Bush vs. the Media, Part 2

The esteemed Jay Rosen, NYU journalism czar and PressThink blogger extraordinaire, is chiding me for not being tough enough on the Bush administration.

Well, I hate to spoil a good cyber-fight, but I don't think we disagree on very much.

By and large, the Bush administration has taken not just an adversarial but often hostile approach toward the media (which I've reported on again and again for four years). Not since the Nixon administration, with its wiretapping and enemies lists, has a president tried to marginalize the press in such aggressive fashion. And I ticked off some of the techniques: few news conferences, secret meetings, unresponsive briefings, propaganda videos, paying off pundits and, in Dick Cheney's case, barring the New York Times from his campaign plane.

In short, administration officials have decided that journalists are just another special-interest group and should be treated accordingly.

I did try to remind critics, most of them on the left, that Bush didn't invent these techniques, that the Clinton White House was often accused of stonewalling, and that every administration tries to manipulate the media to further its political self-interest.

My larger point was that whatever damage the Bush administration has done to the press doesn't come close to matching the damage that the news business has inflicted on itself. Let's say that in four years, a liberal Democrat is elected who holds weekly news conferences, grants dozens of interviews and generally treats the press with warm-and-fuzzy respect. Does anyone seriously think the media's battered reputation will improve?

Besides, why do we need the administration to be nice to us, or to somehow validate our existence? Journalists need to do their jobs regardless of the roadblocks and land mines placed by the White House. And the real reporting doesn't take place in the briefing room, regardless of who's accredited, or in the televised news conferences, which have become theater. It takes place behind the scenes, where journalists cultivate sources not just in the administration but on the Hill and among interest groups, to break news the White House doesn't want broken. (Watergate, you may recall, was not broken by White House beat reporters.) And it takes place when reporters have the courage to say that what the president said yesterday is at odds with reality or with his own record.

All right, here's Rosen's take:

"In my view Kurtz's judgment on this is wrong-- very wrong for a beat reporter with his experience. His attempt to de-excite us about de-certification deserves to fail."

That's a reference to the Jeff Gannon business (which I've written about more than any other newspaper reporter). I'm not trying to "de-excite" anyone (didn't know that was a verb), just offering some perspective.

"But Mike Allen of the Washington Post, Kurtz's colleague, did not forget what administrations do. On October 8 he wrote: 'Although all presidents are kept somewhat removed from reality because of security concerns and their staffs' impulse for burnishing their image, Bush's campaign has taken unprecedented steps to shield him from dissenters and even from curious, undecided voters.'"

Yes, Bush has taken the practice to absurd heights. But keep in mind that John Kerry wouldn't answer questions from his traveling press corps for six weeks during the campaign.

"Kurtz says people forget what presidents do. But I didn't forget (and I'm people, Howard.) Last week I went out of my way to address his doubts from this week.

"It is true that all administrations want to speak to the nation in an unfiltered way; there's nothing notable about that. All at one time or another see the press as 'against' them. All cry foul-- and in the name of the facts! Hating the press is normal behavior in the White House. So is favoring the sympathetic correspondent.

"But we can recognize these facts, and still discern something going on with the Bush team:

"There's a difference between going around the press in an effort to avoid troublesome questions, and trying to unseat the idea that these people, professional journalists assigned to cover politics, have a legitimate role to play in our politics. . . .

"Of course the whole idea of having a White House press corps is that the reporters in it do represent the American public's common interest in seeing executive power questioned, monitored, examined, explained. The president needs an interlocutor, it was once thought."

Again, I couldn't agree more. We're not there for the fun of it; we poke and prod on the public's behalf, but it's a public that is increasingly losing confidence in us, and that's not primarily the doing of George Walker Bush.

Meanwhile, Columbia Journalism Review says I overlooked a major point in detailing why Bush's Social Security plan has stalled:

"He misses the elephant in the living room -- ample and repeated press coverage of Republicans who have growing doubts about the Bush scheme. Republicans haven't uniformly lined up behind the president's plan as they did for the major proposals of his first term. And that gives the press an excuse to write about what it loves best -- conflict. Who wants to write about (or read about) a warmed-over stump speech in some freezing Midwestern town when some Republican is shooting his mouth off about the idiocy of the president's top domestic priority?"

