If you can't manage the occupation by sending enough troops in, pretend it's OK, and it'll be OK apparently. http://www.msnbc.com/news/982193.aspBush’s News War Fed up with the gloom-and-doom coverage of the conflict, the White House is taking aim at the press By Richard Wolffe and Rod Nordland NEWSWEEK Oct. 27 issue — It started out as a little crowd control in Baghdad. But as U.S. troops entered the streets to restore order earlier this month, the protest turned ugly. Someone threw a homemade grenade at the Americans, wounding 13 servicemen. According to the Oct. 8 Daily Threat Assessment—the Coalition’s internal casualty report, which was shown to NEWSWEEK—eight soldiers were wounded seriously enough to be evacuated to military hospitals. Yet at a press conference the next day, there was no mention of the attack. Pushed by reporters, U.S. officials would only say the incident was under investigation. It was as if the ambush, and the casualties, had never happened. IN BAGHDAD, OFFICIAL control over the news is getting tighter. Journalists used to walk freely into the city’s hospitals and the morgue to keep count of the day’s dead and wounded. Now the hospitals have been declared off-limits and morgue officials turn away reporters who aren’t accompanied by a Coalition escort. Iraqi police refer reporters’ questions to American forces; the Americans refer them back to the Iraqis. Reporters and government officials have always squabbled over access; but the news coverage of the messy, ongoing conflict in Iraq has worsened the already tense relationship between the press and the administration. American officials accuse reporters of indulging in a morbid obsession with death and destruction, and ignoring how Iraq has improved since Saddam Hussein was toppled. Reporters grumble that the secretive White House and Pentagon hold back just how grim and chaotic the situation really is. After a summer of sliding polls and an autumn of tough questions in Congress, the White House is hoping to boost public support by convincing Americans that the cynical national press is getting the story wrong. Last week President George W. Bush himself complained about the national media’s fixation on bad news, and made a show of going around them by granting interviews with local TV reporters. “I’m mindful of the filter through which some news travels,” he told one interviewer, “and sometimes you just have to go over the heads of the filter and speak directly to the people.” Of course, Bush isn’t the first president to try sidestepping the national press in favor of local reporters, who tend to be gentler questioners than the reporters who cover him every day. Bill Clinton did it when he thought the White House press corps was treating him harshly. So did the first President Bush. News management is at the heart of the administration’s shake-up of Iraq policy. The National Security Council recently created four new committees to handle the situation in Iraq. One is devoted entirely to media coordination—stopping the bad news from overwhelming the good. Yet White House officials insist their agenda for Iraq is not driven by the need to generate positive campaign coverage. “If this was all about the election, do you think we would have gone to Congress and said, ‘We need $87 billion to send 8,000 miles away’?” says one senior administration official. “I don’t think so.” Despite their efforts, administration spinners struggle to make themselves heard over the gunfire and suicide bombs in Baghdad. Take one potentially good news story: the arrival of new Iraqi bank notes last week, freshly minted, and minus Saddam’s haughty portrait. Administration officials crafted the media rollout for weeks. In theory it was a compelling story. The new bills were printed in five countries, including the —U.K., Germany and Sri Lanka (the two Iraqi printing plants weren’t up to the job). Piles of old Saddam bank notes were burned, and the new currency was flown into Baghdad onboard 25 jumbo jets. Yet the event was barely covered. USA Today buried a wire story inside, on page 5, while its front page led with hard news: the death of three U.S. soldiers and the hunt for Saddam. “This was an enormous logistical effort that could never have happened in a country in chaos or without the cooperation of the Iraqis,” says one senior U.S. official. “Yet it barely breaks through the media.” One new tactic in the media war is to send congressional allies and cabinet secretaries to Baghdad to bypass the American reporters. Commerce Secretary Don Evans flew into Iraq last week to tell investors and voters back home to stop believing the news on TV. (Evans’s last high-profile travel was an American road trip to convince voters that the economy was recovering.) “All the TV wants to cover is some sensational, isolated terrorist attack,” Evans told NEWSWEEK on his flight back to Washington. “I went over expecting to find an environment where people were frightened. But I found a country that was alive with hope and optimism.” Yet reporters who covered the war say that some of the Coalition’s achievements are less impressive than they sound. Paul (Jerry) Bremer, the U.S. civilian administrator in Iraq, proudly announced the reopening of Iraq’s schools this month, while White House officials point to the opening of Iraq’s 240 hospitals. In fact, many schools were already open in May, once major combat ended, and no major hospital closed during the war. But that didn’t stop a group of Republican senators from tearing into American reporters covering Iraq earlier this month. “I was not told by the media... that thousands and thousands of Iraqi schoolchildren went back to school,” said Larry Craig of Idaho, who recently toured Iraq. The senator neglected to mention that he slept both nights of his trip in Kuwait, not Iraq. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- With Howard Fineman
Joke making the rounds: Up in Heaven, Alexander the Great, Adolf Hitler and Napoleon are looking down on events in Iraq. Alexander says, "Wow, if I had just one of Bush's armored divisions, I would definitely have conquered India." Hitler states, "Surely if I only had a few squadrons of Bush's air force I would have won the Battle of Stalingrad decisively in a matter of days." There is a long pause as the three men continue to watch events. Then Napoleon speaks, "And if I only had that Fox News, no one would have ever known that I lost the Russian campaign."
damn, if those three can make it up to heaven, bush should equally have no problem making it up there as well.
