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Bush went on to state that he was confident weapons would be found, and that Saddam was a dangerous man. He was flustered, but back on book. Then he remembered the impertinent query, and he said he was confident he had made mistakes, but couldn’t think of any, what with being put on the spot and all.

Put on the spot? When you’re the president, you
live
on the spot. I wish this book could include a video clip, because the transcript and the description don’t really do this exchange justice. You need to see the video to catch all the dead air, the fumbling, and the frustrated hemming and hawing. It also helps to hear Bush’s sarcastic, affronted tone as he blusters his way through his nonanswer. What really surprised me about this question was that it seemed to totally blindside the president: Dubya and his handlers didn’t even plan a joke response to the question about mistakes, something like, “Well, Laura’s been keeping me off the pretzels,” har-dee-har-har.

The administration shuns direct questioning by the press, and prefers staging little tableaux vivants, like the “Mission Accomplished” landing on the aircraft carrier, or prepared orations, like the State of the Union and his speeches before vetted crowds. The Republicans have also created their very own media to combat and infiltrate the MSM. Karl Rove got his start in direct mail, and the Republicans still use it at as a right-wing samizdat, a way of spreading stories unfit to print. As previously noted in the PR chapter, the Republicans have paid pundits to praise their initiatives and distributed video news releases to television stations. In February 2005, bloggers broke the story of Jeff Gannon, a White House correspondent for an organization called Talon News. Jeff was a regular at White House press briefings from 2003 until 2005, when the blogosphere began wondering who this guy was and how the hell he got a White House press pass. They discovered the following: Talon News is a fake news front for GOPUSA, a Republican group run by a Texan named Bernard Eberle, who has long supported Bush and Rove. Jeff Gannon had no prior reporting experience or credentials, save for a two-day workshop at a right-wing think tank. Jeff’s questions and articles reproduced, verbatim, talking points from the administration. Jeff Gannon is not even his real name. It may be James D. Guckert, and it may be something else, but it ain’t Jeff Gannon. Gannon’s career previous to his time in the press corps? Personal trainer and gay male escort. Nobody has explained why Gannon kept getting daily press passes for years when a number of legitimate media outlets would kill to get that kind of access. Nor has anyone explained how a guy with a fake name gets past all that post 9–11 security.

People like Gannon are part of the network of right-wing think tanks and front groups and professional bloviators that has helped move public discourse rightward and selfward over the past twenty years. But the right also has its very own cable network, Fox News. I write this chapter at an unfortunate distance from the mother lode: I don’t get Fox News. The CRTC, Canada’s FCC, finally approved Fox News’s application to broadcast on digital cable in 2004. John Doyle, a television columnist for the
Globe and Mail,
wrote that he couldn’t wait for the channel to come to Canada. He saw it in the States and thought it was a riot, and figured the rest of us would find it pretty hilarious, too. This bit of impunity landed him on Fox News and right-wing message boards, and he got hundreds of hate e-mails denouncing him, his socialist paper, and his communist country. The few choice snippets of Fox News I have seen on Canadian television have largely been from Fox News reports about Canada, and they are unilaterally intemperate and ill-informed. That said, I’m with Doyle: I can’t wait to get it. I think it is important to keep an eye on the unilaterally intemperate and ill-informed, especially when they happen to be running the latest competitor for cable news supremacy.

Fox was the first network to declare Bush president in 2000, and Roger Ailes and the gang have been singing his praises ever since, and lavishing invective on the old media, the liberal media, like CNN. The Fox News Channel markets itself as the news for people who don’t trust the news. One Fox survey found that only 14 percent of the respondents trusted the media. The military, the president, the public school system, and the Catholic church—even in the throes of its pedophilia scandal—all inspired more trust than the media. The only institution that polled worse than the media was big corporations, which is kind of funny given that Fox is a big media corporation. But the poll was part of Fox’s ongoing effort to position itself as news for people who don’t like the news. The Fox News Channel has aggressively marketed itself as the unbiased alternative to all the other news, with the tagline “We report, you decide” and frequent brags about their “fair and balanced” coverage. Fox’s top-rated show,
The O’Reilly Factor,
markets itself as a No-Spin Zone, but it features a host who bellows about socialists and traitors, who bullies his guests and tells them to shut up when they disagree with him. It is popular precisely because O’Reilly is a reactionary loudmouth, not because he’s Mr. Neutral. CNN maintains the credibility edge in this battle of the broadcast titans, but they too have made their broadcasts louder, flashier, and quicker, so as not to be totally trounced by the belligerent Fox juggernaut.

It should be noted that the very idea that journalists should be neutral or objective is a fairly recent one. America’s earliest papers were fiercely partisan. The invention of the telegraph and the founding of the Associated Press helped standardize coverage in the late nineteenth century. But for the great turn-of-the-century newspaper tycoons, like Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, a newspaper was a platform and a project as much as it was a moneymaking enterprise. During the heyday of yellow journalism, both editors trafficked in sensation and scandal as they fought for readers and meddled in political events, like the Spanish-American War. During World War II, the FCC’s “Mayflower laws” discouraged editorializing. Over the course of the forties, however, this no-editorializing policy seemed too restrictive, and changed into an equal time policy, otherwise known as the fairness doctrine, in 1949. Equal time refers to election laws that require networks to give opposing candidates for office equal airtime to get their messages out. The fairness doctrine was less binding, being a FCC guideline rather than a law, but it meant that media outlets had to make an effort to present both sides of a controversial issue, and give all interested parties the opportunity to speak out. Editorial content was supposed to be evenhanded, and reportage was supposed to be neutral. The idea that reporters would traffic only in facts and figures made it possible for the new news owners to distance themselves from editorial content, and present and sell the news as independent and professional. Television’s ability to air footage also helped the turn toward just-the-facts journalism.

