s detention camps for Japanese Americans. Good guys make mistakes in war.
Jay, pass the ideas on to your Axis buddies. Tell ‘em it’s for starters. Ending rollback means rolling forward by both the Administration and The Axis.
Austin Bay copyright August 11, 2005
Jay Rosen replies:
Well there’s a lot that I don’t agree with in Austin Bay’s post, just as I’m sure there’s a lot he would dispute in my various posts on Bush and the national press. This is normal. (Right?) I reserve the right to amplify those points of diagreement later on.
The headline for me is that Austin Bay, proud Republican, friend of the Administration’s project in Iraq and a veteran of the war, believes the clever people in the White House are making a mistake in their policy of rolling back the press, which he prefers to call “containment.” He does not deny that the push back happened, and he says it made a certain sense to Republicans tired of the gotcha games and 70s frames.
Still, it’s dumb policy, he says.
Why is it dumb? According to Austin, it’s dumb because if you’re serious about a war on terror you know that it will have to be fought consistently and well across Administrations. This means that several waves of “players,” who are likely to be from both parties, will come in and out of policy-making before the war can in any sense be put to rest, or won. Each new generation has to understand what United States policy is, and continue on the path Bush the Younger set. This is a path Bay himself supports.
How is the strategy going to work if it shifts with each new cast of players? Austin says it can’t. Al Queda, a global information power, will be waiting on any wavering American governments show. Thus a key factor in winning the Big One is the Bush Administration’s “success or failure in getting subsequent administrations to sustain the political and economic development policies that truly winning the War On Terror will entail.”
For this, he says, the Bush team “needs the dying, withering, but still powerful press axis.” As far as I know, this has never occured to anyone in the White House.
What can the press do? (Here I am adding my own sense of what Austin was getting at.) For a long time the Washington press corps was considered part of the “permanent government.” There was a reason for that: Tim Russert and Jim Lehrer don’t leave, but Administrations come and go. This is exactly what drives people nuts about the big media establishment (how do we vote these guys out of office?) but Austin makes a different point.
Like it or not, journalists “carry” institutional memory. They port the story and its premises over from year-to-year, government to government. The press can create expectations of continuity by the way it looks at policy. It can treat as “surprising news” any plan to depart from principles established in 2002-03. At presidential debates it can ask the questions that would expose a shift in strategy. But will it? Not the way things are going, he says.
“The Bush Administration must revitalize its public diplomacy,” Austin writes. (I think the “re” is a bit much. This has never been a vital part of the White House’s approach.) “And that means ‘rolling forward’ and establishing a new, more mature relationship with the press.” What he means by more mature is found, I think, in this observation:
Ike knew the Cold War would be a long, tedious test of wills, and he agreed with the Truman Administration’s assessment that the social, political, and economic vitality of the U.S. would be very effective tools in that struggle.
A mature view would be that a weakened, timid or corrupted press, discredited and marginalized, under constant attack from office holders, or imploding from its own mistakes, is no sign of a strong and vital polity.
To me this was a key passage: “Key members of the Bush Administration believe they have been the victims of lies or victims of a relentless, decades-long selective reporting and commentary by members of the big media axis.” I think he’s exactly right. Once upon a time, Republicans had a more suspicious ear for the victim’s mentality.
“Why give such a biased, and myopic bunch a break?” writes Austin. But giving the press a break is not the way I see it. I don’t think chief-of-staff Andrew Card should do that– give reporters a break. But he could ask himself this: In the global arena where the war on terror is actually being fought, in what sense is a weakened, discredited, co-opted, or truth-starved press in the strategic interests of the United States?
I will be interested in hearing your reactions here and at Austin Bay’s blog.
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Jay and I are interested in comments on his initial post and my response.
For PressThink readers and new visitors, here’s a link to a January 3, 2005 article I wrote for the Weekly Standard, entitled The Millennium War. It has some background material relevant to my respons to Jay. So does this one from December 9, 2002, entitled Reinventing Iraq.
UPDATE: I received an email from “a knowledgeable reader.” He mentioned Peter Braestrup’s “The Big Story” — a book about the press and the 1968 Tet Offensive in Vietnam. Here’s a link to an Air University essay on the press and Tet.
” in what sense is a weakened, discredited, co-opted, or truth-starved press in the strategic interests of the United States?” It is if the press is an enemy of the best interests of the United States, and so it has proven to be. And not just lately.
Comment by megapotamus — 8/19/2005 @ 9:59 am
I think Jay wishes to gloss over the key “roll forward†point of your post: the media’s responsibility to regain credibility. I would dispute the need for a similar roll forward for the administration, but not because I don’t think it valuable. My contention: organizations or institutions have very specific roles. As you have eloquently described, the role of actor and reporter is necessary, and in the WOT both roles require some change. But change is not always unilateral, nor is unilateral change in this case advisable. For the Bush administration to “roll forward†prior to the reforms needed in the MSM, would only receive the response we could easily predict. The press will hail any move toward reconciliation on the part of Bush towards the media as a “victory†for the MSM and their current worldview. Just as current polls (suspect) are being held high by the press as indicative of the failure of the Bush administration. The current crop of liberal media players are (mostly)dogs, and deserve no more respect than what the Bush WH is giving. Is this a problem, yes! What’s the solution? You, gentle reader, are looking at it!
