NYT/Rich: All the President's Press

The New York Times
April 29, 2007

Op-Ed Columnist
All the President's Press
By FRANK RICH

Picture:
http://select.nytimes.com/images/2007/04/28/opinion/29rich-span.jpg

SOMEHOW it's hard to imagine David Halberstam yukking it up with
Alberto Gonzales, Paul Wolfowitz and two discarded "American Idol"
contestants at the annual White House Correspondents' Association
dinner. Before there was a Woodward and Bernstein, there was
Halberstam, still not yet 30 in the early 1960s, calling those in
power to account for lying about our "progress" in Vietnam. He did so
even though J.F.K. told the publisher of The Times, "I wish like hell
that you'd get Halberstam out of there." He did so despite public
ridicule from the dean of that era's Georgetown punditocracy, the now
forgotten columnist (and Vietnam War cheerleader) Joseph Alsop.

It was Alsop's spirit, not Halberstam's, that could be seen in C-
Span's live broadcast of the correspondents' dinner last Saturday, two
days before Halberstam's death in a car crash in California. This fete
is a crystallization of the press's failures in the post-9/11 era: it
illustrates how easily a propaganda-driven White House can enlist the
Washington news media in its shows. Such is literally the case at the
annual dinner, where journalists serve as a supporting cast, but it
has been figuratively true year-round. The press has enabled stunts
from the manufactured threat of imminent "mushroom clouds" to "Saving
Private Lynch" to "Mission Accomplished," whose fourth anniversary
arrives on Tuesday. For all the recrimination, self-flagellation and
reforms that followed these journalistic failures, it's far from clear
that the entire profession yet understands why it has lost the
public's faith.

That state of denial was center stage at the correspondents' dinner
last year, when the invited entertainer, Stephen Colbert, "fell flat,"
as The Washington Post summed up the local consensus. To the
astonishment of those in attendance, a funny thing happened outside
the Beltway the morning after: the video of Mr. Colbert's performance
became a national sensation. (Last week it was still No. 2 among
audiobook downloads on iTunes.) Washington wisdom had it that Mr.
Colbert bombed because he was rude to the president. His real sin was
to be rude to the capital press corps, whom he caricatured as
stenographers. Though most of the Washington audience failed to find
the joke funny, Americans elsewhere, having paid a heavy price for the
press's failure to challenge White House propaganda about Iraq,
laughed until it hurt.

You'd think that l'affaire Colbert would have led to a little
circumspection, but last Saturday's dinner was another humiliation.
And not just because this year's entertainer, an apolitical nightclub
has-been (Rich Little), was a ludicrously tone-deaf flop. More
appalling - and symptomatic of the larger sycophancy - was the press's
insidious role in President Bush's star turn at the event.

It's the practice on these occasions that the president do his own
comic shtick, but this year Mr. Bush made a grand show of abstaining,
saying that the killings at Virginia Tech precluded his being a "funny
guy." Any civilian watching on TV could formulate the question left
hanging by this pronouncement: Why did the killings in Iraq not
preclude his being a "funny guy" at other press banquets we've watched
on C-Span? At the equivalent Radio and Television Correspondents'
Association gala three years ago, the president contributed an
elaborate (and tasteless) comic sketch about his failed search for
Saddam's W.M.D.

But the revelers in the ballroom last Saturday could not raise that
discrepancy and challenge Mr. Bush's hypocrisy; they could only clap.
And so they served as captive dress extras in a propaganda stunt,
lending their credibility to the president's sanctimonious
exploitation of the Virginia Tech tragedy for his own political self-
aggrandizement on national television. Meanwhile the war was kept as
tightly under wraps as the troops' coffins.

By coincidence, this year's dinner occurred just before a
Congressional hearing filled in some new blanks in the still
incomplete story of a more egregious White House propaganda
extravaganza: the Pat Tillman hoax. As it turns out, the
correspondents' dinner played an embarrassing cameo role in it, too.

