[Mb-civic] Explaining the Bush Cocoon (why media protects him nomatterwhat)

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

 Via NY Transfer News Collective  *  All the News that Doesn't Fit
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Consortium News - Aug 24, 2005
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2005/082405.html

Explaining the Bush Cocoon

By Robert Parry

Under traditional news judgment, the lead paragraph in American
newspapers on the morning of Nov. 12, 2001, should have read something
like: If all legally cast votes in Florida were counted in Election 2000,
Democrat Al Gore would have carried the state and thus won the White
House, according to an unofficial tally of disputed ballots.

Indeed, the tally found that Gore would have carried Floridas key
electoral votes regardless of the standard used for judging so-called
undervotes, ballots kicked out by vote-counting machines which could
detect no presidential choice. Gore won even ignoring Floridas other
irregularities such as the badly designed butterfly ballots and the
improper felon purges that cost him thousands of additional votes.

To put it more starkly, a recount conducted by a consortium of major
media organizations had determined that George W. Bush, the guy in the
White House, not only lost the national popular vote but should have lost
the Electoral College, too. To be even blunter, a pivotal U.S.
presidential election had been stolen.

But that wasnt how the major newspapers and TV networks presented
their findings. Instead, they bent over backwards to concoct
hypothetical situations in which George W. Bush might still have won
the presidency if the recount had been limited to only a few counties or
if legal overvotes, where a voter both checks and writes in the name of
the candidate, were cast aside.

Lost Purpose

Though the news medias recount had started with the goal of assessing
whether Florida voters favored Gore or Bush, that purpose was lost in a
rush to shore up Bushs fragile legitimacy in the weeks after the Sept. 11
terror attacks.

The key discovery of Gores victory was buried deep in the stories or
relegated to charts that accompanied the articles.

Any casual reader would have come away from reading the New York Times 
or
the Washington Post with the conclusion that Bush really had won Florida
and thus was the legitimate president after all.

The Posts headline read, Florida Recounts Would Have Favored Bush.
Referring to Bushs success in getting five U.S. Supreme Court justices to
stop the vote-counting, the Times ran the headline: Study of Disputed
Florida Ballots Finds Justices Did Not Cast the Deciding Vote.

Some columnists, such as the Posts media analyst Howard Kurtz, even
launched preemptive strikes against anyone who would read the fine
print and spot the hidden lede of Gores victory. Kurtz labeled such
people conspiracy theorists. [Washington Post, Nov. 12, 2001]

After reading these slanted Bush Won stories on the morning of Nov.
12, 2001, I wrote an article for Consortiumnews.com noting that the
obvious lede should have been that the recount revealed that Gore had won.
I suggested that the news judgments of senior editors might have been
influenced by a desire to appear patriotic only two months after the Sept.
11 terror attacks. [See Consortiumnews.coms Gores Victory.]

My article had been on the Internet for only an hour or two when I
received an irate phone call from New York Times media writer Felicity
Barringer, who accused me of impugning the journalistic integrity of
then-Times executive editor Howell Raines. I got the impression that
Barringer had been on the look-out for some deviant story that didnt
accept the pro-Bush conventional wisdom.

[For more on Election 2000, see Consortiumnews.coms So Bush Did Steal the
White House. For a broader historical perspective, see Robert Parrys
Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq.]

Iraq War Prelude

This early example of the U.S. news media building a protective cocoon
around George W. Bushs presidency is relevant again today as many
Americans try to understand how Bush was able to lead the nation so deeply
into a disastrous war in Iraq and why the U.S. news media has performed
its watchdog duties so miserably.

The history of the mis-reported Election 2000 recount also attracted
the recent attention of New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. After
referencing Gores apparent Florida victory in one column, Krugman said he
was inundated by an outraged reaction from readers who thought they knew
the history but who really had learned only a false conventional wisdom
about how the recount supposedly favored Bush.

In a second column entitled Dont Prettify Our History, Krugman argues that
we arent doing the country a favor when we present recent history in a way
that makes our system look better than it is. Sometimes the public needs
to hear unpleasant truths, even if those truths make them feel worse about
their country.

Election 2000 may be receding into the past, but the Iraq war isnt. As the
truth about the origins of that war comes out, there may be a temptation,
once again, to prettify the story. The American people deserve better.
[NYT, Aug. 22, 2005]

Whether Americans can expect better is an open question, however.

A strong argument even could be made that Krugman is wrong suggesting that
the news media just wanted to prettify American history or that I was
wrong in speculating that the distorted reporting on the Election 2000
recount was just a case of putting patriotism over professionalism.