Comment by David Brenna — 8/19/2005 @ 11:19 am
The press has gotten it wrong so often, I think that the Administration would be stupid to trust some outlets (The New York Times and CBS News come readily to mind). And in this, it is the press which has taken the same “blame America first” routine since the 1970s. Ever since Walter Cronkite got the Tet Offensive wrong (note: it was a smashing defeat for the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese), the media seems to side against the U.S. military. All too often, key facts on major controversies (like the interrogation methods used on Mohammed Qahtami and Qahtami’s background) are omitted if they are inconvenient to an agenda. The media will blow crises way out of proportion - like the alleged difficulties the Stryker is facing in Iraq of the brakes on the F/A-18. We also have had people in Iraq pretty much all but say, “The media is not telling the whole story.” Jennifer O’Doan has practically called the press “anti-war” in a July column. Captain Sherman Powell, currently serving in Iraq, told Matt Lauer, “Sir, if I got my news from the newspapers also, I’d be pretty depressed.” The major media outlets are also guilty of not reporting on things that would change the American public’s perception about whether liberating Iraq was worth it - like a memo recovered by Toronto Star reporter Mitch Potter that indicates that Saddam’s regime had a relationship with al-Qaeda. Unless someone reads the Weekly Standard, they really would not know of these things. We are winning on the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq, but we’re losing in this country’s newsrooms. The press needs to shape up here - and it may mean that rather than being ignored by the Administration, they need to be called out.
Comment by HaroldHutchison — 8/19/2005 @ 11:44 am
I’m 62 and have read the New York Times on and off since the 50s. I’ve lived through Vietnam and Watergate and was against the Vietnam war and for nailing Nixon for his sins. But I agree with Austin Bay that there is a NY-DC-LA press axis and that they falsely portray the current world through the lens of the Vietnam and Watergate templates. It is hard to see the Bush attempts to roll back the media from where I live in Australia because what I mostly see is the relentless opposition to the administration in the press. I can see that just trying to ignore the press isn’t working very well. Still it is indicative of the tightness of the media’s control of how Iraq is reported that the only journalist in Iraq I am aware of reporting the war in the tradition of Ernie Pyle is Michael Yon. Reading Chrenkoff’s ‘Good News From Iraq’ is likewise a devastating indictment of the onesidedness of the press. I don’t think the current state of affairs is in the national interest. I’m a Democrat by background but I believe we really have gotten into a cultural divide so great that neither side seems willing to talk constructively to the other. It is good to see Austin and Jay conducting this exchange in a civil manner and agreeing where they can. We need a lot more of that.
Comment by lgude — 8/19/2005 @ 12:12 pm
Any suggestion that a Presidential administration has weakened, discredited, co-opted, or truth-starved the national press is a good example of the way the national press has in fact ruined itself. Blaming one single entity for the collapse of a huge industry like the national press is a sign of disconnection from reality. No one could have demolished the “legacy media” but itself.
Comment by William P. Zeller — 8/19/2005 @ 12:16 pm
Austin has provided a substantial critique of the Bush press policy and why changes are needed, in his view. What we need from Jay is a substantial critique of the behavior of the NYDCLA press and what possible improvements in their performance he would like to see.
Comment by JohnH — 8/19/2005 @ 12:48 pm
The nice thing about this disagreement is that the ultimate resolution will be in the arenas that IMHO define the American Experiment: democracy and capitalism. As long as the public has a choice - which it did not until the onset of the maturation of the internet - they will vote as to the ultimate winners of this debate. A neighbor of mine cancelled her subscription to the NYT because she could not tolerate their liberal bias (the existence of which their ombudsman, based on sophisticated journalistic technique, denies). After several weeks of the Post, she had to go back to the Times for all of the non-news sections. Consider what will happen when an entrepreneur fills that niche with an expanded version of the free advertising journals, with either a non-editorializing news section, or no news at all. After all, I manage to get all of the news I need/desire, in extreme depth and with great analysis, off of the internet. This effect (”hit them in the pocketbook”) is picking up steam as MSM advertising revenue is beginning to drop (it is too early yet to say “plummeting”). FNC is expanding its leadership in cable-news viewership, while CBS is soliciting advice from its interns as to how to revitalize its news services. Air America is significant primarily as fodder for the blogosphere - as is the the MSM non-reporting of it. Publishers are driven by economic interests - although Soros may create an exception to this eventually - and will have to accomodate to reporting rather than preaching. Monopolies distort and corrupt economic environments; what you call an “Axis” does the same for the intellectual/news environment. The internet and cable television appears to have broken the stranglehold of MSM. The next step, I suspect, is when when a blogger-based consortium obtains White House Press accreditation. Somehow, I think the current administration would be only to happy to comply. Changes in the world of journalism school will probably be more glacial. However, as graduates of Columbia, etc., find fewer jobs in MSM, and certainly in left-leaning media, the schools will have to accomodate. Capitalism and democracy work wonders; the election is on and people are voting with their mice and channel-changers.
Comment by akiva eisenberg — 8/19/2005 @ 1:07 pm
COL Bay, you make some outstanding recommendations on what the NYDCLA Axis must do to regain their credibility. But it will be a cold day in Hell before they ever do any of it.
Comment by KenPrescott — 8/19/2005 @ 3:08 pm
Braestrup’s Big Story ought to be required reading. I also recommend this column by Arnaud du Borchgrave for a more readable version of the story of how the media blew it with regards to the Tet Offensive, and how they refused to correct the record.
