Tearing down the press

The Bush administration has been at war with the media from Day One. Is its real goal to undermine the press itself -- and thereby eliminate inconvenient truths?

By Eric Boehlert

Mar 2, 2005 | For the last four years the persistent story line about the White House's relationship with the press has focused on the administration's discipline, denial of access, and ability to stay on message. The Bush administration, according to this account, is expert at managing information, using secrecy, carrots and sticks, and carefully crafted talking points to control the news.

But in the wake of revelations about the aggressive and unprecedented tactics employed by the White House to manipulate the news, that relatively benign interpretation is being reexamined. Recent headlines about paid-off pundits, video press releases disguised as news telecasts, and the remarkable press access granted to a right-wing pseudo-journalist working under a phony name, have led some to conclude that the White House is not simply aggressively managing the news, but is out to sabotage the press corps from within, to undermine the integrity and reputation of journalism itself.

The White House and its media allies, echoing a deep-rooted conservative antagonism toward the so-called liberal media, say they are simply countering its bias. But critics charge that the White House, along with partners like Fox News and Sinclair Broadcasting, organizations whose allegiance to the Republican Party outweighs their commitment to journalism, is actually trying to permanently weaken the press. Its motivation, they say, is twofold. Weakening the press weakens an institution that's structurally an adversary of the White House. And if the press loses its credibility, that eliminates agreed-upon facts -- the commonly accepted information that is central to public debate.

"Republicans have a clear, agreed-upon plan how to diminish the mainstream press," says Ron Suskind, a former Wall Street Journal reporter who was granted unique access inside the White House in 2002 to report on the administration's communication strategy. "For them, essentially the way to handle the press is the same as how to handle the federal government; you starve the beast. When it's in a weakened and undernourished condition, then you're able to effect a variety of subtle partisan and political attacks. Armstrong Williams and others are examples of that."

Williams, the radio talk show host and conservative columnist who was paid by the administration to write allegedly independent, legitimate pieces supporting Bush policies, was among several pundits who accepted contracts from the administration while at the same time hyping White House initiatives. News in January of Williams' contract was the first of many headlines this year to raise questions about the Bush administration's attempt to undermine the independent press. "It's basically gaming journalism," says Alex Jones, director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. "It shows withering contempt for journalism. What's frightening is that it's been done with total disregard, or lack of concern, about being exposed."

According to David Brock, author of "The Right Wing Noise Machine" and CEO of Media Matters for America, a progressive, not-for-profit advocacy group, the White House's ultimate aim is to raise doubts about the information independent journalists produce. "Their explicit goal is to get us to the point where there are blue [state] facts and red [state] facts," Brock says. Eliminating agreed-upon facts has obvious political advantages for the White House. The most glaring example is Saddam Hussein's alleged WMD, the rationale for the war. No WMD were found in Iraq, a fact that was widely reported in all the mainstream media, but scarcely mentioned in Bush-friendly media organizations like Fox News. Polls consistently showed that remarkably high percentages of Americans, and extraordinarily high percentages of Bush supporters, believed that WMD were found in Iraq. Another example is the alleged connection between Saddam and al-Qaida; although the connection has been found to be nonexistent, many Americans -- and particularly Fox viewers -- have said they believe the two were connected. In similar fashion, a poll conducted by the Pew Research Center last December, coming on the heels of the deadliest month for U.S. soldiers serving in Iraq, found that 75 percent of Bush supporters thought the war in Iraq was going "very well."

Of course, the public's erroneous beliefs could be the result of simple ignorance or its increasing reliance on partisan media outlets, not a conscious plan by the White House. But the two are not mutually exclusive. And the Bush administration's well-documented mastery of cold-blooded political hardball, its record of contempt for journalism, its cavalier willingness to cross ethical lines in dealing with the press, and its arrogant assertion that it alone creates and controls reality, make it difficult to dismiss outright the idea that its approach to the press is strategic, not just tactical.

The most egregious example of this almost metaphysical chutzpah appears in an October 2004 article for the New York Times Magazine, in which Suskind quotes a senior Bush advisor who dismissed reporters for living in the "the reality-based community." The advisor said, "That's not the way the world really works anymore. We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality."

Separately, discussing the role of journalists, White House chief of staff Andy Card famously told the New Yorker in a Jan. 20, 2004, article, "They don't represent the public any more than other people do. In our democracy, the people who represent the public stood for election. I don't believe you have a check-and-balance function." At the time, Card's blunt assessment was seen as a justification of the Bush administration's policy of keeping the press at arm's length. (Bush held the fewest first-term press conferences in modern presidential history.) It's now clear that while most mainstream reporters were getting stiffed, members of the administration were simultaneously setting up propaganda projects by lavishing the Ketchum public relations firm with nearly $100 million in contracts to "communicate" White House initiatives -- by hiring Williams, shipping out bogus video news releases, and other sleazy schemes -- and waving into the White House an amateur journalist using an alias and working for a fake news outlet. (The bogus video news releases were subsequently slapped down as an illegal use of public funds by the General Accounting Office.)

Those revelations have led many observers to take a far darker view of the White House's attitude to the press. "This is qualitatively beyond staying on message and controlling leaks," says Larry Gross, director of the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Southern California. "This is cynical manipulation and 'What can we get away with?'"

Next Page: How the "Jeff Gannon" debacle serves Bush's purposes

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