Media declares war on White House
It’s a civil war in Washington. The combatants have an eye-for-an-eye mentality. The partisanship is heated and nasty.
Republicans versus Democrats? Nah. This one pits the media against the White House.
It’s a war the media can’t win, and shouldn’t wage.
The intense grilling that White House reporters inflicted on presidential spokesman Scott McClellan on Monday over whether political guru Karl Rove leaked the name of a CIA operative was no ordinary give-and-take. It was a hostile hectoring that revealed much of the mainstream press for what it has become: the opposition party.
Forget fairness, or even the pretense of it. With one of its own locked up – Judith Miller of the New York Times – much of the Beltway gang has declared war on the White House.
Reporters apparently have decided Democrats aren’t up to the job. Can’t blame them. With Dems reduced to Howard Dean’s rants and Hillary Clinton’s juvenile jab that President Bush looks like Mad magazine’s Alfred E. Neuman, somebody has to offer a substantive alternative. The press has volunteered.
That the mainstream media are basically liberals with press passes has been documented by virtually every study that measures reporters’ political identification and issue positions. But bias has now slopped over into blatant opposition, a stance the media will regret. Instead of providing unvarnished facts obtained by aggressive but fair-minded reporting, the media will be reduced to providing comfort food to ideological comrades.
Already held in lower esteem by the public than lawyers and Congress, the press risks looking like a special interest group. Its claims to represent “the American people,” as one McClellan inquisitor did, are easily ignored when it serves as an echo chamber for the anti-Bush.
Indeed, as soon as Monday’s bash-by-press session ended, Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., called on Rove to resign. If everybody resigned when Kerry demanded it, Washington would be empty.
In fairness, the media have many reasons to feel frustrated. The Bush White House has not only restricted information, but has aggressively moved against traditional press privileges. In the past year, about 25 reporters have been subpoenaed or questioned in courts about their sources, according to the Newspaper Association of America.
The most famous case has seen the Times’ Miller sent to prison for up to four months after she refused to disclose who in the government talked to her about CIA agent Valerie Plame.
A federal prosecutor is probing whether a crime was committed by someone who blew Plame’s secret status. Rove has emerged as the latest press suspect; his lawyer denies any wrongdoing.
Miller – a former colleague of mine – has taken her punishment with grace. Her husband, book editor Jason Epstein, told Editor & Publisher magazine, “She was quite prepared to take the consequences and the judge had no choice, she understood that.” Epstein said Miller believed she had to protect her source, even if that meant jail.
“I don’t see how it could have been avoided because the law is the law,” he said. “She exhausted her appeals and had no place left to go.”
What a refreshing, adult point of view. Here’s hoping it spreads. Then the press can get back to reporting on the president instead of fighting him.