The Press in Time of War
BARNES, FRED
The Press in Time of War BY FRED BARNES Peter Jennings, the ABC News anchor, ventured outside New York last week to discover the mood of the country. In Dallas, a man told him bluntly: "Nobody...
...How often have we heard anything like that on network news...
...Who would have thought a press corps filled with liberals would make Rumsfeld, the hardest of hard-liners, into the rock star of the war against terrorism...
...Two days later, the New York Post picked it up and the next day so did the Drudge Report...
...Not Rumsfeld, I'll bet...
...One CNN official admitted the cable network had "underserved" conservatives, which is putting it mildly...
...He sent a memo to correspondents, instructing them to remind viewers of the attacks that prompted America to go to war in the first place...
...But, in the short run, remarkable things have occurred...
...she asked...
...I am changed," he explained...
...Reporters have credited him with giving candid and often witty briefings...
...I was wrong," Westin wrote...
...And yet, in nearly all his columns since September 11, he has recognized the stakes ("this is World War III") and advocated a decisive military victory ("to not retaliate ferociously . . . is only to invite a worse attack...
...It hasn't affected what's become a hardy perennial at the network: obsessive emphasis on collateral damage caused by American bombing...
...Another offender is ABC...
...The bigger problem was the source of that reputation: the content of CNN's programs...
...But four days later, the Westin speech was shown on C-SPAN, where Brent Baker of the Media Research Center caught it at 2 A.M...
...The stories were fact-filled, fair, balanced, poignant, comprehensive, and politically neutral...
...Back in 1991, he wrote, "For all of President Bush's passionate insistence to the contrary, the war in the Persian Gulf has more than a few similarities to the war in Vietnam, in the sort of problems that it poses if not in the probable outcome...
...Once the American bombing in Afghanistan began on October 7, the coverage grew more critical—but for the most part that wasn't because the war on terrorism was being fought too brutally, but because it wasn't being pursued vigorously enough...
...But the anthrax threat isn't, and, in general, the coverage of anthrax has been uninformed, speculative, and overwrought...
...Despite lapses, CNN's coverage has improved...
...In the end, he's pessimistic about erasing bias...
...How can you be a dove when someone has committed mass murder in your neighborhood, killed friends of yours...
...Reporters themselves have been so ideological that liberal bias became a dominant trait of journalism, as Bernard Goldberg engagingly points out in the about-to-be-released Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distorts the News...
...Saturday Night Live lampooned his facial contortions, body language, and curt treatment of questions...
...The press has been more in sync with the American people since September 11 than at any time in decades...
...Rather's appearance on the Late Show with David Letterman a week after the terrorist attacks was quite touching...
...A reply would be e-mailed to him soon for posting on the MRC website...
...Predictably the claims turned out to be false...
...And he'll make the call...
...They're inclined to report on a study based on a sensationalized press release, not the study itself...
...Even Christiane Amanpour dismissed anti-American demonstrations in Pakistan as unrepresentative of popular sentiment in that country...
...Freshly installed as the head of CNN, Isaacson faced various problems...
...Tom Friedman is a special case because his take on the war is at odds with his paper's...
...This is peculiar, almost shocking...
...They're not trying to impute political motives to everything Bush does or says...
...The most striking changes involve CBS anchor Dan Rather, liberal television journalist Geraldo Rivera, CNN chief Walter Isaacson, and columnist Tom Friedman of the New York Times...
...But it did so in a you-got-to-love-him fashion...
...I've given little space to the two books under review, but not because they're unworthy...
...It Ain't Necessarily So is an impressive piece of media criticism, more serious-minded and rigorous than sloppy and alarmist reporting on science deserves, and surprisingly readable...
...But there are other reasons, too, for the change in journalism...
...But faced with a war to cover, Isaacson took an extraordinary step that Ted Turner, were he still in charge, surely would not have...
...The thesis of It Ain't Necessarily So: How Media Make and Unmake the Scientific Picture of Reality, a recent study by David Murray, Joel Schwartz, and the media critic Robert Lichter, is that the press can't cover scientific and medical issues without going off the deep end...
...The comment drew no criticism from the students, which may tell you something about them...
...Even so, Dan Rather's metamorphosis seems real, if perhaps temporary...
...Asked if the Pentagon were a legitimate target for attack by America's enemies, he said, "I actually don't have an opinion on that ...as a journalist I feel strongly that's something I should not be taking a position on...
...There are, of course, exceptions to a changed press, dinosaurs bent on covering the war as antagonistically as possible...
...A few days after that, he pointed out that the American military had been gutted in the 1990s...
