Is the news media asking enough tough questions?
News media abdicate role in Iraq war
By James O. Goldsborough
Columnist
THE SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE
March 10, 2003
signonsandiego.com
Editor & Publisher, the professional weekly, devotes its latest issue to the subject of the press and the Iraq war. "Now that the Super Bowl and Golden Globes are over," it begins, "Americans are finally ready to debate an attack on Iraq."
The press' role in the Bush administration's march to war has not been glorious. No Golden Globes for us, whatever they are. Yet even E&P's analysis misses the central point we presumably learned in Vietnam: that in war as in everything else the press' role is to question, question, question.
That role is especially important for Bush's war, which is war against a nation that has not attacked us. Bush repeats ad nauseum that "Iraq is a threat," but offers no evidence. With his policy of "pre-emptive" war, he doesn't need evidence, but imagine that every nation adopted such a policy. Or imagine that Bush had come to power during the Cold War.
E&P blames the public's confusion in part on "officials planning the war, who have not fully explained the reasons for it," but adds that U.S. newspapers deserve "no small measure" of blame for the confusion.
I think the media deserve most of the blame. Bush officials have explained in detail their reasons for war, and the media have not sufficiently challenged those reasons. They are endorsing Bush's war by default. The public is confused because its gut feeling is that the government/media reasoning doesn't add up.
E&P focused on newspapers, but television is worse. For Bush's war, cable TV – with its absurd "countdowns to war" – leads the charge. Rupert Murdoch's Fox News goading Bush is worse than Hearst's and Pulitzer's New York American and World goading McKinley into war with Spain a century ago because Murdoch reaches tens of millions. Commercial talk radio, with ranting paranoids shouting at angry people stuck in traffic, is a nightmare.
Newspapers have always had trouble with war. They are good at challenging government on domestic issues, but on war flail about like hooked flounders, unclear what to say. Truth is still the first casualty of war.
War is a nasty business the press must stick its nose into like anything else. The press' meat is death, and there is more death in war than in anything. It took us years in Vietnam to report a war gone wrong, but this time we have a chance before war starts. When America starts shooting 3,000 guided missiles into Baghdad – to "shock" a city the size of Los Angeles into surrender – it will be too late to realize this isn't a Super Bowl.
Television is Bush's ally in war because it is a visual medium. It shows pretty pictures of ships sailing, flags waving, troops landing. Television loves Bush photo-ops and shrugs off anti-war protests. C-SPAN and PBS alone present fair pictures because they don't depend on advertising.
The wasteland of commercial television is an easy target, but why does E&P let newspapers off so easily, quoting a gaggle of talking heads about how "complicated" war is to cover and how "uneasy" newsrooms are about their coverage. Why isn't this magazine – watchdog of the watchdogs – willing to confront the central question: Why has the press become a willing accomplice in Bush's war?
Unlike television, newspapers are not a picture show. Unlike television, newspapers have editorial and opinion pages whose job is analyze, endorse or refute official policy. These pages have ties to their communities, not to some multinational news machine in New Jersey. Reporters report what Bush and Donald Rumsfeld say or do, but the job of opinion pages is critical analysis. Short of that, we are useless.
The catastrophe of Vietnam could have been prevented with more editorial courage. A few voices – Walter Lippmann most notably – did question the war from the beginning, but just as most editorial pages in 1965-67 were willing accomplices, so are most of them today.
Lippmann, easily America's most respected commentator, wrote in February 1965, when Johnson was just starting to gear up for all-out war, that it would be "supreme folly" to wage a land war in Asia. "While the warhawks would rejoice when it began," he wrote, "the people would weep before it ended." Remember those words.
"Despite rising doubts," writes E&P, "there doesn't seem to be one U.S. newspaper among the top 50 dailies by circulation that is strongly anti-war." A group of big city newspapers (read big advertising) advocates "fast-track invasion," writes E&P. "Not surprisingly, The Wall Street Journal leads the formation of hawks."
The press has accepted Bush's war assumptions from the beginning, confusing a skeptical public. It reports Pentagon leaks as truth, reports Bush allegations as fact and endorses the fiction that Bush's goal is disarming Iraq when his clear purpose all along has been "regime change."
In a nation bitterly divided, this editorial enthusiasm for Bush's war amounts to professional crime. The media, led by cable television (which wasn't there) has forgotten the lessons of Vietnam. Soon we will be remembering the words of Tacitus, referring to the Romans: "They make a desert and call it peace."
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James O. Goldsborough is foreign affairs columnist for The San Diego Union-Tribune and a member of the newspaper's editorial board, specializing in international issues.
Goldsborough spent 15 years in Europe as a correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune, the International Herald Tribune and Newsweek Magazine. He is a former Edward R. Murrow Fellow at the Council on Foreign relations and a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment.
He is the author of Rebel Europe: Living with a Changing Continent, and of numerous articles on foreign affairs for national publications. Goldsborough can be reached via e-mail at jim.goldsborough@uniontrib.com. |
