The media's "Officer Barbrady" ruse, or Can the DSM break big anymore?

This is a long post, sorry, but, ahem, I think it's worth getting down on (electronic) paper. Eric Boehlert, writing in Salon, provides a fine overview of the story so far surrounding the DSM in the States. Titled "Bush lied about war? Nope, no news there!", it asks why it's taken more than a month for the U.S. press to even begin covering the Downing Street memo. There are some interesting insights in here, but Boehlert seems to be tending toward the point of view that the media simply can't or won't "break" this as a big story now, because to do so would clearly show them up for not breaking the story weeks ago. To provide support for this pov, Boehlert examines a favorite strategy employed by news organizations caught out not covering a major story when they should. This is (what I'm calling) the "It's Old News Now/We've Covered That/Everybody Knows About it/It's not That Big a Deal/Let’s Move On" strategy applied to the DSM. Actually, it kind of reminds me of the favorite refrain of Officer Barbrady in South Park, who, after any strange, out-of-the-ordinary public happening, automatically downplays its significance by telling everyone to "Move along now, Nothing to see here!" So maybe I should call it the "Officer Barbrady" ruse. That's catchy! The kids will like that. :-)

Boehlert focuses first on Tim Russert's performance on last Sunday's Meet the Press to show how this works. Russert asked a question about the memo to Republican National Committee chair Ken Mehlman, but it was the way he phrased it that was interesting. Boehlert notes that "In setting up his question to Mehlman on Sunday, Russert said, 'Let me turn to the now famous Downing Street memo'" (emphasis added). The next point might be obvious to the few of us who have been following this story carefully, but for the vast majority of Americans it won't be obvious, so it needs to be spelled out. States Boehlert:

Famous? It would be famous in America if the D.C. press corps functioned the way it's supposed to. Russert's June 5 reference, five weeks after the story broke, represented the first time NBC News had even mentioned the document or the controversy surrounding it. [My emphasis.] In fact, Russert's query was the first time any of the network news divisions addressed the issue seriously. In an age of instant communications, the American mainstream media has taken an exceedingly long time -- as if news of the memo had traveled by vessel across the Atlantic Ocean -- to report on the leaked document. Nor has it considered its grave implications -- namely, that President Bush lied to the American people and Congress during the run-up to the war with Iraq when he insisted over and over again that war was his administration's last option.

Did Russert have any notion of what he was saying? Was he doing an Officer Barbrady?

Anyway, the Boehlert article notes that the story is finally getting some very limited play in the mainstream media - thanks to the U.S. blogosphere that has been getting its information from overseas (overwhelmingly UK) news sources. But this follows what has been up to now a "breathtaking lack of interest" in the story by the U.S. media - in spite of the glaringly obvious news pegs. Remember (and I have to keep reiterating this to maintain my grip on reality) the DSM, which implicates both the UK and US administrations in outright lying or serious deception (take your pick) had been leaked to the Times of London and printed way back on May 1 and, coming days before the general election, generated extensive press coverage in the UK. But in the US? I repeat the data provided by Boehlert to show the extent to which this story barely existed in the United States.

According to TVEyes, an around-the-clock monitoring service, between May 1 and June 6 the story received approximately 20 mentions on CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC and PBS combined [original emphasis]. (With Blair's arrival in Washington Tuesday, there was a slight spike in mentions but still very little reporting of substance.) By contrast, during the same five-week period, the same outlets found time to mention 263 times the tabloid controversy that erupted when a photograph showing Saddam Hussein in his underwear was leaked to the British press.

Since the Times of London published the memo on May 1, White House spokesman Scott McClellan has held 19 daily briefings, at which he has fielded approximately 940 questions from reporters, according to the White House's online archives. Exactly two of those questions have been about the Downing Street memo and the White House's reported effort to fix prewar intelligence. (Three weeks after the memo was leaked in Britain, McClellan prefaced a response to a question about it by telling White House reporters he was not familiar with "the specific memo.")

Until Tuesday, the number of U.S. newspaper articles reporting on the Downing Street memo could be counted on two hands, including two articles in the New York Times, two in the Washington Post (print edition), and one each in Newsday, the Los Angeles Times, the Minneapolis Star Tribune and the Chicago Tribune. Only the Chicago Tribune article ran on Page 1, and it focused on how little commotion the memo had caused in the United States, noting, "The White House has denied the premise of the memo, the American media have reacted slowly to it and the public generally seems indifferent to the issue or unwilling to rehash the bitter prewar debate over the reasons for the war." Additionally, Knight Ridder's Washington bureau covered the story for its chain of newspapers.

I'd say this is pretty breathtaking. But what's even scarier to me are the numerous instances recounted by Boehlert where TV and print journalists feigned either ignorance or disinterest. Take, for example, this May 25 exchange between actor and activist Tim Robbins and Chris Matthews on MSNBC's "Hardball" (recounted by Boehlert). I’d call this another attempt to “do an officer Barbrady”:

Robbins: I think there should be more discussion about the Downing Street memo and less about Newsweek. I think that that story seemed to be buried. And there seems to be a lot of questions that the Downing Street memo raises.