...Robert Lichter thinks so...
...Nonetheless, Goldberg tells an engrossing story about his twenty-eight years at CBS, his clash with Rather over liberal bias, and his take on liberal news coverage in general...
...The more you read about the state of science reporting in It Ain't Necessarily So, you're not surprised that the press hyped and mangled the anthrax story...
...And his solution is democracy— for, without it, "religion and the mosque become the vehicle of angry protest...
...On the day anti-Taliban forces made their first big breakthrough in Mazar-i-Sharif, the Times focused on a tiny incident in which Taliban soldiers tricked Northern Alliance troops into thinking they'd surrendered, then opened fire...
...I'm not so sure that we've seen the end of the "journalist as critical outsider...
...The scourge of liberal bias, Brent Baker of the Media Research Center, is persuaded...
...When they find them, they let the whole world, or at least elite opinion-makers, know...
...Like Dan Rather, Geraldo Rivera is a liberal media icon, a last-ditch defender of Clinton during impeachment...
...It was Geraldo...
...After the article, his career at CBS was stymied and he left the network in 2000...
...and] where do you go...
...The story got front-page treatment, though it was merely the theory of two scientists and any explosion would be thousands of years in the future...
...For a generation now, the type of reporting practiced first in Washington and then nationwide has been adversarial, cynical, and highly negative...
...The nature of the story—a war with many facets, foreign and domestic—requires more fact-based reporting and less commentary...
...The message between the lines was "Don't sound anti-American...
...Cheney answered gently that such information "needs to be classified...
...We know that some may come back in flag-draped caskets, but we reluctantly and sadly accept that as a reality of a war forced upon us...
...A mention of the firefighters at the World Trade Center reduced him to tears...
...In a more emotional way, this is also true of Rather and Rivera...
...This no doubt has played a role in CNN's coverage...
...With Limbaugh's show still in progress, Baker got a call from ABC...
...There were even murmurs of patriotism, not exactly a staple of the liberal media...
...The case of David Westin, the president of ABC News, is a good example...
...They're eliminating the spin...
...Our thoughts and our love are with our warrior men and women," he said...
...There have also been episodes of klutzy and hysterical reporting...
...Practically never, and by this time the emotion of September 11 had begun to wear off...
...Many of these are conservative, and they're constantly on alert for liberal or leftist excesses...
...At a time when President Bush, Congress, the postal service, the Centers for Disease Control, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, homeland security chief Tom Ridge, and Attorney General John Ashcroft are Fred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...Do they come in and get you...
...What do they do when they take you away...
...He broke up again while reciting a stanza of America the Beautiful and declared: "You know, it's just one American, wherever [the president] wants me to line up, just tell me where...
...At the New York Times, R.W...
...That was the New York Times piece in 1995 on "whether the planned underground dump for the nation's high-level atomic wastes in Nevada might erupt in a nuclear explosion, scattering radioactivity to the winds or into ground water or both...
...They just don't understand...
...Still, the big question about journalism is whether September 11 marks a turning point—indeed, whether the press is permanently chastened, changed, different...
...Goldberg tells plenty of CBS tales out of school (Rather's down-home quips are scripted, he observes, and CBS News boss Andrew Heyward privately agreed about liberal bias...
...He's criticized Arab-Muslim regimes that hypocritically side with the United States while allowing radical Islam to fester...
...And when [authoritarian] leaders are seen as being propped up by America, America also becomes the target of Muslim rage...
...Then, too, for television, ratings matter...
...The bestselling author of The Lexus and the Olive Tree, he's criticized American foreign policy for years—but especially since Bush took office...
...If the template is that infectious diseases, sexual assaults, and mortgage discrimination each pose severe (and possibly worsening) problems, evidence to the contrary will often be ignored or rejected," the authors write...
...If it lasts, people may learn to like the press as much as they like, well, Donald Rumsfeld...
...I want to see a reinforced United States rifle company take a hill," he said...
...Famous journalists have been transformed in ways that should thrill conservatives who complain about liberal bias...
...One is the New York Times...
...That alerted Rush Limbaugh, who devoted an hour or more to it on his radio show...
...The usually liberal Parade magazine ran a puff piece on him...
...The man added that the press's reporting is unpatriotic and isn't helping the nation recover from the attacks of September 11...
...The sins of the press are basic: ignorance, sloth, hype, ideology...
...He zinged the Taliban for being, among other things, anti-American...
...In short, what we've seen at times over the past nine weeks is the American press transformed...
...Large media organizations once haughtily ignored conservative criticism...