The CJR folks are right. I've mentioned it in the past, but Republican resistance should have been on my list--along with the downbeat tone of the poll-driven media coverage itself, which has created the impression that the plan is going nowhere.

Everything in Washington is indexed to inflation--with the notable exception of the minimum wage, which keeps getting shrunk by in real dollars. And that's not going to change:

"The Senate yesterday defeated two proposals to raise the minimum wage, in a test of muscle over what is expected to be a yearlong struggle to increase an income floor that has gone unchanged for nine years," says the Philadelphia Inquirer.

"A Democratic proposal to raise the hourly rate from $5.15 to $7.25 in three steps of 70 cents each over the next 26 months failed, 49-46. A Republican proposal to increase it to $6.25 in two steps of 55 cents apiece over 18 months also failed, 61-38."

Ron Brownstein takes a whack at the Fed maestro in his LAT column:

"Is he kidding?

"That's the only possible reaction to Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan's conclusion last week that the massive federal budget deficit accumulated under President Bush was 'unsustainable.' Declared Greenspan: 'The principle that I think is involved here ... [is] that you cannot continuously introduce legislation which tends to expand the budget deficit.'

"That would be an entirely reasonable -- even urgent -- warning from someone who didn't bear so much responsibility for the problem he's describing. Greenspan lamenting higher deficits is like New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner complaining about inflated baseball salaries. . . . Greenspan's more like the guy at the party who handed the car keys to a drunk."

Is Brownstein seconding Harry Reid's complaint that Greenspan is a political hack? Sure sounds like it.

Looks like the political worlds isn't the only place where leaders can't keep it zipped:

"The chief executive of the Boeing Company, Harry C. Stonecipher, who was brought out of retirement 15 months ago to clean up the company's tarnished image and restore its credibility, was forced to resign yesterday after admitting an affair with a female Boeing executive," says the New York Times.

"Mr. Stonecipher, married and with grown children, was forced out for having violated an internal code of conduct that he had imposed on all Boeing employees as he tried to improve the company's actions and image. His predecessor, Philip M. Condit, was forced to resign in 2003 because of ethical lapses, including affairs with employees, and poor business prospects that Mr. Stonecipher was hired to remedy."

So Stonecipher was just carrying on company tradition!

Scott Rosenberg uses his Salon blog to remark on some op-ed shifts:

"Well, it's official: The New York Times, having replaced William Safire with John Tierney, now has two dedicated 'conservative seats' on its op-ed page. Meanwhile, as I wrote a month ago, the Wall Street Journal, having lost its sole token sorta-liberal, has . . . not replaced him at all." Meaning Al Hunt.

"The Times constantly takes brickbats from the right for its supposed liberal bias, but it's clearly trying to find room on its opinion pages for a variety of perspectives. Meanwhile, the Journal, whose editorial pages list far further to the right than the Times' lean leftward, doesn't seem to think it need bother expose its readers to those who disagree with it . . .

"That difference hasn't seemed to filter very far into the blogosphere's media-criticism memepool. Anti-Times noise is endemic here, whereas the Journal doesn't seem to warrant more than an occasional snipe. Maybe that's a sign of the Journal's subscription-only self-marginalization; but Dow Jones has actually placed most Journal opinion-writing on the free Opinionjournal.com site, so I don't think that's it.

"Rather, this is one more data point in the right's campaign against the Times and other media institutions that it sees as impediments on the path to total reality control. The scorched-earth ground rules parallel the CNN/Fox argument. Conservatives jealously defend their right to own their own partisan media outlets, while loudly complaining that anyone still foolish enough to struggle for balance is hopelessly biased to the left."

