For those of us who get our news on-line, we were somewhat surprised by an article that was written by Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post August 12, 2004:
Stories Pushed Aside in March to War Post says it underplayed skeptical reports on WMDs
The reader is strongly encouraged to put the Kurtz article under a microscope of objective analysis. It is a goldmine of contradictions and propaganda.
Since it is obvious that one doesn't bite the hand that feeds it, why would Kurtz suddenly be so critical of his own management? The obvious answer is that his management is actually promoting this article not because it is pursuing the truth, but because it has an agenda. It is trying to rescue its credibility by appearing to show that it allows criticism when it makes a mistake. Credibility is important for a news source that derives revenues from subscribers and advertisers. In the long run, this article is all about The Washington Post's viability and ability to generate profits in the future.
The basic technique employed in the Kurtz article is to plead guilty to a minor offense and thereby proclaim innocence of the major crime. The minor offense is that The Washington Post allowed an overwhelming information load to outweigh the need to investigate the opposing viewpoint. "It underplayed skeptical reports on WMDs." It got caught up in group-think. That seems innocent enough. After all, anybody can make a mistake.
However, The Washington Post plays a major role in shaping national opinion on issues such as a commitment to go to war. Is The Post guilty of the major crime of participating in a massive propaganda scheme to agitate for war?
Kurtz's article acknowledges that "some critics say the media, including The Washington Post, failed the country by not reporting more skeptically on President Bush's contentions during the war run up." But Executive Editor Leonard Downie, Jr. excuses the paper with the following statement:
We were so focused on trying to figure out what the administration was doing that we were not giving the same play to people who said it wouldn't be a good idea to go to war and were questioning the administration's rationale. Not enough of those stories were put on the front page. That was a mistake on my part.
This is an excuse befitting The National Enquirer, but is this acceptable from The Washington Post? This is the newspaper that brought down the Nixon administration by exposing Watergate. It sees itself as a watchdog of government and attempts to portray that image to the public. Watergate reporter Bob Woodward still plays a key role on the paper and, as the Kurtz article pointed out, was in a position to influence the positioning of articles questioning the wisdom of going to war.
No doubt The Washington Post would claim fiercely that it defends the interests of "the common man" against the predations of the powerful, including the powerful in government. And yet the Kurtz article quotes Post reporter Karen DeYoung as follows:
If the president stands up and says something, we report what the president said. [if contrary arguments] are put in the eighth paragraph, where they're not on the front page, a lot of people don't read that far.
Students of propaganda techniques will recognize what DeYoung is doing: deflecting the responsibility for misinterpretation to the reader. Her rationalization seems to be, "After all, I put the contrary arguments in the article, but it is your fault that you didn't read the whole article." But Kurtz has already acknowledged that The Washington Post edited articles to place what it believed to be most important information on the front page. The Washington Post was intentionally communicating its judgment – read what we put on the front page. It is important. This is the president speaking and he certainly must know more than others in the government.
This is not just a matter of government's watchdog being asleep. The watchdog was very much awake and licking the hand of the administration feeding it stories. In short, The Washington Post had become nothing more than the administration's propaganda conveyer belt.
One would think that a true apology was merited, yet the Kurtz article makes it plain that no apologies will be forthcoming. Liz Spaed, the assistant managing editor for national news, states:
I believe we pushed as hard or harder than anyone to question the administration’s assertions on all kinds of subjects related to the war. . . . Do I wish we would have had more and pushed harder and deeper into questions of whether they possessed weapons of mass destruction? Absolutely. Do I feel we owe our readers an apology? I don’t think so.
Then there is Executive Editor Leonard Downie, Jr.'s parting shot, the thought that The Washington Post really wants its readers to be left with:
People who were opposed to the war from the beginning and have been critical of the media’s coverage in the period before the war have this belief that somehow the media should have crusaded against the war. They have the mistaken impression that somehow if the media’s coverage had been different, there wouldn’t have been a war.
Try to picture a situation in which the mainstream media opposed the war and the administration still proceeded on the warpath. Picture a Congress able to stand up to the media and the screams of its constituents. Downie's assertion is the third part of the blessed trinity of myths, the first two being that there is a Santa Claus and an Easter Bunny.
The Washington Post is not the only sheepish newspaper to do a mea culpa. The New York Times has likewise been forced to admit that it allowed the drums of war to overwhelm rationality. But these papers are hardly standard bearers for neo-conservatism. How did they allow themselves to be "hoodwinked" into parroting the current administration's party line? How is it that supposedly left-wing media as well as media from the Right were so in-harness with the Bush team? Two possibilities come to mind:
- Wars are sensational. They sell newspapers.
- There is a symbiotic relationship between most of the mainstream media and the state that transcends traditional ideological loyalty.
Mainstream reporters and editors are very comfortable with administration sources of information, but construct immense barriers to opposing ideas. In effect, they are elitist as well as statist. Who you are is far more important than the veracity of what you say. While they may rationalize this bias based upon publishing time pressures, as the Kurtz article has done, the bottom line is that the sale of newspapers and the building of journalism careers assumes first priority. Truth is an also ran.
That, however, still fails to explain The Washington Post's full agenda in releasing the Kurtz article. To fully understand, we must await the coming months’ run up to the national elections. However, a reasonable prediction can be made today. Having done its mea culpa, and its readership having forgotten The Washington Post's responsibility in our march to war with Iraq, it will gradually find more and more to criticize the Bush administration. Finally, it will come out with an unqualified endorsement for John Kerry, conveniently forgetting that Kerry supported the Iraq war resolution. In doing so, it will sell a lot of newspapers and appear to be taking the moral high ground. The Right will rail against The Post along with the rest of the "liberal media" and very little will appear to have changed on the American political scene. The average citizen, perhaps, will be even more cynical midway through the next administration, whoever wins in 2004.
One should not be depressed by the duplicity of the mainstream media since the voluntary sector can offer a correction. If one finds a vacuum in media coverage, it is possible to fill that void with the opposing point of view. That is easier to do in the Internet Age than ever before. However, the Kurtz article suggests another weapon against biased news coverage. Never before has it been so easy to analyze reporting over a period of time. That is why both The Washington Post and The New York Times have been forced to publish their phony mea culpas. Every publication in America ought to be exposed to that same scrutiny. This is a contest in which David has the clear advantage over Goliath.
August 16, 2004
