Columnist
It was not a great year for the media. There were shamefully too many man-made blunders by media, titans of industry, politicians and other charlatans of every stripe.
As if Hurricane Katrina were not severe enough, the Bush administration assigned one Michael Brown to the cleanup. As director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Brown proved so deficient in skills and style that even the administration had to force his resignation.
Incompetence also played itself out when Harriet Miers was persuaded to withdraw her name from consideration after President George W. Bush had personally stage-managed an attempt to have his good-buddy Texas lawyer fill a vacant seat on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Such flashes moved the Washington press corps to face the question it had steadfastly avoided: Is the sitting U.S. president up to the job?
This administration’s slide away from competence recalls such a period during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, the Hollywood actor, whose unpreparedness for the White House was palpable. Yet, the press went soft on Reagan after he was struck by a would-be assassin’s bullet early in his first term.
Never much as an intellect during his grade-B movie acting days or as California governor, what little gray matter Reagan carried into the Oval Office got even grayer after his shooting ordeal. Instead of reporting his diminishing capacity, the Washington press corps made it appear as if Reagan got smarter by each day’s press briefing.
It fell to Anthony Lewis, who wrote from Boston for The New York Times, to grade the press corps papers on White House coverage. “They saw the most powerful of offices occupied by a man with an anecdotal view of the world, giving simplistic answers to complicated questions, or tuning out. They (the media) found it upsetting to acknowledge, to the public or themselves, that American leadership was in such hands.”
Could such concerns lie at the base of media coverage of the Bush White House? If so, it would account for the most powerful vice president ever and a foreign policy team headed by Secretary of Defense Rumfeld that appears to be omnipotent until things go wrong.
Under the badgering of Dick Cheney and the manipulation of Karl Rove, the Washington press corps seemed to wither somewhat during the year. This, of course, is nothing new. Decades ago, H.L. Mencken savaged Washington correspondents as reporters who “come in as newspapermen trained to get the news and eager to get it; they end as tinhorn statesmen, full of dark secrets and unable to write the truth if they tried.”
Such erosion may account for the wounds inflicted by reporters with heavy names such as Judith Miller of the Times and the legendary Bob Woodward, sometimes of The Washington Post. Miller complicated her complicity with the Bush administration by serving 85 days in jail for refusing to tell a grand jury what she knew about a White House official seeking to use the media to punish a government whistleblower.
Despite such heavy weather during the year, the press rallied to show signs of recovery with such stories as the domestic spying by the U.S. government. Now, if Karl Rove can just get himself indicted, things would really brighten up.
Carol’s Journal will return next week.