Why oh why can't we have a better press corps---with apologies to Brad DeLong

There he is, taking a vacation from his vacation, to go hug the wrong mom.

A mother who doesn’t need consolation or an explanation, all her boys are still alive.   But that’s why she’s the mom who gets the hug.  The only good solider is a live soldier.  The only good mom is one who supports him.  Once again, he handpicks his audience to make sure it includes only the adoring.  Once again, he celebrates the glory of his little war and denies the fact of death and pain.  Once more he uses someone else’s courage to sell himself as a great and fearless leader.

The man is playing at being president.  He’s always played at being president.  There has been no other American president who took orders from his vice-president and thought and said only what his consilgere told him to.

He’s a fake.  But he gets away with it.

He’s a failure.  But he gets away with it.

Paul the Spud thinks the national news media must be afraid of Bush.

He has drawn up a list of Bush's many failures, Iraq first and foremost, but he doesn't forget the deficit created out of a surplus or the No Child Left Behind Act that for all the good it's done might as well have been called the We Should Have Left Well Enough Alone Act, among other disasters.  Paul demonstates Bush's unpopularity---Nixon had better numbers during Watergate---and reminds us of how Bush himself is afraid to play fair or face any crowd that isn't a cheerleading squad because he knows that to do so would risk showing himself up as the fake and failure that he is.

Then Paul wonders why the Press still handles the man with kid gloves and, answering his own question, concludes that for some reason the Press is afraid of the man.

This is a reasonable guess.  It's supported by the fact that as it's becoming undeniable that the American people have realized the truth about Bush, and don't much care for it, the Media have shown signs they're developing an interest in reporting that truth.

But as the Media is a Hydra with a thousand heads, and some of those heads are Conservative and will support George Bush until the day he declares war on Texas and maybe until the day after that, one explanation probably doesn't answer.

More's going on.

Paul Krugman provides some more of that more in his column Monday.  Krugman was looking at the way the Media reported the 2000 Presidential Election Debacle and its aftermath, at how quick the Media was to declare Bush the winner, how loathe they were to look at the facts revealed by the several recounts done after Bush was Inaugurated.   None of the facts about the recounts suggest that Bush certainly won or would have won.  Most of the facts show the opposite, that Gore would have won, although not in any way handily, but decisively.  Still most of the Media treats that election as if Bush's victory was somehow proven rock solid.  Krugman doesn't mention it in his column, but a lot of pundits were quick to argue that Bush's victory in 2004 made all the questions about 2000 irrelevent.  But Krugman concludes that what the Media really decided about 2000 was that the truth was too messy and that neither they nor the American people could handle the messy truth.  So, says Krugman, the Media has decided to prettify the story.

Bush won.  The system works.  The story has ended and every story has a happy ending.

Krugman says that the Media prettified the story again after 9/11.

The country wanted very badly to believe in its leadership. Nobody wanted to write stories suggesting that the wrong man was sitting in the White House.

Krugman is right.  The fact that George Bush wasn't up to the job of being a peacetime President had become clear.  He screwed up everything he touched for the first eight months of his term and then he took a vacation.  He was a failure out of the gate.  But we can't rally round a failure and we needed to rally round the President, so the Media told us another pretty story.  George Bush, screw-up in a time of Peace, had become heroically competent in a time of War.  Crisis was what he was made for and thank God he was there when a crisis loomed.  The Media decided we needed George Bush the War President, so they gave us George Bush the War President.

And then they were stuck with what they'd created.

Krugman's point is that the Media, thinking we can't handle the truth about Iraq, have been telling us another pretty story about the war.

My point, my personal guess as to what's going on inside many of the heads of that hydra is that, Krugman's right, they have been telling us pretty stories, but they're stuck with those stories and they have had to stick with those stories out of professional vanity.

God forbid that they ever admit they were wrong.

But this started before 9/11.  It started before the 2000 Election.  It started in 1992.  It started when the Media decided collectively to hate and despise Bill Clinton.

All the pretty stories since, about 2000, about 9/11, about Iraq, about George Bush Man of the People and George Bush the Avatar of Teddy Roosevelt, have all been written to prove that the first ugly story they told about Bill Clinton was right.

Dinner time here.  Look for Part 2---yes, I'm sorry, another multi-parter---later tonight.

Comments

[Linkmeister]

And books have been written to try to explain why the media hated Bill Clinton. I've read a few, and none have yet explained it to my satisfaction. I think they bought the "Slick Willie" characterization and ran with it.

[Lance]

Link, it's like you read my mind. It's what my next post is about. Hop on over to the Heretik's for a preview. While you're there leave your own three paragraph short story. Tell Joe Mannion sent you.

