This from an interview with Larry Beinart, author of Fog Facts:
The weakness of objective journalism is that, on principle and on what used to be sound moral principles, it does not make judgments. It says we’re not here to tell you who’s right, who’s wrong. We’re here to report the facts and, like Fox News said, “We report; you decide.” That’s the theoretical basis of objective journalism.
But if you are a PR person, and nowadays, if you are a politician, you understand the essential weakness of that. Basic reporting becomes one from column A and one from column B, and sometimes one from column C. It’s basically like ordering in a Chinese restaurant. You will call in an outside expert, but what if there is no column B? For example, at the time when we were going to go to war in Iraq, there was no column B. There was no official - no mainstream official of stature -- willing to stand up and say this is a con job. This is stupid. This is a mess. Don’t do it. Not only that -- it’s based on false assumptions, hidden facts, fog facts and lies.
There were a few people. There was a Scott Ritter, and Hans Blix. But Scott Ritter’s story got reported once, and Hans Blix’s story got reported once, and the newspapers had done their job.
Then the President made an announcement that he was still determined, because we didn’t want the next thing to be a mushroom cloud. The newspaper dutifully reported that, because it’s a Presidential statement. The next day, the Vice President made a similar statement. They reported that. Maybe some enterprising reporter called around and said: Anybody want to stand up against that? But there wasn’t anybody, so that got reported. And the next day, Condi Rice did it. And the next day, the President did it again. The day following that, Cheney did it again. They have learned to game the system. And the system, by and large, has not awakened to the fact that it’s being gamed.
The model for this goes back to when Reagan ran for President. The system got horribly yanked, and they learned it. They understood it, and they actually made a very big change. But I think at some point the media is going to start waking up and say, you know, we were gamed, and we have to learn how not to do this
This is definitely a part of what is going on, but I think Beinart is letting the media off too easily. If the the people in the media were being gamed, they were very willing players. They wanted the war; it excited them. There were plenty of people from Column B, but they were all dismissed as "not serious." Robert Byrd strongly and eloquently spoke out against the war, but he was made out to be bordering on senility. Jim McDermott, the congressman from my district in Seattle, spoke out very strongly about how we were all being conned. But he was dismissed as "Baghdad Jim."
And what about Howard Dean? This conservative, sensible governor who speaks candidly about what he really thinks, was presented as a radical and a loose cannon. He was perceived as dangerous because he was telling it as it is, that the emperor had no clothes. Remember how his anti war stance was the single most thing early on that made him unelectable? Is that the American people's perception of him, or was it the perception of the media punditry?
In retrospect, these are the people who saw most clearly what we were getting into. We didn't slip slowly into this war as we did in Vietnam. There was a point not too long before the war when most Americans were against it. There was very strong, unprecedented vocal opposition to this war during the months running up to it. Most of Europe was against it. The freakin' pope was against it. There was plenty to report on from Column B. But such opposition was dismissed by the media by caricaturing it as the same old know-nothing hippies and left-wing cranks. What is it about our political and media culture that made it so hard for any opposition to be taken seriously? The answer is pretty obvious.