A harsher interpretation is that journalists put their careers not
their love of country ahead of their duty to tell the American people the
truth. In other words, big media personalities may have understood that
challenging Bush would put their big pay checks in harms way. [See
Consortiumnews.coms The Answer Is Fear.]

At Powells Feet

That also appears to have been the pattern during the run-up to war
with Iraq. It was safer for journalists to toe the line on Bushs case for
war with Iraq than to contest the dubious arguments presented by the likes
of then-Secretary of State Colin Powell.

One only needs to look back at the op-ed pages in the days after
Powells speech to the United Nations Security Council on Feb. 5, 2003, to
see the lock-step thinking of columnists across the mainstream political
spectrum.

Even though Powells speech was riddled with falsehoods and
questionable assertions, none of the many journalists who safely
positioned themselves at Powells feet suffered professionally for
their lack of professional skepticism. Many of the same columnists are
still holding down lucrative jobs on the Washington Post op-ed page or as
pundits on TV talks shows.

Theres also little indication that skepticism has been ramped up to
the levels that would seem justified by the long list of Bushs
discredited war rationales.

Last March, for instance, many commentators including New York Times
columnist Thomas Friedman and the Washington Posts David Ignatius and the
editorial boards of the Times and the Post were hailing Bushs new Iraq War
rationale, that is was the instrument to advance democratization in the
Middle East.

Just as the pundits had bought into the WMD claims in 2002-2003, they fell
for Bushs argument that the invasion of Iraq would spread democracy across
the Islamic world and thus destroy Islamic extremism. [See
Consortiumnews.coms Neocon Amorality or Bushs Neocons Unbridled.]

Since then, as the optimism about democratization has receded from
Egypt and Saudi Arabia to Iraq and Lebanon the Bush administration and the
pundit class have shifted rationales again, this time to a modern version
of the domino theory that a quick withdrawal from Iraq is unthinkable
because it would undermine U.S. credibility.

Just as it was nearly impossible to find a prominent U.S. pundit who
challenged Bushs original WMD claims, theres now a scarcity of
commentators who dare to make the argument that a U.S. military
withdrawal from Iraq might undercut Islamic terrorism (by driving a
wedge between Iraqi Sunni insurgents and outside jihadists who have
come to Iraq to kill Americans). That wedge, in turn, could help
stabilize Iraq, while Washington could focus on removing other root
causes of Islamic anger, such as the Israel-Palestinian conflict. [See
Consortiumnews.coms Iraq & the Logic of Withdrawal.]

Repositioned Pundits

Still, self-interest remains the driving force behind Washington
punditry. So, some columnists seem to be repositioning themselves in
the face of Bushs slipping popularity, by sniping at Bush about style
while continuing to support him on substance.

For instance, a Washington Post column by New Republic editor Peter
Beinart chides Bush for refusing to meet with Cindy Sheehan, a mother of a
soldier who died in Iraq. But Beinart, who supported the Iraq invasion,
adds that Bush is right to refuse Sheehans call for a U.S. withdrawal
because it would be a disaster for national security and a betrayal of our
responsibility to Iraq.  [Washington Post, Aug. 18, 2005]

David Ignatius, another Post columnist and war supporter, struck a
similar theme: Lets look at what the president is doing right: At a
time when anguished Americans are calling for a quick withdrawal from
Iraq, Bush is telling them a painful truth. Pulling the troops out [now]
would send a terrible signal to the enemy, [Bush] said. [Washington Post,
Aug. 17, 2005]

Perhaps one of the most remarkable facts about the Iraq War is that
despite all the errors and misjudgments, the Washington pundit class,
which cheered the nation off to war, remains remarkably unchanged.

Though the Iraq War may be the most glaring example in decades of the U.S.
government and the national news media letting down the American people
and especially the troops sent off to fight, virtually no one responsible
for this catastrophe has been punished.

While journalists have been fired for far-less serious errors, theres been
no known case of a media personality being publicly punished for buying
into the Bush administrations bogus arguments for invading Iraq. Instead,
many of these same media personalities continue to lecture the American
people about what needs to be done in Iraq.

But this Bush cocoon started years ago, when journalists forgot that
their first duty in a democracy was to give the people the truth as
fully and fairly as possible, even if some Americans didnt want to
hear it.


[Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for
the Associated Press and Newsweek. His new book, Secrecy & Privilege: 
Rise
of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at
secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999
book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.']

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