In America, blame the media - it always works

Each week seems to bring new evidence of how cowed the U.S. news media have become under the current Bush administration. The latest example is the cowering response by all the country's media to the vicious and undeserved administration attack on Newsweek over the retraction of its anonymously sourced story about the Koran being flushed down a toilet in Guantanamo Bay by U.S. interrogators. Yes, the use of anonymous sources always causes some credibility issues to arise, but the viciousness of the official response is breathtaking, and quite scary, given the clear record of dissembling and mass death associated with the administration's own Iraq War record. I brought this up in my mediaville blog, but this issue has a place in London Calling because, along with the repressed British secret memo story, it provides perhaps the clearest evidence yet of how the U.S. news media are still unwilling and/or incapable of taking on the Bush administration over the Iraq debacle - and why so many Americans are looking overseas for their news.

Over the Guantanamo/Koran story, Frank Rich, in a Sunday New York Times piece (reprinted in Truthout.org), noted the insane lengths to which Scott McClellan went to successfully draw attention away from the real story, and pin the blame on the media, thus:

"Our United States military personnel go out of their way to make sure that the Holy Koran is treated with care," said the White House press secretary, Scott McClellan, as he eagerly made the magazine the scapegoat for lethal anti-American riots in Afghanistan. Indeed, Mr. McClellan was so fixated on destroying Newsweek - and on mouthing his own phony P.C. pieties about the Koran - that by omission he whitewashed the rioters themselves, Islamic extremists who routinely misuse that holy book as a pretext for murder.

That's how absurdly over-the-top the assault on Newsweek has been. The administration has been so successful at bullying the news media in order to cover up its own fictions and failings in Iraq that it now believes it can get away with pinning some 17 deaths on an errant single sentence in a 10-sentence Periscope item that few noticed until days after its publication. Coming just as the latest CNN/Gallup/USA Today poll finds that only 41 percent of Americans think the war in Iraq is "worth fighting" and only 42 percent think it's going well, this smells like desperation. In its war on the press, this hubristic administration may finally have crossed a bridge too far.

What, the administration going too far in unfairly slamming the media and being held to account for it!? Not if Patrick Healy, writing in the same "Week in Review" in Sunday's Times is to be believed. He recounts a battery of statistics (many of which I've mentioned before) showing just how low public trust has gone in the U.S. media. Here are the most stomach-churning examples, fyi:

In the post-Watergate 1970's, some 25 to 30 percent of Americans reported to the Harris Poll that they had a great deal of confidence in the press, more than they had in Congress, unions or corporate America. In the 2005 poll, the press ranked only ahead of law firms, with 12 percent reporting high confidence in the media.

Another poll, in 2003 by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, found that 66 percent of Americans see news reports as slanted, compared with 53 percent in 1985. Even more stunning to some analysts, 32 percent judged news organizations to be immoral, up from 13 percent in 1985.

"Today we have a case where the public is suspicious of the values of the news media as well," said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center. "I don't know if it's a crisis, but it's a hell of a growing problem."

For the first time, Pew also asked Americans in 2003 if they believed some news organizations, which were not identified, were becoming too critical of America. Nearly half the respondents, 46 percent, said yes; 48 percent said no.

"More people think media companies are motivated by profit, and put stories on the front page to serve that interest, and that reporters are motivated by their own career advancement more than any concern about the country," Mr. Rosenstiel said.

Perhaps an even more dire forecast came in another Pew report, Trends 2005, which found 45 percent of Americans saying they believed little or nothing of what they read in their daily newspapers, up from 16 percent two decades ago.

So, no problems for the Bush administration spin doctors there, then. Even as their poll numbers plummet, they can clearly continue to blast the pernicious media - whose own popularity numbers will always be lower - and get away with it. No charge is too outrageous to throw at the media in America, as Scott McClellan proved last week. Tony Blair could never have got away with such a bald-faced attack in the United Kingdom, where the news media still have a bit of life in them. And that is surely what makes the British media so attractive to critical-thinking Americans.