Comment by HaroldHutchison — 8/19/2005 @ 3:36 pm
Your note was great — my substantial ideas are on Jay’s blog. The Vietnam “victory” of the press, in advocating leaving, and getting the US to leave, is a moral rot in the entire Leftist, no longer liberal, minds. Their US policy led to acceptance of genocide. They wanted the US to leave; the US left; the evil commie genocides started.
Comment by Tom Grey - Liberty Dad — 8/19/2005 @ 6:06 pm
In my opinion, both views are overly complicated by far. It seems much more basic than that. The NYDCLA axis (more generally, the “MSMâ€), has declared itself the absolute enemy of America, and is engaging is what can only be described as open warfare. Any attachment to “America†felt by the MSM is for an imagined nation that they define for everyone else, one over which they would have de facto control, and one where the despised “little people†in “flyover country†have no say about anything. Such an America does not exist, and has never existed. Therefore, they apparently see themselves engaged in a revolutionary battle, once in which the ends justify the means. And proceed accordingly. Bush and his administration, despite their many faults, understand this and rightly consider the MSM the enemy. Again correctly, the Bush White House views any attempt to appease, or compromise with, the MSM as unproductive as it has been with bin Laden. In other words, hopeless on its face. Were there any remaining doubts, the MSM’s totally shameful behavior during last year’s election cycle no doubt put them to rest. But Bush has plenty on his plate, and probably sees no reason to either join battle or offer the enemy encouragement. He is undoubtedly well aware, from innumerable examples, that what the Administration says will be misrepresented, lied about, distorted, ridiculed or simply buried. So to the extent possible, he simply ignores them. By all accounts, he is not a man that is overly worried about what others think of him. The irony is that being ignored is the ultimate affront to the self-appointed “important people†in the NYDCLA axis, made more stinging as they see their influence declining elsewhere. As further insult, the White House makes a point of providing access to small local and regional media outlets, where they apparently believe they will get a fairer hearing. Yes, this all certainly all damages America. But there are no “solutions†other than an extreme left-wing Democratic president or the collapse of the MSM. For the next three and one-half years, neither is likely to happen.
Comment by GaryS — 8/19/2005 @ 6:09 pm
In general I agree with Austin Bay. If I was President Bush and his administration I wouldn’t trust the press corp to honestly report the apparent color of the sky without flavoring it with some editorial slant that would somehow support their world view. I have little use for the old media. I rarely watch TV except for an occassional sports show, I read no newspaper except for my local offering and then only for the local news and I get all my information from the internet. And I think that is where this administration and the Republican Party is going to get it’s message out. The can’t count on honest reporting.
Comment by John Clark — 8/19/2005 @ 6:20 pm
If the Cold War was won despite the best efforts of The Press to lose the war, why is co-operation with The Press neccessary today to win the hot war against Islamofascism? Especially now that The Press is weaker and dying and the Islamofascists are so much less appealing than the communists ever were.
Comment by Brad — 8/19/2005 @ 6:49 pm
By all means, a responsible media is key to the success in the War on Terror, but we must sanction the current Axis in Regimen, and wait for the flowering of democratic media per the blogosphere and post-blogosphere. It helps not at all to aid the current media that voraciously pimps out Gitmo gossip and slander, cries ‘Quagmire!†just three weeks into Afghanistan and barely ONE week into Iraq, screams down the Patriot Act and then reads the riot act on why Bush let 9-11 on purpose (Dowd), pushes for prosecution of the Marine in Fallujah, laments the one night abuses of Abu Ghraib, and manufactures stories out of whole cloth to incite violence amongst Muslims (via Korans in toilets). To whatever currency we must give the hearts and minds mission of the press, clearly we must not empower an establishment that mercilessly refuses American values for the jihadi nail-bombers. A hostile press in the minority and on the wane is better than a hostile press in the ascendant.
Comment by Brad — 8/19/2005 @ 7:17 pm
I would like to repeat the observation made by JohnH above: Austin’s offered a substantial critique of both the press AND the Bush White House, and made suggestions for what both can do to improve things. Jay continues merely to blame the White House for everything. At least a third of America–as high as 45 or even 55% in some polls — view the press with deep mistrust if not outright contempt. The White House did that? Evil right wing demagogues did that? If the press refuses to grant any possibility of any truth to its critics, then it can’t get better. The White House views the press very much as a hostile, enemy element. You know what? So do millions of other Americans. If that can’t be faced head on, and answered with something more than “well that’s just far right fringe demagoguery,” nothing will get better, and the mainstream press will continuously be bypassed. Indeed, if the NY-DC-LA axis doesn’t reform itself, I predict that future administrations will simply cease to have a White House press corps, or will start restricting it to a tiny fraction of what it is now. Why bother when they can put out their press releases straight to the internet, broadcast their speeches straight to radio, television, and internet, and simply dispense with all but a handful of carefully selected reporters? Mind you, I’m not saying the Bushies should do this, I’m saying someday soon some Democratic or Republican administratin will finally set that standard. And by “carefully selected” I don’t even mean partisan, I mean reporters they know will not play “gotcha” games and will ask intelligent questions and won’t be jagoffs. I honestly think that’s what we’re going to see, although the press has an opportunity here to stave that off and also have some influence on how the change gets made and how major it is.