Matthews: Tell me about that.

Robbins: Well, it suggests that the administration knew full well they were being duplicitous and were operating with weak intelligence.

Matthews: Well, they -- well, they did tell us at the time, Tim, that the best argument for getting the Europeans to join us in the war was using the WMD argument, but it wasn't their primary purpose. The primary purpose apparently was democratization in the Middle East, nation building.

Robbins: And I think they didn't mention that until much later, Chris. I think that the original -- original reason was that [Saddam] was an imminent threat.

Matthews: Let me ask you about Hollywood. Do you think Hollywood, in its critique of this president, has been effective? Somebody put up a sign recently to Hollywood: "Thank you, Hollywood, for getting Bush reelected."

Now that the story is finally finding some "legs" thanks to the ceaseless efforts of those in the blogosphere, the mainstream media are desperately trying to lessen its impact. As Boehlert notes:

Playing catch-up this week has produced some awkward moments for reporters, such as Russert's referring to the memo as "famous" even though nobody at NBC News had ever bothered to report on it. On Monday, Fox News' online site reported that the memo "has received little attention in the mainstream media, frustrating opponents of the Iraq war," while failing to mention that Fox itself had effectively boycotted the memo story for five weeks. On Tuesday, Fox News finally reported that "there's been a lot of controversy recently about a memo that suggests British officials warned well before the war in July of 2002 that the Bush administration felt war was inevitable." Again, Fox failed to explain why the news organization had ignored a controversial story for more than a month.

That's just the latest press oddity surrounding the memo story, says Swanson at AfterDowningStreet.org. "It's very strange that when it now comes up in the media, it's described as well known. It's not well known. Most people don't know anything about the memo. It's very disturbing."

This is the aforementioned "It's Old News Now/We've Covered That/Everybody Knows About it/It's not That Big a Deal/Let’s Move On" thing, aka “doing an Officer Barbrady”. And I don't think the "disturbing" characterization is strong enough. This whole thing is positively Orwellian. The media are learning a very dangerous, and seemingly effective trick: That if you go from completely ignoring a story for weeks or months to pretending that it's been done to death and is old news and can't we move on to something else, you can avoid the nasty controversy of actually breaking a story and following it up, because that will only bring instant opprobrium from the legions of conservative critics who will cry “liberal bias” and incessantly slam you for being "liberal", "anti-Bush", "unpatriotic" etc. And the mainstream news media are so gun-shy now that they'll go quite far to avoid that. After all, why bother? They don't need the hassle. And everyone's already made up their minds about Bush, right? (Right ....?) Let's just get back to Michael Jackson. Meanwhile, most Americans (those who still get their news from neutered domestic TV sources) will accept this obfuscation at face value - after all, research consistently shows that most viewers can't remember specifics of TV news reports, only a few salient (i.e., constantly repeated) news stories and the general tone of the coverage. If the tone of the coverage is "that's old news, nothing to get worried about" - or if the issue is ignored altogether - viewers don't get riled up by anything. The story dies - in fact, for the vast majority of Americans, the story never existed in the first place! Like I say, Orwellian. But back to Boehlert:

The fact that it took five weeks for more than a handful of Washington reporters to focus on the memo highlights a striking disconnect between some news consumers and mainstream news producers. The memo story epitomizes a mainstream press corps that is genuinely afraid to ask tough questions and write tough stories about the Bush administration. Worse, in the case of the Downing Street memo, it simply refuses to report on the existence of a plainly newsworthy document.

"This is where all the work conservatives and the administration have done in terms of bullying the press, making it less willing to write confrontational pieces -- this is where it's paid off," says David Brock, CEO of Media Matters for America, a liberal media advocacy group. "It's a glaring example of omission."

"I think it exacerbates the sense among some [of our] listeners that NPR is not taking on the Bush administration," notes Jeffrey Dvorkin, ombudsman for National Public Radio, who continues to receive listener complaints about the missing memo story. As of Tuesday, NPR had aired just two references to the Downing Street memo, and both occurred in passing conversation, without giving listeners the full context or the details of the memo. Asked about the network's slim coverage, Dvorkin says, "I was surprised. It's a bigger story than we've given it. It deserves more attention."

Also, as I mentioned before, I don't think the “bridge” from alternative to mainstream media is as strong on the liberal side as the one for the conservative media - thought that might be changing, slowly.

Slowly, the Downing Street memo is getting that attention. "Stories are starting to trickle in now only because so many ordinary people are raising hell about it," says David Swanson, co-founder of AfterDowningStreet.org, which launched on May 26. This week, thanks to constant exposure on the Air America radio network, the site is receiving 1.7 million hits a day, according to Swanson. "My colleagues are doing more radio shows than we can fit in during a day."

So, some hope, maybe. Let's see.

Addendum: Here are some useful memo links: (U.S.) Downing Street Memo site; AfterDowningStreet.org; and the Times of London original memo site.