By The Beachwood Press Failure Affairs Desk
Today we conclude our three-part excerpt from the opening chapter of When the Press Fails: Political Power and the News Media from Iraq to Katrina, by W. Lance Bennett, Regina G. Lawrence, and Steven Livingston, graciously provided to us by the University of Chicago Press and also available in one fell swoop on their website. Catch up here with Parts 1 and 2.
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WMDs and the al-Qaeda Connection
Perhaps the central example that illustrates the press’s having limited capacity to challenge potentially questionable, but dominant, official accounts involves the allegation of links between the international terrorist organization al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, and between Saddam and 9/11. Those claims, like the charges that Saddam possessed WMDs, were asserted repeatedly by high administration officials including President Bush and Vice President Cheney, but little solid evidence was ever presented. To the contrary, there was ample evidence that al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden had condemned Saddam’s government as a secular threat to Islamic fundamentalism, and that Saddam feared an Islamic threat to his rule. Indeed, after Saddam’s capture, documents were found in his possession ordering Iraqi resistance fighters to refuse to cooperate with any Islamic fundamentalists who entered Iraq, suggesting that al-Qaeda, while sharing an antagonism toward the United States, was also seen as a threat to stir Islamic revolution in Iraq.
Despite the available challenges to this core rationale for the war promoted by the Bush administration, the durability of the Saddam-al-Qaeda connection in public opinion polls continued years into the conflict. Just the right dose of reinforcements from high administration sources continued to receive publicity from news organizations that were curiously ill equipped to balance the spurious claims. Indeed, the underlying ethos of “we report (what officials say), you decide (if it is true)” results in the odd problem of balancing erroneous claims. It might make sense to worry more about whether such claims should be reported so decorously at all. In any event, a poll conducted in July 2006, more than three years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, found that 64% of Americans still believed that Saddam Hussein’s regime had strong ties with al-Qaeda – even though volumes of contrary information circulated just beyond, and sometimes even found its way into, the mainstream press.
[EDITOR’S NOTE: “Poll: More Than 4 in 10 Americans Still Believe Saddam Involved with 9/11,” June 25.]
There was similarly little evidence presented to support the alleged existence of WMDs – particularly nuclear weapons capacity – that was offered as the imminent threat to U.S. national security that justified the war. The slim evidence put forward by government officials was overplayed in the news, as indicated in the published apologies of both the Times and the Post. Weaknesses in the accounts and challenges to claimed evidence were either buried deep in the newspapers’ inside pages or not examined much at all. Here is how the Times‘ editorial apology to its readers assessed the paper’s reporting on an intelligence finding about the aluminum tubes alleged to be part of Saddam’s hidden operation to manufacture nuclear materials:
On Sept. 8, 2002, the lead article of the paper was headlined “U.S. Says Hussein Intensified Quest for A-Bomb Parts.” That report concerned the aluminum tubes that the administration advertised insistently as components for the manufacture of nuclear weapons fuel. The claim came not from defectors but from the best American intelligence sources available at the time. Still, it should have been presented more cautiously. There were hints that the usefulness of the tubes in making nuclear fuel was not a sure thing, but the hints were buried deep, 1,700 words into a 3,600-word article. Administration officials were allowed to hold forth at length on why this evidence of Iraq’s nuclear intentions demanded that Saddam Hussein be dislodged from power: “The first sign of a ‘smoking gun,'” they argue, “may be a mushroom cloud.”
Five days later, the Times reporters learned that the tubes were in fact a subject of debate among intelligence agencies. The misgivings appeared deep in an article on Page A13, under a headline that gave no inkling that we were revising our earlier view (“White House Lists Iraq Steps to Build Banned Weapons”). The Times gave voice to skeptics of the tubes on Jan. 9, when the key piece of evidence was challenged by the International Atomic Energy Agency. That challenge was reported on Page A10; it might well have belonged on Page A1.
Other evidence being pushed by the Bush administration to support its case for war was similarly disputed within government intelligence circles, but effective management of a compliant press kept the lid on the story. For example, intelligence analysts suspected that the document underlying the administration’s charges that Saddam tried to purchase bomb-grade uranium in Africa was a fabrication. In fact, the Central Intelligence Agency asked that the claim be removed from a Bush speech during the fall 2002 campaign to raise support for the war. The CIA again pushed successfully for removing the charge from the U.S. ambassador’s speech to the UN Security Council later in December. Yet the uranium charge reappeared at White House insistence in the president’s 2003 State of the Union address that signaled the coming war. Months after it was discredited, the charge continued to be spread in news interviews and speeches by other administration officials, who simply attributed the claim to British intelligence reports that also proved to be groundless. The repetition of the dubious charge by nearly every top official in the coming weeks was part of the “strategic coordination” of the administration’s message, as described by White House communications director Dan Bartlett.