Comment by Dean Esmay — 8/19/2005 @ 9:15 pm
I tend to agree with most people on this post. Why would any conservative in thier right mind trust the main stream media outlets? They have shown themselves clearly in this struggle, terrorists=good, America=bad. I have no use for them and I applaud president Bush for not pandering to these self important nabobs of negativity.
Comment by Jake — 8/19/2005 @ 9:58 pm
Rollback versus Roll Forward: A Reply to Jay Rosen Is someone pulling our leg:…
Trackback by News from Around the World — 8/19/2005 @ 10:29 pm
We are complicating this much more than it needs to be. The traditional media has been historically and demonstrably hostile against Republican Administrations. From Uncle Cronkite’s “the war in Viet Nam is unwinnable” to the Bush National guard memos, it has gone out of its way to shape public opinion in order to destroy Republicans and help Democrats. Their power is now severily diluted due to their loss of control over news sources. The Blogs, internet, etc are becoming the citizen watchdogs over a clearly and overtly biased cadre (dare I say cabal) of traditional media. Their loss of power is not due to the administrations hostility towards them but to tectonic shift in information distribution. The administrations aparent hostility is not in failing to answer questions, but in the questions asked. When you get repeated versions of the “have you stopped beating your wife?” questions, it will not matter how you answer it. You see, the MSM has their own vision of the truth, they create it in their cocktail parties and art exhibits in the NYDCLA domain and repudiate anything that does not fit their expected views. They demand that everyone believes their cries of “the earth is flat” and then decry as hostle anyone not willing to follow their gospel. Is it hostile to patiently respond with logic to Helen Thomases rants? If it was me, I would have long time ago thrown the drooling moonbat of the White House roof onto the rose garden; I dont take kindly at slander and libel. The MSM is been replaced, inevitably and irreversibly by the new media. Attempting to reform the MSM would be like attempting to reform the UN, a wasted effort. Lets not even try. Lets instead celebrate the demise of the fourth socialist column, and accept the rapid ascent into adulthood of the reader regulated citizen media. Want a great example of it? Go read Michael Yon.
Comment by Rey — 8/19/2005 @ 10:50 pm
The Press Not Getting It–and a Proposal for the White House Austin Bay, an Iraq war vet and writer, and Jay Rosen, a journalism professor, have an interesting dialogue about the Bush White House’s treatment of the press, and the press treatment o…
Trackback by Dean's World — 8/20/2005 @ 3:49 am
Motivating the MSM to report from the perspective of American national interests is problematic; there is no incentive whatsoever for them to do so. Experience, education, and financial reward all tend to push journalists toward reporting templates directly aligned with international popularity polls. If one tracks the American MSM against international polls, there is virtually no disconnect at all. Their product does not support American conservative thought because the Western international community is not supportive (hell, it’s terrified!) of Americans who fall out of the waltz to two-step a little.
Comment by Bob Whiteside — 8/20/2005 @ 6:43 am
Motivating the MSM to report from the perspective of American national interests is problematic; there is no incentive whatsoever for them to do so. Experience, education, and financial reward all tend to push journalists toward reporting styles directly aligned with international popularity polls. If one tracks the American MSM against international polls, there is virtually no disconnect at all. Their product does not support American conservative thought because the Western international community is not supportive (hell, it’s terrified!) of Americans who fall out of the waltz to two-step a little.
Comment by Bob Whiteside — 8/20/2005 @ 7:26 am
Jay Rosen and COL Austin Bay Jay Rosen at PressThink shares a conversation he initiated with COL Austin Bay (Retired). For Rosen and COL Bay to initiate a dialog of matters involving media, the military, and our Global War on Terror represents a milestone in the as yet adolescent …
Trackback by Dadmanly — 8/20/2005 @ 10:41 am
I linked to and extended this discussion at Jay Rosen and COL Austin Bay. For Rosen and COL Bay to initiate a dialog of matters involving media, the military, and our Global War on Terror represents a milestone in the as yet adolescent history of blogging. I applaud both Rosen and Bay for “appearing†together on a common podium, and generating much substantive and important dialog, together. As many of my readers know, I have had some success in engaging in civil discussion with those in political opposition over at Debate Space, the joint blog I share with the Liberal Avenger. Though dormant for the time being due to the non-availability of a co-debater, I still have much faith in the concept. I look forward to any further cooperation or discussion between these two fine writers.
Comment by Dadmanly — 8/20/2005 @ 10:51 am
This kind of analysis by two intelligent writers would not be found in the pages of the NYT. Certainly, the Times (ie national media) employes talented writers; they just wouldn’t write about their own flaws. They prefer propounding upon or creating flaws in others. That reality speaks for itself and in that reality lies the truth . The national media has itself to blame, not some White House policy that avoids adding fuel to a fire of unprofessional bias. The White House should not be blamed for sidestepping a known source of troublemaking by making the argument that “truth ultimately needs the national media, therefore the White House needs the media”. As much as I admire both writers in this argument, the truth is simplier. The national media is weakening America, not the White House. And all the national media needs to do (as is suggested) is simply report the facts without the use of adverbs or adjectives and, especially, without presenting historical perspective. The American readers (and viewers) can provide perspective and adjectives, as they once did sitting around the dining room table. It was more fun doing it on our own. But that was before we ordinary types were told we were too uninformed and too ignorant to provide our own color; our own opinion. If the national interest is damaged by the manner in which the press relates to the White House, that is sad and dangerous. But that does not mean the White House is at fault. In fact, ignoring the press seems perfectly consistent with the highest principles of democratic government. The government governs; the press reports. That is proper. It is not proper under our system of government to have the press govern and the White House report. That is what the national media desired and it is where the national media made its mistake. It forgot itself, its origins, its purpose, its role, in an irony eerily resembling Watergate. For thirty years the press attempted to elevate itself to the realm of governance and got caught in the middle of a parade down mainstream America utterly and completely naked. The White House didn’t strip off their clothes and has no obligation to cover their nakedness. The damage done will have to be suffered until the media again dresses itself with personal honor and professional humility. Thank you both for an outstanding discussion.
