A Turning Point on Iraq

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 27, 2006 8:21 AM

Have the media declared war on the war?

In increasingly aggressive questions to President Bush and Vice President Cheney, in a growing focus on the death toll in Iraq, in downbeat assessments on the invasion's third anniversary, many journalists now reflect the view that the war has gone horribly wrong.

Perhaps this simply reflects the stark reality of the suicide bombings, roadside explosions and mosque attacks that have come to dominate the reporting from Iraq. Or perhaps, as Cheney put it on "Face the Nation," journalists provide a distorted "perception" of Iraq "because what's newsworthy is the car bomb in Baghdad."

What is undeniable is that the tone of much of the coverage matches the public-opinion polls showing that a majority of the country has turned against the conflict.

"One thing that would explain it is there's even more bad news from Iraq and other places -- Afghanistan, Iran, North Korea," says Ken Auletta, media writer for the New Yorker. "But even that doesn't fully explain the harshness of the reportage. With two-thirds of the public not approving of Bush's performance, it becomes open season on him. And when conservatives start attacking him, reporters are given more cover."

But Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter says journalists were never cheerleaders for the war. "You can find tough-minded stories in a lot of newspapers and magazines going back three years," he says. "It does a disservice to hardworking reporters, in some cases risking their lives, to make it seem like in one week they go from pro-war to antiwar."

The journalists certainly don't see themselves as antiwar. But the way they frame many stories about Iraq sliding toward civil war carries echoes of Vietnam, when the media coverage turned sharply critical as the country soured on that jungle war.

Consider the questions asked at Bush's news conference last week.

ABC's Jessica Yellin: "Are you willing to sacrifice American lives to keep Iraqis from killing one another?"

CNN's Kathleen Koch: "Do you believe [Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld should resign?"

USA Today's David Jackson: "Are you concerned that the Iraq experience is going to embolden authoritarian regimes in the Middle East and make it tougher to get democracy there?"

Bob Deans of Cox News: "Is there a point at which having the American forces in Iraq becomes more a part of the problem than a part of the solution?"

The Washington Post's Jim VandeHei: Polls show "a growing number of Americans are questioning the trustworthiness of you and this White House. Does that concern you?"

Hearst columnist Helen Thomas: "Your decision to invade Iraq has caused the deaths of thousands of Americans and Iraqis, wounds of Americans and Iraqis for a lifetime. Every reason given, publicly at least, has turned out not to be true."

In his CBS interview with Cheney, Bob Schieffer said: "Let me ask you about this charge of incompetence, because we hear that not just about Iraq, but we hear it more -- and being raised sometimes by members of your own party on a variety of issues -- the bumbling after Katrina, the Harriet Miers nomination, the failure to see the political implications of the Dubai Ports deal."

When the networks did their three-year anniversary pieces, reciting the mounting death toll, the picture that emerged was bleak. NBC's Richard Engel in Baghdad: "Since the U.S. invasion, there has not been a single day without mortar fire, car bombings or IED attacks."

ABC's Dan Harris in Baghdad: "The situation for many here has worsened. Since the war, millions of Iraqis no longer have drinkable water. In Baghdad, there's electricity for fewer than eight hours a day, compared to 18 before. And in a country with so much oil, today there are unfathomably long gas lines."

But ABC anchor Elizabeth Vargas reminded viewers that before her co-anchor, Bob Woodruff, was injured by a roadside bomb in late January, he did a story on a thriving Baghdad ice cream shop, and that her December trip to Iraq included a piece on a ballet school.

Laura Ingraham, the conservative radio talk show host who recently spent eight days in Iraq, says some soldiers complained to her that their views, which were mixed, aren't being reflected by the media.

"It's not about painting a rosy picture," she says. "It's not about putting all good news out there. It's about there being some context. It's not just explosions every day, and that is primarily what is seen, in snapshots and flashes. And that does over time cement the public's view that this is irretrievably a disaster and the whole nation is in flames."

When news organizations focus overwhelmingly on insurgent attacks, Ingraham says, "it begins to look like you're invested in America's defeat."

That sounds like political overstatement. But if journalists seem far more aggressive these days, it may be because their performance contrasts sharply with the period after the Sept. 11 attacks and in the run-up to the war, when news organizations have conceded they did an inadequate job examining the administration's WMD claims.

"We were attacked," Auletta says. "We are citizens. We felt as vulnerable as our leaders in Washington. Bush and the government got more of a free pass."

The record shows that administration charges that reporters in Iraq are ignoring signs of progress are not true, although most journalists say the dangerous conditions make it difficult to talk to ordinary Iraqis. But sometimes the unrelenting violence has a way of intruding on the news agenda.