Praise and brickbats for The Washington Post: David Frum says the Style section ran an unsympathetic piece on religious conservatives on the same day as a sympathetic piece on PBS's pro-gay Buster cartoon, while Jack Shafer says anonymous sources can occasionally be useful, as in this Dana Priest story on the CIA's treatment of detainees.

OpinionJournal's John Fund says there's a reason Hillary wants to allow felons who've done their time to vote, a practice now barred by 48 states:

"Mrs. Clinton says she is pushing her bill because she is opposed to 'disenfranchisement of legitimate American voters.' But it's hard not to suspect partisan motives. In a 2003 study, sociologists Chistopher Uggen and Jeff Manza found that roughly 4.2 million had been disfranchised nationwide, a third of whom had completed their prison time or parole. Taking into account the lower voter turnout of felons, they concluded that about one-third of them would vote in presidential races, and that would have overwhelmingly supported Democratic candidates. Participation by felons, Messrs. Uggen and Manza estimated, also would have allowed Democrats to win a series of key U.S. Senate elections, thus allowing the party to control the Senate continuously from 1986 until at least this January."

Here's a classic spitting match. I wrote some days back about Kurt Andersen, in New York magazine, saying those who opposed the Iraq war should be careful about rooting for the insurgents to avoid a Bush "victory." And that drew the ire of Vanity Fair writer James Wolcott

"Confession: I've never quite 'gotten' the post-Spy Andersen, what the point is of everything he's so busily doing. The essays he did for The New Yorker, his work on Studio 360, that TV interview show of his--they're bright and intelligent in a completely uninteresting way. After reading and listening to him glancingly for years, I couldn't tell you what his enthusiasms are, what appalls him, what moves him one way or another, or if he's ever moved by anything other than the exigencies of the cultural moment. He's glib in a Manhattan Mandarin manner that conceals the glibness behind a knowingness that itself conceals a lack of deeper, driving conviction.

"I suppose what I'm saying is that Andersen has always struck me as one of those media personalities who's always 'positioning' himself without ever taking a real position."

Kurt Andersen returns the favor in a posting on Romenesko

"Confession: I used to find it exhilarating to read James Wolcott when he was writing in his fresh, careful, smart and unpredictable fashion about TV for the Village Voice and the exigencies of the cultural moment for Vanity Fair. But during the last few years, once he discovered his own simple, predictable, self-righteous, driving political convictions and decided to give them endless, repetitive vent, I have found myself wondering what ever happened to the terrific cultural critic he once was. Rage is easy. Preaching to the choir is easy. 'Spouting the same old tailpipe exhaust,' as he remarked recently about Charles Krauthammer, is easy. What Wolcott used to do is hard.

"It's sad that instead of engaging the substance of what I wrote in New York about the shifting ethics of one's position on the war in Iraq, and partisanship's corrosion of intellectual honesty, he resorts almost entirely to ad hominem attack and accusations of bad faith. (Also, speaking of honesty, why does Wolcott now suggest that he liked Spy, since at the time, as I recall, he only ridiculed the magazine in print? Might this be some 'positioning' on his part -- that is, because *back then* Spy was satirizing his Vanity Fair boss, whereas his *current* Vanity Fair boss was a co-founder of Spy?)"

Put these guys in a ring and I'll buy a ticket.

The Fishbowl DC guy, emulating Jeff Gannon, finally got a day pass into the White House and filed his first reports. Sounds like he could barely stay awake.

"We'd been warned by a regular White House correspondent over the weekend that the 'zoo' of the briefing would likely leave us knowing less and being more confused than when went in. Having sat through it now, we have to agree."

But InstaPundit strikes a skeptical note:

"Garrett Graff is vice president of communications at EchoDitto, Inc., a Washington, D.C.-based technology consulting firm. A Vermont native, he served formerly as deputy national press secretary on Howard Dean's presidential campaign and, beginning in 1997, was then-Governor Dean's first webmaster.

"A partisan PR guy disguised as a 'real journalist!' He's even a 'dittohead!' Somebody tell Kos. I'm sure he'll be right on it. . . . "