When Joseph Wilson, a well-respected retired U.S. diplomat, was moved by the administration’s inaccuracy to explain publicly in an editorial that the nuclear weapons charge had been discredited, the White House retaliated by leaking the identity of his wife, the now well-known Valerie Plame, who was working undercover for the CIA. This bit of hardball led to a special prosecutor investigation of the White House’s breach of national security law, and ironically dragged journalists into the awkward position of protecting the very sources who had tried to use them to dissemble public information. As discussed further below, the close news-making ties between key administration figures and prominent reporters like Judith Miller, formerly of the New York Times, who wittingly or unwittingly helped the administration to damage Wilson and manage the news, are the all-important backstory that explains much of the front-page coverage of the lead-up to the war. We explore the Wilson-Plame incident as one of many examples of the administration’s bare-knuckle news management tactics in chapter 5.
The Intelligence Fiasco
The press’s now familiar inability to create better balance independently in its news stories occurred again after the invasion of Iraq, when reporting turned to the particulars of the intelligence that was presented as cause for the war. Once again, the issue is not whether another side to the Bush administration’s story ever appeared in the news; it did. But once again, it came and went without leaving much of a trace on public opinion or gaining the prominence needed to provide a safe and inviting public context for other government opponents to speak out.
Perhaps the Iraq story that had the greatest potential effects on public comprehension and government debate was the issue of the faulty intelligence that led to the war. Was the intelligence failure a product of poorly organized and ill-qualified intelligence agencies, as the administration and many in Congress offered as their version of the story? Or was it more the case, as a lesser told version of the story had it, that the desire for war at the highest levels of the administration essentially forced intelligence agencies to certify and promote internally contested and knowingly weak intelligence? It is ironic that this important alternative version of the intelligence story – one with the potential to unravel many other claims by the administration – had such trouble gaining traction in the news despite a stream of former officials who came and went in the front pages, echoing similar versions of these stark challenges to the administration’s preferred story.
Impressive as those sources were, they simply operated with a news deficit given their status as past officials who no longer had the mechanisms of office and power to advance their stories. Yet their stories were enormously important, and largely consistent with one another in corroborating firsthand knowledge that high-level administration officials may have pressured intelligence agencies for information to support a preordained war. These charges were lodged in various forms by former treasury secretary Paul O’Neill, former security adviser Richard Clarke, and first-term secretary of state Colin Powell’s then chief of staff, Lawrence Wilkerson, among others, who simply could not compete with the administration’s news-making capacity to beat them back.
Consider, for example, the news moment surrounding O’Neill, who claimed that discussions about overthrowing Saddam Hussein were held from the earliest cabinet meetings of the Bush administration, long before the attacks of 9/11. In the book The Price of Loyalty, O’Neill charged that 9/11 merely provided the pretext for a war that was already on the agendas of Vice President Cheney, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, and the president, among others. According to O’Neill, who had been a trusted Bush political ally, the administration’s belief was that regime change in Iraq would provide a model for democracy that would transform the rest of the region. The main question, he claimed, was how to justify going to war, and the president set a tone of “Fine. Go find me a way to do this.” Both Bush and Rumsfeld issued strong denials after the book came out, and the White House retaliated by calling for an investigation of whether O’Neill had broken governmental secrecy laws in providing the author with official documents to back up his claims.
Such reports came and went in the news, with the stories taking on a “he said/they said” quality. In such stories, the advantage quickly tilted to administration officials with better news access and the inclination to challenge ferociously the patriotism and credibility of anyone who might question their preferred script. And so the charges that the administration had pressed for intelligence to support the war also came and went as sporadic news backdrop – sustained mainly as long as the sources were able to promote their books on cable and late-night television shows. Even Colin Powell’s former chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson received little news traction for his charge that the war was pushed through the administration by a “cabal” of Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.
