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Monday, December 04, 2006

Closing the barn door after the horse leaves
Posted by Jill | 5:50 AM
David Gergen NOW admitting that the press acted as cheerleaders for the war, but NOW are presenting the true story is like John Kerry saying THIS time he's going to kick ass and take names -- it's just too damn late.

GERGEN: There was a sense, in the lead-up to the war, in which the press, I think, was guilty of cheerleading. We were waving the flags and it was almost unpatriotic to question the possibility of war with Iraq. And then during the time of the invasion itself, when the reporters were embedded, you know, many of them fell in love with the military and I think they reported very accurately.

But there was no question that they were swayed by what they had seen. But since they have been there, I do think the press has been on the cutting edge, been the leading indicator of saying it's not going as well as the administration says. And for those that think that the press is being too harsh, we now have the leak of the Hadley memo this week, which shows, within the administration itself, there's a real difference between what they're telling each other internally and what they're saying publicly.

The internal reporting inside the administration is much grimmer and much more similar to what the press says than what the administration has officially been saying.

KURTZ: So are we in the last throes, Nick Kristof, if I can use that phrase, of kind of a great struggle between the dire portrait being painted by journalists who were in Iraq, speaking the language, risking their lives, seeing the suicide bombers day after day, and this more upbeat progress is being made picture painted by the administration?

KRISTOF: Well, I wish I could say that I thought that the administration, you know, had recognized that the problem was the message rather than the messenger. But I think that, in fact, you know, if you look at the Pentagon, in particular, has really made a very major effort to manage the news. And you see that in terms of the new Pentagon channel, the incredible press reaction system that always manages to generate a comment in any language anywhere, and in the early bird news clipping service, which originally was just, you know, a clipping service to provide information to commanders and now has really become one more propaganda channel, you know, picking news articles that they will like and omitting some that they won't like. So I don't see any sign that that kind of effort to manage the news is diminishing at all.

KURTZ: David Gergen, let me pick up on your point about journalists having been cheerleaders for the war early on.

To the extent that that changed, rather dramatically, I should add, was that because of a sense of overcompensation, perhaps a sense of embarrassment at their earlier performance, or did things just get much worse in Iraq, so quickly that the reporting had to change?

GERGEN: I thought it was both, Howie. I thought that the -- you know, you and I have seen this pendulum swing before. Sometimes we in journalism, you know, can build someone up, and then we don't see -- they have feet of clay for a while, and then we do, and then we overcompensate by tearing them down. And I think that happened to a degree in this -- this war.

The journalists did feel -- you know, we were -- we were too easy on the claims of weapons of mass destruction and the mushroom clouds being a reason to go to war. And once we saw that there were no -- you know, no nuclear capacity there, I think we did -- a lot of people in the press felt had. And I think they beat up on the administration to a degree because of that.

So, I do think it is a combination. And Iraq had spiraled downward very rapidly, here in the last few weeks.

Let me just say one other thing, though. I do think if you talk to a lot of young officers who are coming out of Iraq -- and I happen to have some of them in my classroom -- they will tell you, look, there are parts of Iraq that are quiet. And what's this about a civil war? We don't see it. We think the press is -- it's not just the administration saying this, there are actually soldiers on the ground who believe this -- that the press is not accurately reporting it.

And your answer to -- my answer to that is, look, we had a civil war in this country, and just because there was no fighting in New York or in Iowa, does not mean there wasn't a civil war.


Every journalist who has repeated the Administration's claims has as much American and Iraqi blood on his or her hands as anyone in the Pentagon does. The press' job is to REPORT WHAT IS HAPPENING, not what the Administration would like to BELIEVE is happening. The cheerleaders in the media have disgraced their profession in their coverage of this war.
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