While in Baghdad, ABC's Jake Tapper was working on a light feature about an Iraqi station's sitcom. While his cameras were rolling, word came that the manager of the entertainment division had been assassinated. That, of course, became the story.

It has been one of the capital's minor mysteries: Who would set up a Web site for the avowed purpose of getting NBC to fire David Gregory?

The person behind FireDavidGregory.com is Ian Schwartz, an 18-year-old college student in Baltimore.

Schwartz's political leanings can be divined from his other Web site, Expose the Left, which runs headlines such as: "AP Writes Yet Another Anti-War Story," "Al Franken Continues Tirade Against Cheney" and "Liberal Lie: Dick Durbins [sic] Claims He Supports Our Troops."

Schwartz says in an interview that "I generally have a distaste for the mainstream media." Asked why he singled out Gregory, Schwartz cites the White House correspondent's overly aggressive questioning over the Dick Cheney hunting accident and an appearance with Don Imus in which the radio host joked that Gregory must be drunk (later soberly denied by Gregory).

"I know it's his job to get answers," Schwartz says, but his online petition -- which he says was signed by 3,200 people -- was a way of "telling him to cool it. I'm just glad it got coverage."

"I didn't take it very seriously," Gregory says of the site, but he sees it as a sign of a broader phenomenon:

"What concerns me is that it's increasingly true that people are viewing the news and political coverage through their own ideological lens. It's wrong to mistake aggressive reporting for political bias. It's a mistake to ascribe motives to people who cover the White House day in and day out. People watch me in a briefing and draw a conclusion based on that. They won't even wait to see what I report."

Five days after acknowledging that it had misidentified a former Abu Ghraib prisoner as the hooded man on a box captured in an infamous photo, the New York Times ran a correction last week of its profile of Donna Fenton, a self-described Hurricane Katrina victim from Biloxi, Miss. After police charged Fenton with fraud and grand larceny, saying she had never lived in Biloxi, the paper said it "did not conduct adequate interviews or public record checks to verify Ms. Fenton's account."

Downing Street revisited? Check out this NYT story:

"During a private two-hour meeting in the Oval Office on Jan. 31, 2003, he made clear to Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain that he was determined to invade Iraq without the second resolution, or even if international arms inspectors failed to find unconventional weapons, said a confidential memo about the meeting written by Mr. Blair's top foreign policy adviser and reviewed by The New York Times.

" 'Our diplomatic strategy had to be arranged around the military planning,' David Manning, Mr. Blair's chief foreign policy adviser at the time, wrote in the memo that summarized the discussion between Mr. Bush, Mr. Blair and six of their top aides.

" 'The start date for the military campaign was now penciled in for 10 March,' Mr. Manning wrote, paraphrasing the president. 'This was when the bombing would begin.'

"The timetable came at an important diplomatic moment. Five days after the Bush-Blair meeting, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell was scheduled to appear before the United Nations to present the American evidence that Iraq posed a threat to world security by hiding unconventional weapons."

Under the circumstances, critics will ask: Why bother?

Time sees a Democratic year in '06:

"If the elections were held today, top strategists of both parties say privately, the Republicans would probably lose the 15 seats they need to keep control of the House of Representatives and could come within a seat or two of losing the Senate as well. Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, who masterminded the 1994 elections that brought Republicans to power on promises of revolutionizing the way Washington is run, told TIME that his party has so bungled the job of governing that the best campaign slogan for Democrats today could be boiled down to just two words: 'Had enough?' "

Unfortunately for the Democrats, the elections aren't until November, and Bush can't get any more unpopular. Can he?

National Review's Jonah Goldberg ruminates about Bush meeting the press:

"The best moment of political theater at the president's news conference this week came when that thespian carbuncle of bile, Helen Thomas, hung a question mark at the end of a diatribe. The 'dean' of the White House press corps all but called President Bush a lying warmonger who invaded Iraq for no legitimate reason.

"Thomas lost the exchange, but the sad truth is that her side has won the larger argument. Ever since the controversy over the '16 words' in Bush's 2003 State of the Union address -- in which the president alleged that Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa -- the administration has been gun-shy about defending its original decision to invade. That's understandable, given the consequences of that episode: Not only did it make the White House seem inept, it made former U.S. Ambassador Joe Wilson and his very important hair a permanent fixture of the media firmament.

"It is now simply taken as a given inside this White House that having an argument about why we invaded Iraq is a political loser. So the president prefers to talk democracy, not WMDs."

That's the problem with defending the original decision -- all the endless speeches about the nonexistent weapons.

