What We've Got Here Is A Failure To Communicate

Lorie Byrd has a pretty good piece in today's Examiner:

Of Watergate it is often said the problem was not so much the initial crime, but the cover-up. When it comes to the Bush White House controversies, the problem has often been not so much the initial actions of the administration, but rather the communications effort after the fact.

The controversy over the firing of eight U.S. attorneys is only the most recent example of a complete communications breakdown. News reports for more than a week now have focused on what were reported as unprecedented politically motivated firings, as well as accompanying allegations from Democrats claiming wrongdoing, and even criminality, in the firings.

Many of the reports the past week not only did not inform the public that U.S. attorneys serve at the pleasure of the president, but they failed to provide historical context by omitting the fact that Bill Clinton fired 93 U.S. attorneys upon taking office in 1993.

Administration officials were not only unable to get that information to the public through the media filter, but they struggled to present a clear position on the matter. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales apologized for the controversy, not the firings, but all too often that was not clear from media reports.

The U.S. attorney firings are only the latest example. Some of the biggest failures of the Bush administration have been the result of poor communications.

Lorie goes on to cite the following examples of poor communication by the Administration in the initial stages of media coverage, and their failure to publicize the successful aspects of each story as they progressed:

• Hurricane Katrina
  
• The War in Iraq
  
• The Federal Budget Deficit
  
• The Economy

She scolds not only the Bush Administration for their unsavvy public relations, but also the mainstream media for their unethical desire to protect the narrative at all costs. Obviously, it's easier for a journalist to update yesterday's report about a story than to look at it from a new, larger perspective, but what's going on now is strikingly similar to agenda-driven, yellow journalism. This kind of criticism by Byrd is accurate, but it's hardly new. Instapunk detailed the media's subconscious strategy back in May of 2006, and now it's becoming more and more apparent even to the untrained eye:

[Bungles, scandals, corruption, and bad luck] are the whales, sharks, and other monsters that swim ceaselessly in the political ocean. But the ocean itself -- the medium in which the monsters swim -- is the MSM. In this context, the blogosphere is no more than the foam on the whitecaps stirred up by the vast currents and movements in the ocean below. And while the bloggers were fighting their various and diverse battles in the name of truth, justice, and common sense, the MSM ocean was harnessing its entire immensity on just one story, told an infinite number of times, in every possible inflection, from every direction, and with the deadly persistent accuracy of a dripping tap: George W. Bush is no good.

It doesn't have to be true, it doesn't have to be fair, it doesn't have to be consistent in its terms. All that matters is that it is repeated with uniform constancy: drip, drip, drip. George W. Bush is no good. George W. Bush is no good. George W. Bush is no good. Change the headlines, seem to change the subject. Abu Ghraib. European disdain. Tom Delay. Katrina. Deficits. Valerie Plame. Gas prices. Karl Rove. Death in Iraq. Angry mothers. NSA wiretaps. Drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, the lede is always the same. George W. Bush is no good. George W. Bush is no good. George W. Bush is no good. George W. Bush is no good. George W. Bush is no good. George W. Bush is no good. Forget the good news, bury the accomplishments or ignore them altogether. Drip, drip, George W. Bush is no good, George W. Bush is no good, George W. Bush is no good.

It took the MSM three years to bring George W. Bush's approval ratings down from their post 9/11 high to 52 percent on election day 2004. It's taken them just 18 months [corr. per Tim] to bring him down another 20 to 25 points. They never forgot their mission. While the princeling bloggers pissed and moaned about Harriet Miers, and immigration, and federal spending, the MSM kept on dripping out its one story, and now they are within reach of their goal -- Democrats restored to the majority in both houses of Congress and the stage set for the vengeful impeachment and dismissal from office of the most courageous president in modern times.

This analysis was right in 2006 and it's right in 2007. Some of this shoddy journalism can be chalked up to a hyper-competitive media market that has replaced the virtues of objectivity and provability and with speed and sensationalism. Some of it is due to the media's self-described role as being "oppositional" to the powers that be. And some of it can be blamed on partisanship aimed at achieving one goal; the universal perception of George W. Bush as the worst president in American history.


Sadly, the lines between these groups has blurred over the years as journalists from across the spectrum have downplayed good economic news, turned individual Republican embarrassments into full-fledged political scandals, and repeated Joe Wilson's partisan lies even after they had been thoroughly discredited.

You should ask yourself, what is the threat posed by this departure from fair and responsible journalism? Well, one threat is the public's increasing mistrust of the media. But the more serious threat is the perversion of history. As Ayn Rand once said:

The uncontested absurdities of today are the accepted slogans of tomorrow. They come to be accepted by degrees, by precedent, by implication, by erosion, by default, by dint of constant pressure on one side and constant retreat on the other - until the day when they are suddenly declared to be the country's official ideology.

I think that pretty well sums up the "Bush Lied!" myth. The scary thing is that it will one day be accepted as true merely because it has survived. It's precisely because of this phenomenon that I started this blog in the first place. So I and others like me will do what we can to counteract the media's persistent smear campaign against the right, but it will likely be for naught. Anyway, the campaign will end by itself as soon as a Democrat is elected to the White House. And then we'll go back to reading news stories and editorials about blue skies, a strong economy, and any scandals involving Democrats will be reported as mistakes of the individual that do not infer corruption by the Democratic leadership.

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UPDATE:

I just read over at Powerline that Stuart Rosenberg, the director of Cool Hand Luke, died last Thursday. I guess my timing is as good as ever with regards to the title of this post. Sorry about that.