Dan Rather
And the Decline
Of Media Power
CBS is missing the story of its own decline.
BY DANIEL HENNINGER
Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.
Dan Rather and Mary Mapes, meet Ahmed Mutlok Oda.
Ahmed Mutlok Oda is a much better story than pink-cheeked George Bush in the National Guard. But CBS missed that story.
Last Wednesday, amid the CBS media bonfire and constant images from Iraq of car bombings and beheadings, Ahmed Mutlok Oda (shown below) cast the first of 146 ballots in city-council elections for the village of Wynot (as in Why Not?), near Tikrit. The historic, first-ever Wynot election took months to plan, primarily under the direction of a U.S. second lieutenant named Scott Robinson and a sergeant first class named Todd Carlsrud of the 1st Infantry Division.
Even John Kerry, campaigning on chaos to the horizon in Iraq, would probably agree that the Wynot city-council election was a good thing. (Who needs the timorous U.N. when you've got willing and able second lieutenants?) Indeed, in places around Iraq where al Zarqawi can't find anyone willing to blow himself up in a car bomb so that the bloody images convince armchair pundits of chaos, the U.S. military has been holding similar, modest elections, as earlier in cities around the province of Dhi Qar, southeast of Baghdad.
Iraq's Prime Minister Allawi, in an interview Wednesday with editors from The Wall Street Journal in his suite at the Waldorf-Astoria, said: "This is a chance for Iraq to end three decades of catastrophe, a period beyond imagination, of atrocities, with 262 mass graves found. After all this, Iraqis are enjoying freedom, yet others want to destroy it."
Whether that's true, we'll never know before the scheduled January elections. Major media still exercises its traditional power to define the content and context with such stories, as it is doing now with bad images streaming daily from Iraq.
This isn't going to change anytime soon. It has been the dominant media model going back at least to Tet in Vietnam. But what happened to Dan Rather and CBS suggests that the standard media model may be faltering, that in the future the way people get information about an event like Iraq will be different.
Mary Mapes, Dan Rather's producer for the National Guard story, is credited with surfacing the famously potent Abu Ghraib photos. It was a real story to be sure, but the media winds blew the Abu Ghraib images into a wildfire that burned through our politics for weeks--beyond the event's actual worth. Clearly Mr. Rather and Ms. Mapes expected the media winds to similarly carry their National Guard scoop. But the wind shifted, and the media bonfire engulfed them instead.
How did this happen?
Alternative media, primarily Internet bloggers, dismantled their story.
For years, there has been a saying that major media "sets the agenda." The major networks and newspapers control content and define context. They get to shape public perceptions about events by deciding what is left out of stories. At its best, this is good editing. But too often now, it is deciding how to bury or kill facts that weaken a story's main thesis.
This election has been a watershed for the rising power of alternative media in the U.S. We saw Howard Dean's remarkable Internet fund-raising machine kick in, the rise of the 527 groups, the Swift boat vets' campaign and now bloggers with Web sites swarming CBS's false blockbuster, like antibodies. Jon Stewart's "The Daily Show" is also a kind of alternative. The mama is FOX Cable News.
What is most important to understanding the rise and apparent success of these alternatives is that there is clearly a hunger and market for what they offer. A big market that will only grow when PC screens truly function as televisions. The definition of "media" seems to expand every six months. How long can it be before viable information networks form around images and data sent from the little one-pixel cameras on cellphones?
People learn fast today. About 10 years ago at a conference on new democracies in Prague, the late strategic thinker Albert Wohlstetter gave a paper called "The Fax Shall Make You Free." Anti-Soviet dissidents, he said, "used the explosive growth in Western information technology to end the isolation which had made resistance seem hopeless." In Wynot, they inputted low-tech paper ballots into a cardboard box. Soon some young Iraqi may give us "Letter from a Baghdad Cell (Phone)."
CBS captured the digitized content out of Abu Ghraib, and major media ensured that no alternative analysis could penetrate the bubble it placed around the story's context. But surely the days of content/context monopoly--Abu Ghraib, the recent car bombings--are numbered.
Iraq already has good bloggers offering alternative content. They include: Iraqthemodel.com; Healingiraq.com; Hammorabi.com; and Messopotamian.blogspot.com. Ahman al-Rikaby founded and runs Radio Dijla, the first all-talk call-in radio show in Iraq (mirroring radio's emergence as a political force here).
Much of the programming content coming out of Iraq now is created by a homicidal terrorist named al Zarqawi and distributed by the world's major media outlets. I think there is a content-hungry market for a more expansive view of Iraq, and elsewhere, such as Darfur. Some day, as is happening in the U.S., that market will create competing alternatives. It will be imperfect, but so is what we've had.
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