Comment by Peter Hughes — 8/20/2005 @ 10:52 am
It sounds like the NYDCLA press needs to be treated like teenagers - straight talk when they show bad behavior, love always. A Helen Thomas rant needs to lead to a rebuke and a grounding. Good reporting needs praise!
Comment by Paul in MA — 8/20/2005 @ 11:12 am
Sorry Jay, but I wouldn’t care if the press briefing room was relocated to the bottom of the Potomac. The *only* thing Bush can expect from the MSM is that they will either distort his message or censor by ommission. And there have been way too many Rathergate-like episodes from the MSM these last 8 years. I now get all my news from the FOX, AM radio, and the Blogosphere. I’d like to get honest & sincere opposition in the form of CNN or the alphabet networks, but for they zero credibility right now. Why would I waste my time with Wapo or the NYT’s when I know 50% of their “information” is either distorted, censored by ommission, or made up from anonymous sources.
Comment by Fenrisulven — 8/20/2005 @ 12:48 pm
This has been a very, very timely blog - my hat’s off to both. It’s very stimulating to realize that there is a serious rift in the perspective of the “4th estate”. For me, I no longer subscribe to print media . . . except professional magazines to “keep in touch with new developments” but certainly not the news. I’ve no use for major news networks either. I don’t watch TV - just satellite. All news comes via the internet. I try for balance. The the evil “axis” mentioned above is avoided at all costs … sort of trying to maintain my sanity. Why do lefty blogs swear so much? It must be obvious . . . utter frustration that they’re not calling the shots anymore! When the “Gray Old Lady” files for Chapter 11 (which should happen before the decade is out), my heart won’t skip a beat. MSM, who needs it! They cheat, lie and distort . . . continually. Like Helen Thomas . . . I must be fawned over, I’m a king-maker or I the 4th estate is much more important to you all … a la Peter Zenga! Freedom of the press doesn’t mean freedom to tell the rest of us how we should think. Get it?
Comment by Robert Kelly — 8/20/2005 @ 3:18 pm
By the way, with the MSM commenting from a position of “neutrality” between civilization and the unalloyed evil of head choppers, that is a position that consents to the al Qaeda agenda. If this is an information war, one that should be fought with ‘judicious policies,’ and good will, so on and so forth, the battle lines are the US government (anti-jihad), Al Qaeda (pro-jihad), the American public (anti-jihad, except for the Daily Kos), and the MSM (anti-US). Seems important to get at least one of these columns to flip, my advice is to topple or neutralize the MSM; its already rough going with an al Qaeda. information global power.
Comment by Brad — 8/20/2005 @ 3:45 pm
“truth-starved press”? Try truth-dieting press. No matter what tone the Bush Whitehouse takes toward the media, does anyone really believe that the press will begin seeking any “truth” except the truth that they already want to believe? Their “gotcha” approach is not conducive to conversation between mature adults. As any parent who has ever argued with a jailhouse lawyer type teenager knows, you finally have to refuse to argue.
Comment by Don Neuendorf — 8/20/2005 @ 4:09 pm
Wonderful dualing essay effort.
Comment by Consul-At-Arms — 8/20/2005 @ 6:34 pm
It takes a great deal of effort for Jay to reach the point in a discussion where he can say, “Oh. I understand things more clearly now.” Only recently has he reached an epiphany about what he previously took to be bedrock principles of journalism. He can change, but you can’t hurry him. My blog table of contents at “sbw” has dozens of entries to help lead this particular horse to water, but Jay is the one who has to drink. I can’t make him. You can’t make him. Progress, if it happens at all, happens at its own pace. Likewise, the Press Secretary can’t make the NY-DC-LA White House gaggle-horse drink — particularly since the unspoken rule of the gaggle seems to be: The Press asks; the Secretary responds, but does not challenge. Such an approach is ineffective for the media, for the administration, and ultimately for American citizens. Instead of responses, I’d like to see some Socratic questioning from the Press Secretary. Challenge the questions to be more precise and useful. It can be done in a non-combative, constructive way. That approach avoids the useless vibration of asking whether “roll-back” is real. Austin, your essay was illuminating, but dueling bloggers can fritter away a lot of time. Such vibration appears to be movement, but nobody gets anywhere.
