Although the American people did not know it, the entire Washington press corps understood that President Bush wanted to go to war in Iraq from the moment he took office.
So it was odd that coverage in The New York Times, The Washington Post and many other newspapers during the lead-up to the Iraq war portrayed the president as an agonized leader who was being goaded into battle with a brutal dictator who "intends not only to develop weapons of mass destruction," as David Remnick wrote in 2003, "but also to use them."
The story of how the Bush administration cooked up this marketing canard has been told and retold, but a complete picture of how the mainstream media ate it up has finally hit bookshelves. In Lapdogs, Salon journalist Eric Boehlert details the media context in which it happened, while, in her new book, Watchdogs of Democracy?, veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas puts the nature of this rollover in light of history.
Thomas has been working in Washington since the 1940s, so she is no naif when it comes to government spin. Since the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, which made it illegal to print anything critical of the president or Congress, presidents have used a variety of tools to control the press. Thomas describes how they can deny reporters access or bully them. Administrations tell white lies, manage government leaks and control the flow of information. She describes how John F. Kennedy charmed reporters by allowing his press conferences to be broadcast live, while Lyndon Johnson moved to have the press pool abolished when its members didn't write nice things about him. Richard Nixon bugged reporters' phones.
In light of such measures, the Bush administration's maneuvers are hardly unprecedented. What is new, Thomas argues, is the mainstream media's willingness to let them get away with it. While Thomas sees a simple case of bad reporting, Boehlert argues something more sinister is at work. He paints a media landscape that has been at once flattened by deregulation—the seven largest media companies control 80 percent of our access to information—and intimidated by conservative loudmouths into overcorrecting for a nonexistent liberal bias.
Boehlert's thesis would seem like a screed if his evidence were not so damning. Combing through the last five years of news coverage, he shows how one story after another that could have damaged Bush was ignored, delayed or downplayed, while those helpful to him were played to death. During the 2004 campaign, for instance, attacks against John Kerry by the Republican-backed Swift Boat Veterans for Truth received enormous play, while Bush's incomplete service in the Air National Guard didn't get a fraction of the attention. (Questions about it actually cut in Bush's favor after CBS mishandled the story.)
You would think after missing the boat on Iraq, WMDs and any number of other stories, lapdogs would have become pit bulls. Not a chance. In the five-week period after the infamous Downing Street Memo was leaked, Boehlert notes, former White House spokesman Scott McClellan took 940 questions from reporters in 19 press conferences. Only two questions concerned the memo. Makes you wonder what the other 938 were about.
Watchdogs of Democracy?: The Waning Washington Press Corps and How It Has Failed the Public
Helen Thomas
Scribner, $23
Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush
Eric Boehlert
Free Press, $25