Media

...How you feel about the bombing is likely to determine, therefore, how you feel about the press coverage and the fact that the Government timed its air strike for the evening television news...

...It is also difficult to know how much of the Administration's obsession with international terrorism stems from genuine concern and how much from more cynical considerations—winning elections, passing budgets, and cementing a domestic consensus behind official attacks on civil liberties and freedom of expression...

...But war is also the health of the press...

...Lewis—were discovered only by "scraping the bottom of the barrel...

...The President's views were echoed, for example, by Dorothy Rabinowitz, who made her reputation baiting the Institute for Policy Studies and whose views on the press are now distributed by Rupert Murdoch's feature syndicate...

...Charles Glass took advantage of his presence to report on civilian casualties, earning Dorothy Rabinowitz's scorn...

...By the time reports of civilian casualties, the attempt on Muammar Qaddafi's life, and the raid's questionable impact on terrorism and its certain impact on U.S...

...Murdoch is the Australian press lord whose American flagship paper, the New York Post, has been bannering such Libya headlines as Curse of the Capewoman (over a story about Mrs...

...It is here, perhaps, that the most serious journalistic failure occurred...

...In the years since the Gulf of Tonkin incident, much ink has been spilled about "the role of the press" during the Vietnam war...

...lives or dollars, the Reagan Administration has prospered by turning its guns on Grenada, Lebanon, Nicaragua, and Libya...

...Truth may be the first casualty of war, but journalism is always among the big victors...

...But the performance that struck the President as fair impressed others as an exercise in what we might consider calling state-sponsored journalism...

...War is the health of state," Randolph Bourne wrote, and recent American experience seems to affirm the aphorism...

...When it came to the Battle of Libya, however, judgment was rendered immediately by the President himself...

...In that context, even competent coverage of the Battle of Libya would have come too late...

...At the White House Correspondents Association's annual dinner three days after the air raid, the President and Mrs...

...And so it did...

...The epochs of great military conflict in American history have also been periods of journalistic prosperity...

...There isn't much dispute about what the media did in response to the bombing: Almost everyone agrees that they cheered, and even right-wing critics of the press found themselves approving the performance...

...But in giving the press time to position itself in Tripoli, the White House may actually have swallowed its own claims that it could make a few Libyan omelets without breaking eggs...

...You take the pictures...

...that the press allowed the Administration to dominate the news with the official version of events and the official rationale for its own decisions...

...Wars make good reading and fine viewing...

...that the chimera of an "adversarial" press was replaced by the reality of a captive press—captive to its Government sources, its jingoist rhetoric, and its deeply ingrained habits of mind and heart that invariably afford the Government the first best shot at making its case...

...And by the time the bombs began to fall on Tripoli, the Reagan Administration had no difficulty establishing its political beachhead where it mattered most: on the home front...

...Though the press lodged vigorous protests over its exclusion from the Grenada landing, not a peep has been heard about the fact that no pool reporters were allowed to suit up for the ride to Libya...

...Like William Randolph Hearst on the eve of the Spanish-American War, the Government told the news media, "We'll give you the war...

...The Administration was given a free ride when the story had its greatest impact...

...interests began to surface, it was too late...

...Reagan received what USA Today called "a prolonged standing ovation," and Reagan, in turn, congratulated the press for being "honest and fair" in reporting the attack...

...With some exceptions," Rabinowitz wrote, "reporting on Tripoli was free of hysteria and, in much, commendable...

...For the last five years, the press has allowed the Reagan Administration to assert its version of reality without effective challenge, to undermine the international political process, to violate international law, and to walk away from negotiating tables and treaties...

...The exceptions, she added—The Nation's Christopher Hitchens, ABC's Charles Glass, and The New York Times's Flora Robert Karl Manoff is associate director of the Center for the Study of War, Peace, and the News Media at New York University...

...they have always sold papers and established careers...

...for critics of the Tripoli action...

...Qaddafi's reaction to the bombing...

...James Schlesinger, Secretary of Defense in the Ford Administration, made the point explicit: Ronald Reagan's decision to attack the Libyans, he said, was comparable to Lyndon Johnson's decision to attack the North Vietnamese twenty years ago...

...With little cost in U.S...

...For five years, in other words, the press has let its big guns be used to soften up the "enemy...

...Three-quarters of the American people, according to most polls, were already clapping their hands and stamping their feet...

...To be sure, the White House did cooperate with the media to the extent of announcing repeatedly that a raid was in the offing, giving the really heads-up journalists an opportunity to find their way to Tripoli in time to watch the show from the bleachers...

...By the eve of the bombing, New York Times columnist' William Safire had boiled down the complex issues it raised to one simple question: To bomb or not to bomb...

...the bombing of the Libyan cities of Tripoli and Benghazi on April 14 could, indeed, prove to be a watershed...

...In fact, it is difficult to know where counterterrorism stopped and media strategy began...