Comment by sbw — 8/20/2005 @ 9:36 pm
Feathers in the wind: Chrysler has almost 20% of its ad budget on the http://www. More next year. Hollywood is spending less on newspapers. The current model of newspapers cannot stand a permanent 50% decline in ad revenues. OTOH there will be a lot of happy trees and unhappy tree farmers. Same goes for TV and radio. (radio will probably do better because of interactive talk radio)
Comment by M. Simon — 8/21/2005 @ 5:59 am
This is the debate I have been waiting to follow. The Bush administration has suffered at the hands (pens, printing presses, or microphones), of the MSM since almost day one. And as has been mentioned in other posts, so have most other Republican administrations. Often I have mentioned to those I know in the press that “journalists” lack credibility to many. They have no license requirement, they have no continuing education requirement. Even if these existed, the measures of them would be established by those already in the media. So long as the “rule of thumb” is decidedly leftist, no amount of credentials will remove the built in bias that affects so many. The Bush administration may be guilty of failing to “market” themselves, the War on Terror, etc. I have long believed that if the administration could package their position, (and not in a biased, Orwellian, get into lock-step think, Republican only, approach), they may be able to help Americans and the world understand what we are up to in just about any and every endeavor. There are so many who oppose Bush, Republicans, conservatism, religion, America, etc. There are times I watch in disbelief when the MSM reports on events. Few, if any, report straight news. Every broadcast, paper, magazine, or any other communique, has a tinge of partisan content. The qualifiers to good news always conspire to trump the good news. So, in the end, the Bush administration will plod along without MSM understanding, let alone support. The MSM actually openly conveys the message that they abhor anything American. And they most decidedly abhor George W. Bush, President of the United States. It confuses the average person why President Bush is so disliked. I mean, what could he have possibly done to merit such consistent vitriol and such disdain? Even if he did avoid the Vietnam War, even if he was a drunk, even if his faith today affects so much of his reasoning, does that really merit “hate?” The MSM has taken such an opposition position on virtually everything, that no amount of concilliatory messages would sway it from its path. As mentioned, why should he even try? The MSM and apparently the liberal left, have so contaminated the world’s view of Bush and America, that it is no wonder the terrorists continue to fight. So long as hate speech continues, obstensibly designed to get at President Bush, any and all of America’s opponents or detractors will find solace and hope for their success in destroying us. The talk of supporting our troops while condemning any and all of their actions serves only to bolster the mindset that America will eventually fail in Iraq and everywhere else. And the media has become the conduit, champion, and major facilitator for those who would have us bow to either Allah or a United Nations world government. Expressions of patriotism are greeted with amused patronizing condesension. Attacking, discrediting, maligning, any who may voice opposition to the liberal viewpoint, the media and liberal left has succeeded in deflecting any reasonable discourse offered. Claiming a Zionist conspiracy drives all that is American, Republican, or conservative, the liberal left and others opposed to America have convinced even the most reasonable among our detractors, that our aims are imperialistic. No matter what the voices of reason may attempt to convey, shouts of Nazi, Hitler, imperialist, murderers, racists, homophobics, and gender sadists, drown them out. The media is of course much more subtle when it accuses. They avoid the incitements of epithets. The media approach is the more insideous. It lures objective thoughts into the web of deceit by potraying the media as neutral. The media, as with the liberal educational establishment, attempts to indoctrinate the unsuspecting. The claims of intellectual superiority of the progressive agenda has bred a cabal of elitists who dismiss those of any other viewpoint. It is from this position the concept of “rollback” must start. Without any support for the idea that America should live on and help create a better world, the moment President Bush leaves office, America will begin a fall into the depths of a despair that will be used to justify surrender to a socialist agenda. We can only work to and hope that someone out there with at least a passing understanding of our situation will be elected president in the next three or four elections. I don’t plan on holding my breath until that happens. As with most of the rest of “average” America, I’ll just plod along looking for the few opportunities to preserve us.
Comment by Steve R — 8/21/2005 @ 3:21 pm
Jay and Austin make for spirited debate. On first take I sided with Austin; to give Jay his due I spent more time reading thru his site than Austin’s. Comments too, because Jay takes an active role in refuting or (by his own account) censoring comments he dislikes. To my disappointment it made me less sympathetic to Jay’s point of view than before. Basically, while lamenting the decline of fact-based reporting, Jay and his approved list have serious difficulties in separating fact from fear-mongering and analysis from name-calling. For example, is it a “fact” that high global oil prices are a plot of Bush/Cheny/Halliburton and so on? A core criticism of B/C/H was that they over-emphasized expansion of energy supplies at the expense of the enviroment, and that another core criticism is that the Iraq War was motivated by their eagerness to spend “blood for oil”, but if either were true wouldn’t that hae made energy prices lower rather than higher? And it this is even worth considering as a fact, shouldn’t this warrant as much journalistic attention as the admission there was no WMD, eg “New evidence on oil prices shows that Bush understated energy needs and did not spend nearly enough bblood for oil”? For another example, if you’re going to blast