Rethinking Bush: A Year Later, How the MSM Cracked Up

The mainstream media’s headlong and heady descent into denigrating George W. Bush over the last decade signaled a dark moment in media history that has surely damaged American consciousness. Caught up in “Bush-bashing,” the MSM reached a critical turning point, and likely one of no return.

At times consciously and even triumphally, the media increasingly abused the traditional journalistic standards of independence and neutrality in favor of functioning as a virtual arm of the liberal Democratic Party. They took on, in effect, a new and disturbing identity.

So consumed by politics, power and status did the MSM become during this period that bashing the former president became standard media fare. This death by a thousand cuts proceeded unabashedly, unabatedly, and largely without challenge by Bush and his staff during his presidencies.

Jim A. Kuypers concluded as much in his study, Bush’s War: Media Bias and Justifications for War in a Terrorist Age, in which he meticulously documents how the agenda-driven and “anti-democratic” media not long after the 9/11 terror attacks began pervasively distorting the former president’s statements, failing to report critical parts of his speeches, and even “framing” (manipulating stories) to portray the president as an enemy.

Among countless examples:

• In 2001, ABC’s Peter Jennings was caught during a commercial break at one of the network’s affiliates wondering about where Bush was on 9/11. One viewer commented, “With the most horrific attack upon the United States since Pearl Harbor unfolding before our very eyes, Mr. Jennings sees fit to bash the Bush administration.”
• In 2003, as tallied by the Media Research Center’s Tim Graham, the major networks favored the Democratic contenders with overwhelmingly more [“landslide’] face time than the Republican contenders. “The morning hosts,” Graham notes, “posed 319 questions to the Democratic candidates, nearly one-fifth of which (58) were designed to get them to reiterate or amplify [“with great ferocity”] their condemnations of President Bush.”
• CBS had the gall to lead off a 2009 story, making the case against reelecting the tyrant Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president of Iran, with the title “Meet Iran’s George W. Bush.” The network, as Gateway Pundit pointed out, conveniently ignored Bush’s liberation of 50,000,000 Muslims from two of the most violent regimes in history and his opening of the door to democracy in the Middle East.
• Anti-Bush hysteria continues to this day. In early 2010, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow (among others) used the tragedy in earthquake-ravaged Haiti to rip him. NewsBusters‘ Noel Sheppard aptly called Maddow a “hyper-partisan shill.”
• In 2004, ABC’s Ted Koppel stymied a serious discussion with General Tommy Franks about Bush’s earlier assessment that major combat war was over in Iraq by sarcastically mocking the president. Koppel asked Frank such things as “you didn’t suggest he put on a flight suit and sit backseat on a plane landing on an aircraft carrier, did you?” “Insult-imbedding,” as one might call this tactic, had become par for the course.
• After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, CNN, CBS and the New York Times piled on Bush for not responding more quickly to the disaster as compared to the action he took in Iraq. CNN’s Jack Cafferty sneeringly suggested Bush was vacationing and sloughing off work.

The irrational, no-holds-barred character of what Brent Bozell calls the anti-Bush jihad, embarked upon in fact before 9/11, speaks volumes about the current advocacy journalism and the MSM’s devil-may-care vision of themselves – a vision that one of its prominent members did not bother to hide. In a 2007 interview with Inside Washington, Newsweek‘s Evan Thomas responded to the question, “Are the mainstream media bashing [President Bush] unfairly?,” by saying, “Well, our job is to bash the President. That’s what we do.”

Such flip disregard on the part of media leaders for journalistic fairness and integrity reinforces Jim Geraghty’s view, posted at National Review Online, that “we’ve passed a threshold in the way the media perceives their jobs.” Referring to the unrestrained media bias throughout the course of the Obama-McCain presidential race, and hence the likelihood that the press would not scrutinize Obama once he was elected, Geraghty observed resignedly:

They’ll never go back to paying any attention to news that is bad for their preferred candidates, and they’ll never again worry about accuracy in stories that are critical of the candidates they hate.

In other words, the “high art” of media bias honed in the Bush era seems likely to endure, as does the civic fallout from the bias.

The one-sided media have insidiously altered the landscape of American public knowledge, concerning not only the war on terror but also other crucial foreign policy and domestic issues. As Kuypers argues, in the Bush years media bias came to act as a filter to shape and compel, in predetermined ways, the people’s perception and judgment of America’s role in the world.

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It is of interest to add that, after winning in 2004, the former president and his press apparatus unfortunately seemed to have little stomach for countering the MSM’s constant barrage against him and his policies. In the judgment of a Washington insider (who must go unnamed), the Bush press operation was “notoriously awful.” He and his staff must have assumed, like John Adams, that such campaigning after taking office was beneath the dignity of the office.

This same insider recalls another Washingtonian urging Bush’s press staffers to more proactively defend him. Their answer? “We’ve already given a speech on that.” Having evidently no understanding of the need to answer and repel the charges, they were consequently always on the defensive. “Flat-footed,” comments the insider, “doesn’t begin to describe them. They simply let the New York Times, Washington Post, and CNN falsely define what they stood for and thus the battle lines.” They appeared to lack the passion, so vibrant in the world of FOX and blogs, to fight the good fight.

In addition, it could be that Bush viewed himself as a war president guarding the home front and was wary of being sidetracked by domestic politics. His half-hearted push to define a policy and galvanize his conservative supporters in the cause of reforming Social Security would seem to bolster that hypothesis.

Or perhaps Bush had faith in the American people to such an extent that he believed they would know, despite the media’s distortions and omissions, what was right and true because he saw himself as making the right decisions and telling the truth.

Yet again, maybe Bush, well before the end of his second term, was simply worn down by the attacks on him and had begun to rely on faith that his actions would later be judged well by fair-minded scholars and pundits.

In any event, the fact is that the former president and his staff failed, as one might have hoped, to boldly take up the cudgel in self-defense against the biased MSM. For that reason, media bias is all the more deeply entrenched and difficult to combat today.

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More than ever today, with a radical president and Congress in power, it falls to us, the people and alternative media, to take up the weapons at hand and oppose the debased MSM. The latter’s increasing debility is cause for hope.

Concluding his report on the MSM’s disproportionate support for Democratic contenders in 2003-2004 (cited earlier), Graham tidily identified the might at our disposal and why we can hope for victory – victory akin to that of Bush, who won two presidential races despite having “everything, including the sink, thrown at him”:

The media … have been left only with the feeling that their power is sapped, their influence is waning, and their credibility is collapsing.

There are two brakes on the arrogance of liberal media bias: One is declining ratings; the other is liberal politicians’ losing and conservative politicians’ winning. The message of popular resistance to the liberal media has been sent once again … it makes no sense to be optimistic about the liberal media’s recognizing their arrogance. We can only be optimistic that their meltdown continues.

Once again, in 2010, we must rely on popular resistance and the burgeoning power of our samizdat media. Long live, to quote the paradoxically inspiriting title of Graham’s essay, “Amazing Loss.”