Guess What? The “Liberal Media” Is Not
Blogtopia is all over Mike Allen’s Politico piece about Scott McClellan’s harsh criticism of the Bush administration’s conduct of the war in Iraq.
Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan writes in a surprisingly scathing memoir to be published next week that President Bush “veered terribly off course,” was not “open and forthright on Iraq,” and took a “permanent campaign approach” to governing at the expense of candor and competence.
Among the most explosive revelations in the 341-page book, titled “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception” (Public Affairs, $27.95):
• McClellan charges that Bush relied on “propaganda” to sell the war.
• He says the White House press corps was too easy on the administration during the run-up to the war.
• He admits that some of his own assertions from the briefing room podium turned out to be “badly misguided.”
• The longtime Bush loyalist also suggests that two top aides held a secret West Wing meeting to get their story straight about the CIA leak case at a time when federal prosecutors were after them — and McClellan was continuing to defend them despite mounting evidence they had not given him all the facts.
• McClellan asserts that the aides — Karl Rove, the president’s senior adviser, and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the vice president’s chief of staff — “had at best misled” him about their role in the disclosure of former CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity.
Guess which one of these “explosive revelations” you will not find in the major news outlets’ coverage of this story? Unless you adhere to the “liberal media” myth, the answer is a no-brainer:
In a minimally rational world, this extraordinary passage, from the new book by Scott McClellan, would forever slay the single most ludicrous myth in our political culture: The “Liberal Media”:
If anything, the national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House and to the administration in regard to the most important decision facing the nation during my years in Washington, the choice over whether to go to war in Iraq.The collapse of the administration’s rationales for war, which became apparent months after our invasion, should never have come as such a surprise. . . . In this case, the “liberal media” didn’t live up to its reputation. If it had, the country would have been better served.
Just consider how remarkable that is. George Bush’s own Press Secretary criticizes the American media for being “too deferential” to the Government. He lays the blame for Bush’s ability to propagandize the nation on the media’s uncritical dissemination of the Republican administration’s falsehoods. And most notably of all, McClellan actually uses cynical scare quotes when invoking the phrase which, in conventional political discourse, is deemed the most unassailable truth of all: The Liberal Media.
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The primary reason why this preposterous myth persists is because the media generally refuses to engage in any self-examination. The media blackout on the “military analyst” scandal continues; they still refuse to tell their viewers about what they did. To the extent they admit that there was any media problem at all concerning war coverage under the Bush administration, they’ll dismiss it all as a “Judy Miller problem” — the malfeasance of a single bad reporter whose flaws were singular and isolated.
And just watch how McClellan’s mockery of the “deferential” press — piercing and humiliating as it is — will be ignored by media coverage of his book, consigned to the same dustbin where the “military analyst” story is kept. Already today, The New York Times and The Washington Post both trumpet the fact that McClellan made statements harshly critical of Bush. But they completely ignore McClellan’s far more significant indictment of their “deferential,” Bush-enabling conduct. Isn’t it rather self-evidently newsworthy that Bush’s own press secretary blamed the American media for allowing Bush to get away with all sorts of falsehoods because of how “deferential” they are?
Glenn is right, you know. You don’t have to take his word for it. Take a look at the major news sites linked from Memeorandum. With the exception (as Glenn writes) of a throwaway line at the end of Elisabeth Bumiller’s article in the New York Times, none of the media biggies so much as mention McClellan’s observations about the press’s failure to question what Bush and his lackeys told them.