conservative bloggers’ exposes of Cindy Sheehan as a “circus” and allow Steve Lovelady to suggest that her grief ought to make her off-limit to others’ criticism, should you not at least acknowledge the legitimacy of reporting glaring contradictions in Mrs. Sheehan’s own statements; e.g., her kind words about Bush after meeting him versus what she says now? And should that not in turn open a discussion whether, say, any death or distress endured by a teenage girl who has an abortion against an anti-abortion mother’s wishes entitles that mother to inordinate media attention to voice her distress and opposition to abortion? I’m not talking about political slant here. The Guardian slants quite far to the left but it admits it, and generally provides some internally coherent logic. I’m talking about basic (il)logic. On reflection I believe the problems stem from several sources: 1) Advances in natural and social sciences which require more specialized knowledge than your average journalist (typically with a general humanities background and focus on “writing”) has, combined with a selection/self-selection process in college that directs the talented to engineering, medicine and law and the windbags toward journalism. 2) The internet revolution which makes access to information extremely cheap and easy and thereby devalues information per se; it’s analysis that matter. s. Journalists’ nattempts to serve up more analysis is undercut by their own shortcomings as per (1) and by competition with specialists, who increasingly deliver their message thru blogs or have bloggers deliver it for them. 3) Analyses having fallen short, journalists seek out a more comfortable nche reporting feelings in place of facts. Rene Descartes’ philosophy of “I think therefore I am” becomes Renee Descartes’ philosophy “I feel therefore it is”. But of course they can’t really report feeligns, they can only report how someone expresses their feelings and so that biases reporting to the most strident, flamboyant, and openly emotive, thereby blurring the distinctions been news reporting and the Oprah Winfrey show. 4) journalists feel frustrated with (1)-(3) and fear it, but since they don’t understand it, they tend to indulge in the superstitions of their milieu and ascribe it to either a right-wing conspiracy or to the low standards of their audiences. And that in turn exacerbates the problems. Does Bush administration stonewalling of the press help? Yes in the narrow sense. No, in the broader sense of winning hearts and minds. I agree with Austin and Jay there. But I’m pessimistic about how much Bush can roll forward given his own rhetorical handicaps and the media’s hostility. It may take a future President, maybe even a liberal Democrat President, to consolidate public opinion for a stern struggle against radical Islamism. That would be unprecedented. Nixon’s well-advertised anti-communism gave him leeway to open up to China in ways no McGovern could have. Clinton was able to implement a comprehensive welfare reform that Democrats would have blocked coming from a Republican.
Comment by Kent — 8/21/2005 @ 5:19 pm
There are already many fine comments; I especially concur with #11 and #18. The Bush administration is correct to not trust or attempt to work with MSM (NYDCLA axis): they are a self-inflicted lost cause. However, the administration does need to do a better job getting accurate, timely information out to the public in a direct, unfiltered manner. I suspect they are trying to do this to some extent with limited success. Only in the last decade has this even been a remote possibility, so there will be some “lessons learned” as they hone their skills and strategy. I’ve cut my ties to newspapers, newsweeklies and MSM television. Don’t get me wrong, I’m more of a “news junkie” now than I’ve ever been before. It’s just that I tend to rely more on trusted sources on the internet (like this site) than I do old MSM sources. One of the few anchors I care to watch is Brit Hume. One mustn’t forget our responsibility as citizens to critically analyze what we read and watch. We cannot totally blame MSM when we make unwise decisions based on their inaccurate and/or extremely biased “reporting”. WE will be accountable for OUR collective decisions regardless of the quality (or lack thereof) of our information sources. With this in mind, I believe it becomes vitally important that we do all we can to insure accurate information is widely disseminated and that inaccurate information is widely and rapidly exposed. In other words, keep up the good work (all you in the new media).
Comment by E. T. — 8/21/2005 @ 6:28 pm
correction in #34: sentence “That would be unprecedented” should read “That would not be unprecedented by any means.” Sorry.
Comment by Kent — 8/21/2005 @ 8:56 pm
Jay closed his comments (thin skinned inn’t he?) before I could respond to Steve L. So here goes: Steve L, I’m not so sure. The “Patterico” I refered to above is a lawyer. Instapundit is a law prof. Randy Barnett who wrote Raich (clear style - well argued) writes well. He is a law prof. You will have to judge if I write well. People have told me I make technical subjects easy to understand. I’m an engineer. DenBeste who was long winded but a very good read is an engineer. Maybe we have an inherent disconnect. The run of the mill in any profession is no good. Writers have trouble with logic and logical people have trouble with writing. I think that goes back to my point about reporters being unable to frame a logical argument. Or question their assumptions. Maybe in the end talent is where you find it. It is a scarce commodity and reporting does not pay enough to attract much of it. I know I can make a lot more as a tech writer working for Motorola than I can doing a similar job for a newspaper.
Comment by M. Simon — 8/22/2005 @ 4:12 pm
http://www.andrewsullivan.com/index.php?dish_inc=archives/2005_08_14_dish_archive.html#112429038015782754 A nice bit on why reporters don’t report.
Comment by M. Simon — 8/23/2005 @ 2:26 am
Comment’s closed?
Comment by M. Simon — 8/23/2005 @ 2:27 am
Austin — I am eager to hear your opinion of Jay’s shut-down of the debate over at PressThink. I have commented on it at length here. Do you think he was justified in his frustration, and do you think he accurately summarized your position?