The parade of former Washington insiders – former government officials and lower-level officials such as agency technicians and bureaucrats – pointing out the spurious origins of the war in Iraq came and went, with most of them quickly dropping from the news. Even though, as long-time government insiders, they enjoyed considerable credibility among journalists, as mere former officials they lacked the daily story-advancing mechanisms attached to their former offices and institutional processes to keep their side of the story in the news through the daily update mechanisms of press briefings, hearings, official trips, investigations, court cases, legislative debates, and other government news levers. As we explain further in chapter 5, some of these critics had somewhat greater success in sustaining media attention than others, depending in large part on their own public relations resources and their personal vulnerability to intimidation by the administration.
What about those potential storytellers who did have access to the institutional mechanisms that drive stories – members of Congress in particular? They were effectively held hostage to their earlier acceptance of the administration spin that filled the public sphere. Since the climate of press debate about the grounds for war was so stifling that most Democrats ended up voting for the U.S. invasion of Iraq and publicly accepting the dubious intelligence as grounds for military action (which, of course, further stifled news coverage), there was little room for them to stake out a subsequent antiwar position when the early rationale proved unfounded. Cries of deception were quickly deflected by administration officials who said that the Democrats had seen the same intelligence reports that the administration saw, and that everyone then believed that Iraq presented an imminent security threat. Latter-day critics, the administration charged, were exercising convenient hindsight.
All of this may seem strange to an outsider who, when presented with the facts, might simply reason that since intelligence may have been cooked to pave the way for an unwarranted war, the opposition would have reason to cry foul, and to use this as a key issue in upcoming election campaigns. Yet the capacity of the Bush administration to promote its news story of intelligence failure and reform over considerable evidence to the contrary made it difficult for the Democrats to formulate and publicize possible objections, particularly when confronted with equally blaring news featuring the administration’s charges of waffling and lack of patriotism among the opposition. Once again, the absence of an institutional power platform from which to press their case left the Democrats in a defensive position of denying the administration’s smear charges, at least as the press chose to construct the story.
So ingrained is this press calibration of the relative power and status of the available sources when constructing balance, plot, and viewpoint in news stories that even the revelation of “smoking gun” type evidence about the administration’s intelligence fixing was similarly marginalized. On April 30, 2005, the Times of London published minutes of a secret meeting between Tony Blair, the British prime minister, and top British military and intelligence officials. The minutes showed that a core topic was constructing a legal cover for going to war in light of documents from a high British intelligence official who had attended prewar meetings in Washington, at which time it was made clear that 9/11 was being used as a pretext for removing Saddam Hussein from power. As his report put it, the “facts were being fixed around the policy.”
Yet when the so-called Downing Street Memo was disclosed soon thereafter in the United States, it was largely treated either as old news or as a British politics story (an election problem for Blair). Even the huge surge of blogging activity aimed at getting the mainstream media to take up the story was largely ineffective. One of our sources interviewed revealed that the pesky bloggers squeezed only one grudging front-page story out of the Washington Post.
The importance of power calculations in the making of a political news story was further evidenced by how the Washington Post constructed the attempt of Representative John Conyers (D-MI) to publicize the implications of the memo by holding a House informational hearing. That hearing was held in the political context of Republican dominance of the House, and the continuing muddle among Democrats about making an election issue out of being deceived on the war. Given this context, the hearing was unlikely to result either in a shift in Democratic position or in any direct political repercussions for the Bush administration. The degree to which these power considerations by the press trumped (indeed defined) the implications of the document is shown in a telling story by Washington Post reporter-analyst Dana Milbank which began with the headline “Democrats Play House to Rally against the War.” The lead sentence was even more revealing about the power calculus underlying news construction: “In the Capitol basement yesterday, long suffering House Democrats took a trip to the land of make-believe.”
For some news organizations, the lack of coverage became a larger story than the story itself, suggesting that many journalists knew they were looking at something important, but simply could not imagine how to fashion a big sustainable story out of it. And so they blinked. In an NPR commentary, Daniel Schorr called it the biggest “under-covered story of the year.”
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Copyright notice: Excerpt from pages 13-28 of When the Press Fails: Political Power and the News Media from Iraq to Katrina by W. Lance Bennett, Regina G. Lawrence, and Steven Livingston, published by the University of Chicago Press. ©2007 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of U.S. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that this entire notice, including copyright information, is carried and provided that the University of Chicago Press is notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the University of Chicago Press. (Footnotes and other references included in the book may have been removed from this online version of the text.)
Posted on June 28, 2007