[blue girl]

"My point, my personal guess as to what's going on inside many of the heads of that hydra is that, Krugman's right, they have been telling us pretty stories, but they're stuck with those stories and they have had to stick with those stories out of professional vanity."

I think the tide is slowly turning Lance. Maybe it's just that *August lull* that everyone's always talking about (which I think is a total crock! Yeesh. Some journalists can take July off and some can take August off! The news does not stop because it's vacation season...that really makes me mad.) -- but, last night on the ABC evening news -- their very last segment was about wounded American soldiers home from Iraq. And they focused on this one guy -- paralyzed from the neck down. Really think about that. He didn't have much help when he got home and had trouble (obviously) -- doing things for himself. His apartment was too small. It was not good from A-Z.

His entire community came together to help him. Built him a house, wheelchair accessible, etc.
And, bless his heart, he said he felt grateful.

But, the kicker was -- at the end of the report -- they interviewed those in the community. And they said -- "Why isn't there a system in place? What would happen if we weren't here for him? This is ridiculous."

I've been giving a lot of attention/analysis to Cindy Sheehan on my blog -- and some on the left say she needs to go home now...but, I have to say -- that the MSM coverage has kicked it up a notch because of her. That report last night was the next step, or should I say the first step, reporting on the wounded from Iraq. As much as I pay attention to the media -- I haven't heard that much about them.

I truly believe that the polls are reflecting the way the majority of Americans feel right now. Bush's approval rating is at an all time low. What suckers last November.

And there's this hopeless feeling: What are we supposed to do?

It makes me heartsick. Both for us and the Iraqi's. Oh geez. I'm rambling. Sorry.

[Pepper]

You're not rambling at all, blue girl! I was thinking the same thing when I saw that they were closing Walter Reed. Closing one of the major hospitals for wounded soldiers during the war? Oh, everything is so perplexing!

Lance, you are so right that our talking heads won't admit that they're wrong. There's no reason for them to admit they are wrong now. The Fairness Doctrine is dead, and facts are out of style. Facts are bothersome. Facts require work. Facts don't get ratings because they're boring, which is why "The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer" gets yawns instead of the respect it deserves.

[The Viscount LaCarte]

>But this started before 9/11. It started before the 2000 Election. It started in 1992. It started when the Media decided collectively to hate and despise Bill Clinton.<

I would say it started before that, but we began to notice then. It started with a mantra that was repeated over and over and in spite of all available evidence to the contrary, and is still repeated today:

"LIBERAL MEDIA."

Those two words, spoken over and over have helped land us in the situation we are in today. I believe that the mantra has influenced the media in only a small way, because corporate ownership of the news delivery system by definition means that we don't get anything close to objectivity anyway. The damage done by those words was done to the population at large, by getting many to believe that the right-leaning corporate-interest serving media was somehow slanted to the left. This influenced people to become all too willing to accept Fox News and the Radio Shills' nonsense as truth.

Too many people have forgotten that the role of the press in a free society first and foremost is to monitor and report on the actions of the government regardless of the adminisration's stated agenda and direction. This is part of the checks and balances in the US Constitution to ensure that the government is accountable to the citizens.

I link to a 1997 documentary at my blog featuring Noam Chomsky, which explains that absolute absurdity of labeling the mainstream us media as liberal.

For those who are really intersted, there is a movie-length documentary featuring Noam Chomsky called Manufacturing Consent which is a little slow but worth the time.

[Lance]

BG and Pepper, it sure looks like you're right. I hope it lasts. I kind of glanced at this. I think the Media is feeling emboldened because the tide has turned among the American people---that is, among their audience and readerships. One thing they fear more than anything is losing customers.

BG, your posts on Cindy Sheehan have been how I've been keeping up on the story. Folks, here's BG's Wednesday post on how Sheehan chased Bush out of Texas. From there you can work your way through her site, which isn't all Sheehan all the time by any means. Today's post on how Blue Girl's trying to convince herself fall really is on the way is a great example of BG waxing lyrical.

[sfmike]

I love it when you get political. The problem with the media, however, is not the hydra heads barking in unison with a little intramural neck-biting on occasion. It's the fact that they're ALL owned by four or five corporations, including the profoundly evil defense contractor (among other things) General Electric. What else would you expect from their mouthpieces than the company line?

It's why our only hope at this point for actual shared information is the internet, and blogs like your own, which they don't know how to control and haven't quite figured how to shut down. Still, they're trying to figure out how to do just that right now, so BEWARE.

Yikes, I'm sounding like my favorite paranoid conspiracy site, "Rigorous Intuition" by Jeff Wells, the cautiously pessimistic Canadian.

[Paul the Spud]

Thanks for the hat tip, Lance. I really appreciate it.