[Mb-civic] Lap Dogs of the Press - by Helen Thomas

[Mike Blaxill]

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/031106G.shtml

Lap Dogs of the Press
    By Helen Thomas
    The Nation

    Friday 10 March 2006

    Of all the unhappy trends I have witnessed -
conservative swings on television networks,
dwindling newspaper circulation, the jailing of
reporters and "spin" - nothing is more troubling
to me than the obsequious press during the run-up
to the invasion of Iraq. They lapped up
everything the Pentagon and White House could
dish out - no questions asked.

    Reporters and editors like to think of
themselves as watchdogs for the public good. But
in recent years both individual reporters and
their ever-growing corporate ownership have
defaulted on that role. Ted Stannard, an academic
and former UPI correspondent, put it this way:
"When watchdogs, bird dogs, and bull dogs morph
into lap dogs, lazy dogs, or yellow dogs, the
nation is in trouble."

    The naive complicity of the press and the
government was never more pronounced than in the
prelude to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
The media became an echo chamber for White House
pronouncements. One example: At President Bush's
March 6, 2003, news conference, in which he made
it eminently clear that the United States was
going to war, one reporter pleased the "born
again" Bush when she asked him if he prayed about
going to war. And so it went.

    After all, two of the nation's most
prestigious newspapers, the New York Times and
the Washington Post, had kept up a drumbeat for
war with Iraq to bring down Dictator Saddam
Hussein. They accepted almost unquestioningly the
bogus evidence of weapons of mass destruction,
the dubious White House rationale that proved to
be so costly on a human scale, not to mention a
drain on the Treasury. The Post was much more
hawkish than the Times - running many editorials
pumping up the need to wage war against the Iraqi
dictator - but both newspapers played into the
hands of the Administration.

    When Secretary of State Colin Powell
delivered his ninety-minute "boffo" statement on
Saddam's lethal toxic arsenal on February 5,
2003, before the United Nations, the Times said
he left "little question that Mr. Hussein had
tried hard to conceal" a so-called smoking gun or
weapons of mass destruction. After two US special
weapons inspection task forces, headed by chief
weapons inspector David Kay and later by Charles
Duelfer, came up empty in the scouring of Iraq
for WMD, did you hear any apologies from the Bush
Administration? Of course not. It simply changed
its rationale for the war - several times. Nor
did the media say much about the failed weapons
search. Several newspapers made it a front-page
story but only gave it one-day coverage. As for
Powell, he simply lost his halo. The newspapers
played his back-pedaling inconspicuously on the
back pages.

    My concern is why the nation's media were so
gullible. Did they really think it was all going
to be so easy, a "cakewalk," a superpower
invading a Third World country? Why did the
Washington press corps forgo its traditional
skepticism? Why did reporters become cheerleaders
for a deceptive Administration? Could it be that
no one wanted to stand alone outside Washington's
pack journalism?

    Tribune Media Services editor Robert Koehler
summed it up best. In his August 20, 2004, column
in the San Francisco Chronicle Koehler wrote,
"Our print media pacesetters, the New York Times,
and just the other day, the Washington Post, have
searched their souls over the misleading pre-war
coverage they foisted on the nation last year,
and blurted out qualified Reaganesque mea culpas:
'Mistakes were made.'"

    All the blame cannot be laid at the doorstep
of the print media. CNN's war correspondent,
Christiane Amanpour, was critical of her own
network for not asking enough questions about
WMD. She attributed it to the competition for
ratings with Fox, which had an inside track to
top Administration officials.

    Despite the apologies of the mainstream press
for not having vigilantly questioned evidence of
WMD and links to terrorists in the early stages
of the war, the newspapers dropped the ball again
by ignoring for days a damaging report in the
London Times on May 1, 2005. That report revealed
the so-called Downing Street memo, the minutes of
a high-powered confidential meeting that British
Prime Minister Tony Blair held with his top
advisers on Bush's forthcoming plans to attack
Iraq. At the secret session Richard Dearlove,
former head of British intelligence, told Blair
that Bush "wanted to remove Saddam Hussein
through military action, justified by the
conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the
intelligence and facts were being fixed around
the policy."

    The Downing Street memo was a bombshell when
discussed by the bloggers, but the mainstream
print media ignored it until it became too
embarrassing to suppress any longer. The Post
discounted the memo as old news and pointed to
reports it had many months before on the buildup
to the war. Los Angeles Times editorial page
editor Michael Kinsley decided that the
classified minutes of the Blair meeting were not
a "smoking gun." The New York Times touched on
the memo in a dispatch during the last days
leading up to the British elections, but put it
in the tenth paragraph.

    All this took me back to the days immediately
following the unraveling of the Watergate
scandal. The White House press corps realized it
had fallen asleep at the switch - not that all
the investigative reporting could have been done
by those on the so-called "body watch," which
travels everywhere with the President and has no
time to dig for facts. But looking back, they
knew they had missed many clues on the Watergate
scandal and were determined to become much more
skeptical of what was being dished out to them at
the daily briefings. And, indeed, they were. The
White House press room became a lion's den.

    By contrast, after the White House lost its
credibility in rationalizing the pre-emptive
assault on Iraq, the correspondents began to come
out of their coma, yet they were still too timid
to challenge Administration officials, who were
trying to put a good face on a bad situation.

    I recall one exchange of mine with press
secretary Scott McClellan last May that
illustrates the difference, and what I mean by
the skeptical reporting during Watergate.

    Helen: The other day, in fact this week, you
[McClellan] said that we, the United States, are
in Afghanistan and Iraq by invitation. Would you
like to correct that incredible distortion of
American history?

    Scott: No. We are ... that's where we are
currently.

    Helen: In view of your credibility, which is
already mired ... how can you say that?

    Scott: Helen, I think everyone in this room
knows that you're taking that comment out of
context. There are two democratically elected
governments in Iraq and Afghanistan.

    Helen: Were we invited into Iraq?

    Scott: There are democratically elected
governments now in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we
are there at their invitation. They are sovereign
governments, but we are there today.

    Helen: You mean, if they asked us out, that
we would have left?

    Scott: No, Helen, I'm talking about today. We
are there at their invitation. They are sovereign
governments.

    Helen: I'm talking about today, too.

    Scott: We are doing all we can to train and
equip their security forces so that they can
provide their own security as they move forward
on a free and democratic future.

    Helen: Did we invade those countries?

    At that point McClellan called on another
reporter.

    Those were the days when I longed for
ABC-TV's great Sam Donaldson to back up my
questions as he always did, and I did the same
for him and other daring reporters. Then I
realized that the old pros, reporters whom I had
known in the past, many of them around during
World War II and later the Vietnam War, reporters
who had some historical perspective on government
deception and folly, were not around anymore.

    I honestly believe that if reporters had put
the spotlight on the flaws in the Bush
Administration's war policies, they could have
saved the country the heartache and the losses of
American and Iraqi lives.

    It is past time for reporters to forget the
party line, ask the tough questions and let the
chips fall where they may.