Power of the press often defers to the powers that be

Power of the press often defers to the powers that be
By Don Wycliff who teaches media criticism at the University of Notre Dame
Copyright © 2007, Chicago Tribune
Published June 3, 2007

It's almost enough to induce vertigo: A member of the Bush administration said something nice about the news media. Really.

Delivering the commencement address last month at the United States Naval Academy, Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates reminded the new officers of "two pillars of our freedom under the Constitution -- the Congress and the press."

"Both surely try our patience from time to time, but they are the surest guarantees of the liberty of the American people," Gates said.

Citing recent revelations by The Washington Post of abuses and maladministration at the Army's Walter Reed Medical Center as an example, he said "the response of senior leaders should be to find out if the allegations are true ... and if so, say so, and then act to remedy the problem. If untrue, then be able to document that fact.

"The press," Gates admonished, "is not the enemy, and to treat it as such is self-defeating."

Can this really have been a member of the Bush team talking? Well, yes and no.

Gates is in the Bush administration but not, it seems, of it. He had to be talked into giving up the presidency of Texas A&M University to become defense secretary after President Bush, sobered by the results of November's elections, finally decided to relieve bloviator-in-chief Donald Rumsfeld of his command.

Gates' appreciative remarks about the press must have been the result of a hangover from his time in academia. They don't reflect the attitudes that have marked this administration from its beginning.

But according to the authors of a new book on press coverage of the Bush administration, the president and his people actually have enjoyed until relatively recently the acquiescence of a timid, compliant, intimidated press.

The Iraq war, which has become possibly the gravest foreign policy blunder in U.S. history, is the most disastrous result of that acquiescence, say political scientists W. Lance Bennett, Regina G. Lawrence and Steven Livingston in "When the Press Fails."

The Bush administration came up with, adopted and executed the policy. Congress failed in its duty to exercise aggressive oversight. But the press, the nominally independent "fourth branch" of government, also failed big time.

This failure was not solely the result of manipulation by the already legendary Bush White House spin machine, say the three authors. It also was the result of certain habits of the mainstream news media themselves, the most obvious of which is the tendency (in our modern and wonderfully expressive vernacular) to suck up to power.

"[T]he American mainstream news code favors those who wield the greatest power, even when what they say is subject to serious challenge," say Bennett, Lawrence and Livingston.

Only when Hurricane Katrina came along and caught the operators of the Bush spin machine napping did the press muster the gumption to tell the nation about the rank incompetence in the administration's response.

Bennett, Lawrence and Livingston are indisputably right about the news media's dereliction in covering the administration's campaign to take the nation to war against Iraq. Professional skepticism in too many cases gave way to an uncritical, post-9/11 patriotism. (Check out the newspaper editorials that appeared in the days just after then-Secretary of State Colin Powell's much-anticipated speech at the UN Security Council. Seldom is heard a discouraging word.)

But their analysis of the reasons strikes me as, in many cases, naive and simple-minded. Yes, Washington journalists tend to suck up to the powerful -- because the powerful possess, by the choice of the American people, the power to tax, to spend, to make war (or peace), to wreak havoc.

Yes, the press is said to be the "fourth branch" of government, but that's a metaphorical description. Reporters possess no subpoena power, no jails in which to lock up public officials who lie or refuse to talk. Their only power is to print what they know to be true. (And woe to those who, like Dan Rather or Newsweek, report something that is wrong!)

President John F. Kennedy is said to have wished, after the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961, that The New York Times had printed all that it knew about the invasion plans in advance, instead of holding back in the interest of national security.

It's hard for me to imagine Bush ever wishing the press had been tougher on him and his administration while they were arguing for an invasion of Iraq. But just because he wouldn't doesn't mean the rest of us can't.