Why the Media Failed

By Scott Horton

Over at Salon.com, Gary Kamiya looks at media coverage of the war in Iraq – both the lead up and the conduct of the war. He takes it as a given that the media failed its most important challenge in a generation, and he proceeds to an interesting analysis of the grounds for the failure.

Why did the media fail so disastrously in its response to the biggest issue of a generation? To answer this, we need to look at three broad, interrelated areas, which I have called psychological, institutional and ideological. The media had serious preexisting weaknesses on all three fronts, and when a devastating terrorist attack and a radical, reckless and duplicitous administration came together, the result was a perfect storm.

In the first category, he singles out one predictable broadcast player for the Orwellian role:

One month after the United States began bombing Kabul, Fox anchor Brit Hume actually said, "Over at ABC News, where the wearing of American flag lapel pins is banned, Peter Jennings and his team have devoted far more time to the coverage of civilian casualties in Afghanistan than either of their broadcast network competitors." Reading this statement five years later is a salutary reminder of how pervasive such jingoist, near-Stalinist groupthink was in those days--and still is on Fox.

He also noted that there was no shortage of sharp analytical insight. Indeed, several noted scholars called things just right. They didn’t make it on to the television screens or the instant analyses of major media, however.

It was a kind of surreal battle of books vs. the mass media--and books won hands down.

Rashid Khalidi's Resurrecting Empire, written before and during the early days of the Iraq war, accurately predicted the quagmire that America was about to step into, hammering home the notion that for people in the Middle East, who have a long historical memory of imperialist oppression, our "noble" mission would not be seen as such. Michael Mann's Incoherent Empire, also written just before and in the early days of the Iraq war, exposed the incoherence of Bush's "war on terror." Mann pointed out that there is a fundamental difference between "national" terrorists like Hamas and "international" ones like Al Qaeda, and that treating them as if they were the same, as Bush moralistically did and still does, was a catastrophic blunder. And Malise Ruthven's A Fury for God, which came out before the Iraq war, traced the historical and intellectual roots of violent Islamism through the Muslim Brotherhood to Sayyid Qutb, noted the corrosive effect of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on Muslim minds, and cautioned that "another Gulf War will do far more harm than good."

This is a very good list. I would add Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower as another vital analytical work that didn’t get the attention it deserved. It’s not surprising that Fox News, in the midst of last week’s Persian Gulf crisis, offered “expert analysis” from convicted felon and high school-drop-out Bernard Kerik, who does not appear to be able to distinguish between Arabs and Iranians. But that was par for the course.

Next, Kamiya points to economic factors – the rise of infotainment, and a new toothless corporate culture, which began to pander to the right when it witnessed the commercial success of figures like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter. He also discusses the Judith Miller phenomenon – now shorthand for the Faustian bargain: access in exchange for sycophantic coverage.

Kamiya’s last point is ideology. “Evaluating why America was attacked required journalists to learn about the history of the Arab/Muslim world -- and not just skim one of Bernard Lewis' tendentious articles discounting Arab grievances.” And for various reasons, Kamiya says, Americans journalists were unwilling to roll up their sleeves and learn the basic building blocks that would have made for intelligent discussion of the issues haunting the Middle East. The result is that instead of deep analysis, we get cartoon characterizations. I remember asking a bureau chief in Baghdad why he kept putting out stories talking about “the insurgency,” when, as everyone knew, the story was vastly more complex than that? The answer: the folks back in New York don’t want that level of complexity, and how can we fit the reality into 180 seconds on the evening news? The network in question was, I think, one of the more responsible performers.

But there is another aspect to ideology, namely the ideological cloak fashioned by the Neocons to protect the war.

Finally, the media was unable to deal with the abstract and highly ideological motivations for Bush's war -- especially because those motivations, as Paul Wolfowitz notoriously admitted, were never really made clear. To oppose the war, one had to challenge the two real reasons behind it -- the neoconservative crusade against "Islamofascism" and the cold warriors' desire to assert American power -- head on. But this meant not only taking on the sacred cows of 9/11 and Israel, but also dealing with the refusal of the administration to publicly acknowledge these abstract reasons, and challenging a White House that "for bureaucratic reasons," in Wolfowitz's words, was hiding behind its trumped-up "evidence" about Saddam's WMD. For the mainstream media -- unprepared, intimidated, caught up in the torrent of Beltway wisdom and flag-waving -- this was far too much to deal with. As Kristina Borjesson noted, the result was that the media signed off on a war that it itself did not understand. There could be no more damning indictment.

Kamiya’s piece is an interesting contribution to this discussion. He scores a number of important points, but I'm not fully on board with this analysis. I do agree with him on the basics: this was the biggest challenge of the mainstream media in a generation. And the media gets a miserable failing grade. It has a lot of explaining to do. Yet many key players seem incapable of the sort of introspective analysis that is a vital first step.