Comment by Neuro-conservative — 8/23/2005 @ 5:09 am
Alas, I followed a link here from PressThink, where Rosen has had something of an ephiphany: if you open comments to the public, you will hear things you don’t like, and others will get bogged down in tangential discussions. So Rosen closed his comments down (he does this with regularity when he deems the discussion to have gone far enough–good or bad). Kent, you say Jay and Austin make for a spirited debate. I don’t see much of a debate. Two monologues were exchanged, and Rosen’s really just found a single point of agreement, pointed at that, and said, “See? I’m right!” Rosen shouldn’t be embarrassed about his peanuts gallery (and he wasn’t, just pissed), he should be embarrassed about his own lack of intellectual curiosity. He’s got a real echo chamber problem. I wrote in more depth about that here: http://www.udolpho.com/weblog/?id=00804&title=Thus-whineth-the-professor
Comment by Brian — 8/23/2005 @ 11:14 am
The stiffing of the MSM is the inevitable consequence of its diminishing power. For decades, Republican administrations were forced to play the MSM game in the same way that the mob forces shop owners to pay protection money. It was a losing game, the Republican administrations never got a fair shake, but there was no way out. The nature of the game hasn’t changed, but the MSM lacks the coercive power it once had to get Republicans to play. There are now other ways to get the message out. Unlike Col. Bay, I am fairly confident that the alternatives that the Administration has found to circumvent the MSM will be sufficient to build a base of support for the war on terror. The truth is that the MSM’s bias and groupthink has drained away much of its credibility. Polls show increasing distrust and rejection of major press entities. Newspaper circulations and network news ratings are down sharply from where they once were and they continue to fall. In fact, the Administration’s refusal to play ball is exposing MSM groupthink still further and accellerating the MSM’s loss of influence. While there is still some first-rate reporting in the New York Times (although I do not, by any means, endorse all their reporting), there is no credible analysis. It is hard to glean any real and accurate insight into what the administration is thinking in the NYT. This mocks their prententions to be the “paper of record.” The MSM will eventually be forced into an attitude adjustment, not by this or any other administration, but by their consumers. Sooner or later, the koolaid-drinking, left-leaning, groupthinking reporters and editors of the MSM will have to make peace with their readers and viewers in the American public. To the extent that they refuse to do so, they will continue to be replaced by Fox, the blogs, talk radio, and competitors in the media who have the courage to bring themselves back into the manistream.
Comment by K.S. — 8/23/2005 @ 11:35 am
Austin, Jay has closed and expressed huge embarassment over a thread that was fairly interesting — your post and his initial ideas are very important. I wonder if you have a feeling for what Jay wanted? (This site’s comments are too anti-press one sided, which is also my take, so no need to pile on again.)
Comment by Tom Grey - Liberty Dad — 8/23/2005 @ 11:36 am
I don’t get it that Jay recently closed his comments and stalked off in disgust and disappointment. I would like to challenge him to prepare a model comment of the sort that he feels furthers the discussion, other than capitulating to the tune that the White House is stupid, mercenary, and obfuscatory, and the press is full of noble unbiased performers. Really, I don’t know what disqualifies this discussion, except maybe the heavy non-Dem participation.
Comment by ah — 8/23/2005 @ 5:46 pm
Jay and Austin make for spirited debate. On first take I sided with Austin; to give Jay his due I spent more time reading thru his site than Austin’s. Comments too, because Jay takes an active role in refuting or (by his own account) censoring comments he dislikes. Not really. I’ve been following Rosen’s discussions on the matter, and the pattern seems to be that he cherry-picks the points that he agrees with, and then ignores the rest- the most apparent of which in this exchange is the matter of media bias, which Mr. Bay refers to numerous times, with examples, but Mr. Rosen merely ignores- or if pressed- denies. This is a discussion that needs to happen, but it’s not happening yet, and it’s not going to happen with Jay Rosen. He’s still in denial, refusing to admit there is a problem. And now he’s embarassed for taking part in the discussion- check the last comment in the thread. It’s no skin off my nose- I stopped reading the output of the NY-DC-LA axis some time ago… but you’d think he’d have some interest in protecting his own livelihood. What’s he going to eat if nobody goes to J-school anymore?
Comment by rosignol — 8/24/2005 @ 10:18 pm
the press and political power (thoughts on Jay Rosen/Austin Bay) Recently, Jay Rosen asked Austin Bay (”Weekly Standard writer, NPR commentator, Iraq War vet, Colonel in the Army Reserve, Republican, conservative, blogger with a lit PhD”) to guest-blog about the press, the Bush administration, and the war. Bay’s …
Trackback by Peter Levine — 8/30/2005 @ 1:12 pm
[…] There is much still to admire at the Times– correction, there are admirably talented people working at the Times producing worldclass work (John Burns is the world’s top foreign correspondent). However, editorial responsibility and judgment are seriously lacking. The Times’ editors appear to be wedded to the two “press templates” of Vietnam and Watergate. “Getting Bush” is this generation’s “Get Nixon.” […]
Pingback by Austin Bay Blog » UPDATED: The Axis of Abuse: The NY Times and Washington, DC leakers — 6/25/2006 @ 12:34 pm
[…] A sad comment. In form, the Wilson allegations followed the script of “the October surprise” from 1991– an attack on George H.W. Bush which began with a conspiracy-theory essay in the NY Times. Key members of the Bush Administration believe they have been the victims of lies or victims of a relentless, decades-long selective reporting and commentary by members of the big media axis. Are Republicans ticked at Ambassador Joe Wilson’s truth challenged New York Times essay? One reason they are ticked is because they have seen this same kind of canard before. Recall Gary Sick and his nut-case story that George H W Bush flew to Paris on an SR-71 to negotiate with Iran? (See this, and Daniel Pipes with his Wall St Journal response; this link shows the conspiracy theory Sick pushed was first “reported†by Lyndon Larouche.) […]
Pingback by Austin Bay Blog » The Plame Debacle — 9/1/2006 @ 12:07 pm