...The two studies that rejected the theory got no coverage in the Times...
...It Ain't Necessarily So recounts dozens of examples of atrocious science reporting, but one stands out...
...Now they have to take it into account and react...
...The effect of September 11 was traumatic and mind-altering...
...Following two days of bombing, he ended the CBS Evening News with a patriotic peroration...
...He's not the Rather of the past," he says...
...I want to see us rout these bastards...
...The impact this may have on ABC's coverage is uncertain...
...Certainly the tone of coverage has changed...
...In fact, Baker has kind words for most of CBS's war coverage and NBC's too...
...And its coverage, from a professional standpoint, has rarely been better...
...Their theory hadn't been peer-reviewed, but when it was, it was dismissed...
...The roots of Friedman's new outlook are both obvious and intellectually respectable: The world changed, and he has changed in response...
...Gloria Borger's questioning of Vice President Dick Cheney on 60 Minutes, for example, drifted into the ridiculous when she asked him to discuss the secret site where he goes when the president is in the White House...
...Baker put excerpts in the daily "CyberAlert" he writes for MRC's website...
...The result is a makeshift kind of accountability that didn't exist until recently...
...ABC accepted them as credible and played them up...
...In Dallas, a man told him bluntly: "Nobody likes you...
...And then there's Walter Isaacson...
...They turn ambiguous findings into "possible links" between, say, bug spray and Parkinson's disease...
...Despite relatively few civilian deaths in Afghanistan, ABC has concentrated on the subject far more than NBC or CBS...
...There's not much to complain about thematically from a conservative point of view," Baker says...
...In the two or three weeks immediately after the terrorist assaults on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, both print and broadcast coverage was dazzling...
...You can talk freely about many things when you work for the big network news operations, but liberal bias is not one of them," Goldberg notes...
...The idea of the journalist as critical outsider has been blown to smithereens...
...The press is in bad odor around the country...
...ABC even frowned on the president's effort to have American kids send a dollar to Afghan children...
...It wasn't just dealing with CNN's reputation as the "Clinton News Network," though that has caused ratings trouble...
...There's been a seismic shift in journalism since September 11," he told me...
...But what Rather said later, after the bombing started, was more significant...
...Apple, too, is grinding an old ax...
...Its obsession was Taliban claims about civilian deaths from American bombing...
...All that, just since September 11...
...wildly popular, a majority of Americans disapprove of the news media...
...One significant factor gets little notice: the scrutiny the national press now gets from media critics, watchdog groups, press websites, and astute journalistic observers like Andrew Sullivan of the New Republic and Brit Hume of Fox News Channel...
...Since it was the experience of covering the civil-rights movement, Vietnam, and Watergate that helped create this sort of reporting, might the trauma of September 11 propel the press toward a more positive, dispassionate, and ideologically impartial style, one less confrontational toward American institutions...
...Trying to make a new situation fit an old story, he was wrong about the Gulf War—and he's wrong again about the war in Afghanistan, for precisely the same reason...
...Under any interpretation, the attack on the Pentagon was criminal and entirely without justification...
...But then it did the same thing during the Gulf War a decade ago...
...The way the anthrax threat was explained to the American public looks like definitive proof of that thesis...
...On October 23, Westin spoke to a class at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism...
...Remember now, that wasn't Rush Lim-baugh talking...
...This was a harmless instance...
...Apple Jr., has fixated on supposed similarities between American interventions in Afghanistan and Vietnam...
...Five days later, he zinged Saudi Arabia as ingrates for criticizing the bombing...
...But you'd never have guessed from Bias (written months before September 11) that Dan Rather would emerge as the war on terrorism's leading media supporter...
...I want to see our GIs make them pay back for what they did to us...
...Reporters frequently don't understand important scientific distinctions such as that between correlation and causation...
...Its war coverage has been grimly defeatist and its chief Washington correspondent, R.W...
...Yet he took a whopping pay cut, quit his nightly show on CNBC, and signed on with Fox News Channel to cover Afghanistan...
...They let a preconceived idea, or template, determine the story...
...Rummaging through the Internet, Brit Hume spotted the item and mentioned it on Special Report that evening on Fox...
...It was a total capitulation...
...Two days later, Rather, his voice cracking with emotion, ended his broadcast: "With America's fighting men and women in peril far from home tonight, we know we must steel ourselves for many long months...
...He was a top-flight correspondent and Rather favorite until February 1996, when he wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal about liberal bias, particularly at CBS...
...They continue to slant the news and then deny they're doing it," Goldberg says...
Vol. 7 • December 2001 • No. 12