The fairness doctrine was the object of furious debate during the Reagan administration. Opponents of the doctrine, like right-wing think tanks, argued that airing both sides of every issue was a violation of the First Amendment, and actually discouraged coverage of controversial issues. Supporters of the doctrine pointed out that it actually stipulated that the broadcasters cover issues that were important to the public, and made broadcasters present a range of opinions about these issues. Reagan vetoed the fairness doctrine in 1987, and then Bush the Elder threatened to veto it again when Democrats brought it up in 1991. In 1993, when the Democrats tried to revive the fairness doctrine, right-wingers spun this effort as the Hush Rush bill. There’s a little truth in that spin; Reagan’s deregulation of the FCC spawned tons of right-wing radio shows. In January of 2005, during the course of a House debate on the FCC and indecency fines, Democratic members such as Louise Slaughter called, once again, for the reinstatement of the fairness doctrine. Given the majorities in the House and the Senate, this seems highly unlikely. The FCC is more interested in Janet Jackson’s boob, and pandering to the latest wave of culture warriors, than it is in fostering broader public discourse, or more evenhanded coverage.

Few of us still think that the media are objective or neutral, but there are plenty of arguments about exactly which way that bias skews. Liberals say that the corporate press corps is inherently right-wing, and that journalists have become the toadying and fawning lackeys of power, reluctant to expose the excesses and trespasses of their owners and advertisers. Right-wingers decry the touchy-feely liberal media that likes gays, minorities, feminists, and big government, but shits all over guns, God, country, and money. Both are right and wrong. Professionals in the media do tend to vote Democratic, and to be fairly liberal on social issues. However, those who run media organizations tend to be right-wing, like Rupert Murdoch, or corporate interests, like GE, owners of NBC.

The idea that the media are a bunch of commies has long been a favorite thumping tub on talk radio, where the voices range from the right wing to the paleolithically right wing, including freshly chatty types like G. Gordon Liddy and Oliver North—I guess the airwaves have opened them up in ways that being under oath never could. According to a study conducted by the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, 40 percent of viewers think that the media has a liberal bias, and 32 percent think that the media’s bias is conservative. Content analyses of CNN and Fox show that they’re actually both pretty conservative. Fox is more right-wing on social issues, but both channels are equally likely to shake their pompoms for the Bush administration. The right wing certainly bellows louder, and is insistent that the default mode of the media is liberal. The usage of the word
liberal
as an epithet has long been part of the right’s media strategy. They call this strategy playing the ref, and it is the preferred technique of professional right-wing bloviators like O’Reilly, Ann Coulter, and Rush Limbaugh. First, you argue that all the media suffers a liberal bias. Then, you argue that your views are not getting the fair hearing they deserve thanks to those rotten, biased liberals, even though you just so happen to be saying all this during your millionth TV appearance.

The overwhelming majority in the Shorenstein study thought that the media were biased, but they summed up media bias not in partisan terms, but with other words, bummer words like
negative, cynical,
and
depressing.
The really bad thing about the news is not that it favors a specific political agenda, but that the news is always bad. All the tales of crime and sleaze and misery don’t just bum people out. These bleeding leads inevitably crowd out news about other crucial social issues. For example, the labor beat is long gone. When reporters write about work, they don’t write about jobs or working conditions, they write about careers, management, or investments. The growth of prime-time newsmagazines has led to more coverage of celebrities, crime, lifestyles, and health, not in-depth coverage of education, the economy, military policy, and domestic and foreign affairs.

Certain politicians may enjoy extended press honeymoons, particularly during wartime, but political coverage in general is reflexively negative, a steady stream of dismal plotting and posturing. Media critic James Fallows notes that people and media people talk about politics in two entirely different ways. In election campaigns, when people are invited to ask questions in town hall programs, they tend to ask about the what of politics. They want to know what the candidates are going to do about specific problems affecting their communities. Journalists always look for the how of politics, the strategic angle, the spin. You don’t hear about how any given policy or issue affects citizens, or voters, only how it affects the campaign. Covering politics as a horse race may seem more exciting than simply explaining the political process to people, but it only serves to distance people further from the political process, and reduces democracy to a game played by the powerful few. The more the press describes politicians as corrupt to a man, the less interest readers have in politics. This is a very dangerous cycle, for the press and politics both, since they are ultimately dependent on one another. People who care about politics are far more likely to follow the news, and people who follow the news are far more likely to care about politics.

This is why the news is fundamentally unlike all the other shows. Even though the news is sold like any other program, with an eye to ratings, demographic wedges, and the concerns of advertisers, it is not like other programs. A free press is an integral part of a democracy, and the media have a greater role to play than simply raking in the bucks and the ratings. Thomas Jefferson said that if you could only have one or the other, democracy or a press, he’d take the free press. The media still sees itself as a watchdog, and is forever telling us that it’s on our side, getting all worked up into a lather on our behalf. It’s just a shame that so much of that perfectly good anger and attention has been squandered on trifles like sharks and kidnappers, on stories that fondle the feelings and bypass the brain.

A study on press credibility, conducted by the American Society of Newspaper Editors, found that more than three-quarters of the people they polled believed that the media spent too much time on scandalous stories because they were sexy or exciting, not because they were actually important stories. Scandals may provide a cheap, quick ratings boost, but they ultimately erode the credibility of the profession, and audience for the product, particularly when the scandals are presented as newsworthy simply for being scandals. When you do sleazy stories in a sloppy fashion, the slime can’t help but stick. Journalists are no longer perceived as the cigar-chomping, fedora-sporting champions of the common man, and, before their post–September 11 boost, they ranked somewhere around lawyers, insurance salesmen, and politicians in polls about public trust.