What the hearing underscored was the likelihood that the White House
also knew very early on what the Army knew and covered up: the
football star's supposed death in battle in Afghanistan, vividly
described in a Pentagon press release awarding him a Silver Star, was
a complete fabrication, told to the world (and Tillman's parents) even
though top officers already suspected he had died by friendly fire.
The White House apparently decided to join the Pentagon in maintaining
that lie so that it could be milked for P.R. purposes on two
television shows, the correspondents' dinner on May 1, 2004, and a
memorial service for Tillman two days later.

The timeline of events in the week or so leading up to that dinner is
startling. Tillman was killed on April 22, 2004. By the next day top
officers knew he had not been killed by enemy fire. On April 29, a top
special operations commander sent a memo to John Abizaid, among other
generals, suggesting that the White House be warned off making
specific public claims about how Tillman died. Simultaneously,
according to an e-mail that surfaced last week, a White House
speechwriter contacted the Pentagon to gather information about
Tillman for use at the correspondents' dinner.

When President Bush spoke at the dinner at week's end, he followed his
jokes with a eulogy about Tillman's sacrifice. But he kept the
circumstances of Tillman's death vague, no doubt because the White
House did indeed get the message that the Pentagon's press release
about Tillman's losing his life in battle was fiction. Yet it would be
four more weeks before Pat Tillman's own family was let in on the
truth.

To see why the administration wanted to keep the myth going, just look
at other events happening in the week before that correspondents'
dinner. On April 28, 2004, CBS broadcast the first photographs from
Abu Ghraib; on April 29 a poll on The Times's front page found the
president's approval rating on the war was plummeting; on April 30 Ted
Koppel challenged the administration's efforts to keep the war dead
hidden by reading the names of the fallen on "Nightline." Tillman
could be useful to help drown out all this bad news, and to an extent
he was. The Washington press corps that applauded the president at the
correspondents' dinner is the same press corps that was slow to
recognize the importance of Abu Ghraib that weekend and, as documented
by a new study, "When the Press Fails" (University of Chicago Press),
even slower to label the crimes as torture.

In his PBS report last week about the journalism breakdown before the
war, Bill Moyers said that "the press has yet to come to terms with
its role in enabling the Bush administration to go to war on false
pretenses." That's not universally true; a number of news
organizations have owned up to their disasters and tried to learn from
them. Yet old habits die hard: for too long the full weight of the
scandal in the Gonzales Justice Department eluded some of the
Washington media pack, just as Abu Ghraib and the C.I.A. leak case
did.

After last weekend's correspondents' dinner, The Times decided to end
its participation in such events. But even were the dinner to vanish
altogether, it remains but a yearly televised snapshot of the overall
syndrome. The current White House, weakened as it is, can still
establish story lines as fake as "Mission Accomplished" and get a free
pass.

To pick just one overarching example: much of the press still takes it
as a given that Iraq has a functioning government that might meet
political benchmarks (oil law, de-Baathification reform, etc., etc.)
that would facilitate an American withdrawal. In reality, the Maliki
"government" can't meet any benchmarks, even if they were enforced,
because that government exists only as a fictional White House talking
point. As Gen. Barry McCaffrey said last week, this government doesn't
fully control a single province. Its Parliament, now approaching a
scheduled summer recess, has passed no major legislation in months.
Iraq's sole recent democratic achievement is to ban the release of
civilian casualty figures, lest they challenge White House happy talk
about "progress" in Iraq.

It's our country's bitter fortune that while David Halberstam is gone,
too many Joe Alsops still hold sway. Take the current dean of the
Washington press corps, David Broder, who is leading the charge in
ridiculing Harry Reid for saying the obvious - that "this war is
lost" (as it is militarily, unless we stay in perpetuity and draft
many more troops). In February, Mr. Broder handed down another gem of
Beltway conventional wisdom, suggesting that "at the very moment the
House of Representatives is repudiating his policy in Iraq, President
Bush is poised for a political comeback."

Some may recall that Stephen Colbert offered the same prediction in
his monologue at the correspondents' dinner a year ago. "I don't
believe this is a low point in this presidency," he said. "I believe
it is just a lull before a comeback." But the fake pundit, unlike the
real one, recognized that this was a joke.


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