Philadelphia Inquirer, April 9

Tough to make case for blaming media on Iraq

By Dick Polman
Inquirer Political Analyst

As conditions in Iraq continue to deteriorate, and as President Bush's popularity at home continues to wane, administration leaders and their conservative followers have been busy honing a provocative message:

It's the media's fault.

Their argument is that media coverage of the war, focusing on bad news while ignoring the good, is sapping the will of the American people. Maybe it's coincidence, but Bush's March 20 complaint -- "people resuming their normal lives will never be as dramatic as the footage of an IED explosion" -- is being increasingly echoed by his allies in the conservative punditocracy.

It's not unusual for journalists to be assailed during wartime -- President John F. Kennedy tried to get New York Times correspondent David Halberstam ejected from Vietnam because of his downbeat dispatches; Vice President Spiro Agnew later skewered Vietnam-era reporters as "nattering nabobs of negativism" -- but the attacks on the Iraq coverage may set new standards for both fervor and frequency.

Fox News host Sean Hannity condemned what he called "a total and almost complete focus on all the negative aspects of the war." Bill O'Reilly said that "there is a segment of the media trying to undermine the policy in Iraq for their own ideological purposes." Frequent Fox guest Laura Ingraham said that many members of the media "are invested in America's defeat."

But these attacks are proof that the war itself is going badly; there would be no need to point fingers if it were going well. And many nonpartisan observers dismiss the conservatives' media-bashing as an attempt to pin blame to the wrong people -- while exonerating Bush, whose handling of Iraq draws support from only 35 percent of the citizenry, a record low, according to the new Associated Press-Ipsos poll.

Michael O'Hanlon, a Brookings Institution analyst who follows the reconstruction effort and opposes U.S. troop withdrawal, said the other day: "The media has it about right, and public opinion has it about right. It's Bush and Donald Rumsfeld who won't admit they are not handling the war effectively, and that it has gone badly. Vice President Cheney, in particular, is living in positive-spin dreamland."

O'Hanlon said the media were rightfully stressing bad news -- because that's the reality. His annual charts, which track Iraqi statistics, tell the tale: Two months ago, there was less electricity, less household fuel, and less oil production than before Saddam Hussein's ouster. The number of insurgents has more than tripled since February 2004; the number of daily attacks by insurgents has more than tripled since then; and there were twice as many roadside bombs in 2005 as in 2004.

Anthony Cordesman, a former Pentagon intelligence expert, now a national security analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said: "The coverage is fairly accurate. If you go looking for the good news during an ongoing insurgency, in a place where there are major problems forming a government, a place where the economy is in disarray, well, good news may not be the best indicator of what's really going on."

Orville Schell, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, who covered the Vietnam War and recently returned from a stint in Iraq, put it this way: "If you're covering the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown, would you go spend time covering a healthy reactor, for 'balance'? The story in Iraq is the meltdown. It's a bloody mess. The story is not a schoolhouse that just got plumbing."

Rich Noyes offered the pro-Bush argument by phone on April 7. He tracks Iraq coverage for the conservative Media Research Center in Virginia; last October, he filed a report that argued that the media should "balance the daily dramatic attacks with the big picture of a country slowly but surely being restored and democracy dawning in the heart of the Middle East."

Does he still believe that big picture is accurate?

"It certainly isn't a smooth, effortless transition," he said. "... But there are a lot of hopeful signs out there. The good guys don't do things in a huge, dramatic way. What we're saying is, don't remove the bad news, but supplement it with the overall context of the good that we're doing. Because the way the coverage has been framed, it's having a demoralizing effect on public opinion."

The problem, however, is that journalists on the ground often can't get to the "good news" -- because it's way too dangerous.

Lara Logan, a war correspondent on CBS, made this point recently. She told CNN that when she asks U.S. officials for leads on upbeat stories, this is what she is told: "Oh, sorry, we can't take you to that school project, because if you put that on TV, they're going to be attacked, the teachers are going to be killed, the children might be victims of attack. Oh, sorry, we can't show this reconstruction project because then that's going to expose it to sabotage."

Logan, who was speaking from Baghdad, said: "Security dominates every single thing that happens in this country. Reconstruction funds have been diverted to security... . So how it is that security issues should not then dominate the media coverage coming out of here?"

Her point is confirmed by Robert Callahan, a former press attache at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. In the latest issue of American Journalism Review, he writes: "We stopped taking reporters to the inaugurations of many reconstruction projects because, as we quickly learned to our dismay, publicity might invite a terrorist attack... . We concluded that good publicity simply wasn't worth the cost in lives and damage, and we stopped advertising them."

It's also true that reconstruction funds have been diverted to security, more than 25 percent. Stuart Bowen Jr., inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, said it himself, in Senate testimony on Feb. 8, when he spoke of "continuing challenges" and "course corrections" for rebuilding efforts that "became unstable over time."

Cordesman, the national security expert, routinely monitors these kinds of statements by U.S. officials. He concluded: "Their reports track very closely with the daily news reporting. In general, they're more negative than the media."

Noyes, the conservative watchdog, said: "I sympathize with how hard it is. I will not try to minimize the difficulty of trying to do comprehensive coverage. But there are ways to provide balance and context without going directly into harm's way." The media, he contended, need to do some "soul searching" about their failure to convey "the big picture" of Bush's democratization mission.

Unfortunately for Bush's defenders, some recent attempts to provide that big picture have backfired. An American woman on war duty has been blogging as "Grandma in Iraq" for a Cincinnati newspaper since September, telling good-news stories ("Democracy is winning here"). It turns out that her stories aren't so spontaneous; she's a public-relations officer, a fact that was omitted from her blog biography. Outed last week by another blogger, she said, "I sincerely apologize."

More tellingly, California Republican congressional candidate Howard Kaloogian, in an attempt last month to rebut the media depiction of a violent Baghdad, posted on his Web site a photo of Baghdad that was snapped during his trip to the region in 2005. It showed a peaceful street filled with strolling pedestrians.

But then some of those pesky bloggers went to work -- and discovered that it was actually a street scene in a suburb of Istanbul. In Turkey. (Kaloogian later admitted the error but told TPMmuckraker.com: "You're being really picky on this stuff. It's not that big a deal.")

The problem with the Bush Republicans, said Schell, the journalism dean, "is that, especially in wartime, they have almost a Marxist-Leninist view of how the press should behave. As a China specialist, I'm familiar with this notion - that the press should be the megaphone of the party in government. Controlled obedience, no dissent."

Does this mean, if democracy fails to take root, that the media risk being blamed for having "lost" Iraq -- much as some Americans still blame the media for having "lost" Vietnam?

"Either way, the media will survive," said O'Hanlon, at Brookings. "And the stakes are bigger than whether the media gets a black eye. The stakes are whether this war will be good or bad for this country. We've still got to win this damn thing."

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