And we're learning still more about what went on, says Josh Marshall: "So we have one more Bushie giving up the (loyalism) ghost and spilling the beans: the CPA was run by a bunch of inexperienced partisan operatives, chosen for their party-linism rather than any experience with what they'd be doing in Iraq. And they -- through incompetence or their lust for a piece of the pie -- let the reconstruction of Iraq get overrun by all manner of corruption large and small.

"You can read this piece in Newsweek to get Andrew Natsios' take on what happened. He was head of USAID at the time."

HuffPoster Paul Reickhoff doesn't buy the recent complaints about the media's lack of good news from Iraq.

"I believe that press coverage in Iraq is definitely too narrow. But too negative? I don't think so. If you are looking for good news stories in a war zone, you are looking for the wrong thing in the wrong place. It is like looking for virgins at the Playboy mansion -- you might find a few, but they're certainly not the majority. If you want good news stories, go to Disneyland. Not Iraq."

Reickhoff shares an e-mail from a soldier in Iraq who is, shall we say, disillusioned:

"The bottom line is, the overwhelming majority of people live in fear. We can do NOTHING to help them. We don't have anywhere near the manpower, and our actions are too severely restricted. Good thing 2500 people died for this. What are the good news stories? I would love to hear them. Spare me the heart warming tales of a single family or school or neighborhood that was helped. Operation Iraqi Freedom is, at this point, an abject failure. This is the most dangerous place on earth and it's getting worse, not better."

Jonathan Chait is feeling, well, outgunned:

"I blame George W. Bush's election for many ills, and, to that list, I can now add the fact that I have been publicly shamed for not owning a gun. My unwilling confession took place a month ago, while I was being interviewed by the right-wing radio talk-show host Hugh Hewitt. He asked me whether I owned a gun and whether I had ever owned a gun (in what seemed to be consciously McCarthyite language). Later, he proceeded with a lengthier inquisition into whether I had friends or relatives in the military. He asked a version of this question some half-dozen times. ('Is there anyone that you want to bring up, like your aunt or your uncle, or the guy down the street?') I volunteered that my next-door neighbor and friend is a naval reservist, but this failed to mollify him. 'Do you know anyone who's been back and forth to Iraq and been deployed there?' he asked. Sadly, I was unable to produce any evidence for my defense. In the court of right-wing talk radio, I was convicted of being a blue-state elitist.

"This is a very odd cultural moment we find ourselves in, where there is a stigma attached to not owning a gun or not having friends shipped out to Iraq."

You've gotta love New York politics. First there's Kathleen McFarland:

"A Republican challenger to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is bizarrely claiming that the former first lady has been spying in her bedroom window and flying helicopters over her house in the Hamptons, witnesses told The New York Post."

And who can forget the comedy stylings of Al D'Amato?

"For the last few months, William F. Weld's bid to become governor of New York has had a sharp thorn in its side: the outspoken opposition of the onetime kingmaker of state Republican politics, former Senator Alfonse M. D'Amato, who has said that Mr. Weld is 'without any real experience' in New York.

"Mr. Weld struck back in force, telling how their feud dated at least to a 1996 encounter in which Mr. D'Amato gave him $750,000 in donations for his Senate campaign that year against John Kerry of Massachusetts. The donations, according to Mr. Weld, came with an expletive-laced warning: that Mr. Weld distance himself from Robert S. Mueller III, who as a Justice Department official oversaw a federal fraud investigation of Mr. D'Amato's brother, Armand, in the early 1990's.

" 'If I ever see that expletive Mueller at an expletive fund-raiser, I'm going to get every expletive dollar of this back out of your hide,' Mr. Weld, a former Massachusetts governor, quoted Mr. D'Amato as saying."

There's continuing fallout from the "Red America" blogger quitting washingtonpost.com amid lots of evidence of plagiarism, as I reported here. Now Ben Domenech seems a bit teed off, telling Human Events:

"While I appreciated the opportunity to go and join the Washington Post, if they didn't expect the leftists were going to come after me with their sharpened knives, then they were fools."

Pressblogger Jay Rosen has some thoughts on finding a replacement:

"Now that Ben Domenech has officially resigned from the washingtonpost.com I hope Jim Brady will do the right thing, the creative thing, the thing that would turn this sorry episode around and allow the post.com to come out with a win in the blogosphere.

"An open competition on the Web to be the next political blogger at post.com, but instead of hiring one 'red state' person and leaving it at that (a strategic error in my opinion) Brady should say that three slots will be filled over the coming year. One from column right, one from column left, and a third voice that is definitely neither of those, which could mean libertarian -- or not.

"When I say open I mean open: anyone can apply. But experience as a political blogger counts. You have to be an original linker and be able to think for yourself. Finalists and semi-finalists are named. There's a week's try-out period for the final few and a big bake off at the end -- all with comments enabled. The competition would generate interest online, and give the winning bloggers a running start."