Using the Media

The recent reports that the U.S. military was paying to plant positive stories in the Iraqi media in order to promote the war efforts highlights the debate the White House and conservatives face about whether role of the media is to report the news or promote the aims of those controlling the media.

While the White House may say they are looking to build a democracy in Iraq, one has to wonder, what type of democracy? Rather than a western style democracy it looks more like a Eastern European approach where the government takes an active role in the media, no more different than what the White House attempted with PBS.

One of the amazing things about the Bush's dislike of the media is that they owe so much of their "success" to their ability to press to act as their agents. Throughout their campaign their goal was to buddy up to the press in order to generate positive stories. On the otherhand Democrats such as Al Gore and John Kerry were viewed as aloof because they weren't buddy-buddy. One only has to look at the booing by the press core of Al Gore during an early 2000 debate to show the media's true view.

So from the recount of 2000 to the media's lack of interest in the Bush National Guard story, the media was Bush's friend, yet conservatives always yelled that the media was liberal, which ended up to be a good strategy. By confusing the public and labeling the media as liberal, when the media finally woke up in 2005 conservatives bought the lie that the resulting negative stories were just more of the same from the so called liberal media.

The only thing preventing this strategy from working is that the White House lost control of the press. One might say the turning point came when the Daily Show (a comedy show) had the gall to show tape of Vice President Dick Cheney denying he said "it was pretty well confirmed" that terrorist Mohammed Atta had met with an Iraqi official in Prague, then show Cheney saying it. Perhaps many the media figured out that one, they were being lied to, and two, a "fake news" show was doing a better job reporting the news then they were.

So slowly the media beast has risen to look into a few stories, upsetting conservatives. Perhaps conservatives just don't understand the media. Afterall if you've grown up reading the Wall Street Journal editorial page or watching FOX News, one might think that objectivity, fairness, and accuracy play minor roles in journalism and when those traits are employed and bright lights are shown on the adminstration the resulting picture isn't pretty.