So, before the war, they saturate the airwaves with talk of WMDs (see all the talking heads shows where Cheney, Rumsfeld, etc. made the case for war) and then yell "listen to the media, people" and now that the media is doing its job and reporting what Americans want to see on the news (death, destruction, and mayhem) they are going to complain that the media can't be trusted. Who's the waffler now?
Didn't want to start a new thread, but found this interesting. More media manipulation by W. ------------------------------ Curtains Ordered for Media Coverage of Returning Coffins By Dana Milbank Tuesday, October 21, 2003; Page A23 Since the end of the Vietnam War, presidents have worried that their military actions would lose support once the public glimpsed the remains of U.S. soldiers arriving at air bases in flag-draped caskets. To this problem, the Bush administration has found a simple solution: It has ended the public dissemination of such images by banning news coverage and photography of dead soldiers' homecomings on all military bases. In March, on the eve of the Iraq war, a directive arrived from the Pentagon at U.S. military bases. "There will be no arrival ceremonies for, or media coverage of, deceased military personnel returning to or departing from Ramstein [Germany] airbase or Dover [Del.] base, to include interim stops," the Defense Department said, referring to the major ports for the returning remains. A Pentagon spokeswoman said the military-wide policy actually dates from about November 2000 -- the last days of the Clinton administration -- but it apparently went unheeded and unenforced, as images of caskets returning from the Afghanistan war appeared on television broadcasts and in newspapers until early this year. Though Dover Air Force Base, which has the military's largest mortuary, has had restrictions for 12 years, others "may not have been familiar with the policy," the spokeswoman said. This year, "we've really tried to enforce it." President Bush's opponents say he is trying to keep the spotlight off the fatalities in Iraq. "This administration manipulates information and takes great care to manage events, and sometimes that goes too far," said Joe Lockhart, who as White House press secretary joined President Bill Clinton at several ceremonies for returning remains. "For them to sit there and make a political decision because this hurts them politically -- I'm outraged." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55816-2003Oct20.html
another quote from the article... "A White House spokesman said Bush has not attended any memorials or funerals for soldiers killed in action during his presidency as his predecessors had done, although he has met with families of fallen soldiers and has marked the loss of soldiers in Memorial Day and Sept. 11, 2001, remembrances. "
Hey treeman, as a member of our military, how do you feel about the president not supporting the troops by not attended any memorials or funerals?
Well, mark, I would expect that he's probably a little busy. He is after all running two wars, trying to jumpstart the world's largest economy, and all the while having to fend off the liberal hyenas who keep barking at him from the sidelines. Yeah, I think he's busy. He's excused.
I'm sorry, is he on vacation right now in Indonesia? I could think of better places to go for some sun, sand, and bikinis.
Well, he was on "vacation" in Crawford for 30 something days in August and September. Maybe instead of falling off Segways (sp?), he could find the time to attend a funeral or two.
RM95: The President doesn't really take vacations. It's not like he can leave work at the office - the office follows him everywhere he goes. And BTW, he has been to some memorials. He cannot be expected to make every one, and to think so is ridiculous. But the insinuation here is that because he is not at all of the memorials, we servicemen should be pissed off and believe him to be unpatriotic, uncaring, or something. Sorry, we don't feel that way, and it's a ridiculous idea in the first place. mark - I don't think he's there for the fun & sun.
I also understand that it's not a real vacation, hence my first post where I stated: and in my second post: Notice the quotes around vacation, obviously implying that I knew that it wasn't a vacation in the Spring Break sense of the word.
I thought this was an interesting take on the media coverage in Iraq from Rich Oppel, the editor of the Austin American-Statesman: Mr. President, we're not your court stenographers by Rich Oppel Sunday, October 19, 2003 When U.S. Rep. Jim Marshall toured Iraq in September, the final Baghdad-to-Kuwait leg of his trip was in the cargo hold of a C-130E with Sgt. Trevor A. Blumberg of Dearborn, Mich. And Marshall was a very angry man. Blumberg, killed that afternoon, was in a body bag. "I found myself wondering whether the news media were somehow complicit in his death," wrote Marshall in a Sept. 22 op-ed page piece in the Atlanta Journal and Constitution. "The falsely bleak picture (presented by the media) weakens our national resolve, discourages Iraqi cooperation and emboldens our enemy." Most members of Congress are ushered through the peaceful parts of Iraq, winding up with visits to the heavily protected compound of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Baghdad. Marshall reported that "hundreds of Iraqis enthusiastically waved back at me as I sat in the open door of a helicopter." Blumberg's reception was sadly different. The Georgia Democrat's broadside preceded the blame-the-media campaign initiated Oct. 13 by President Bush, who contacted regional broadcasters — bypassing the national media — to complain that "people in America aren't getting the truth." He told Hearst-Argyle, "I'm mindful of the filter through which some news travels, and somehow you just got to go over the heads of the filter and speak directly to the people." Among those helping the president in this effort was Commerce Secretary Don Evans, the former University of Texas regents chair and close friend of the president, who stood before TV cameras in Baghdad on Oct. 14. Surrounded by armed combat troops and a Humvee, Evans explained how safe he felt, and how that conflicted with American TV's characterization of "despair and quite frankly a somewhat frightening area . . . and it's anything but that." U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay, R-Sugar Land, has opened a Web site that includes a section on how the media deceives you about Iraq, accessible at tomdelay.house.gov/iraq/iraqindex.htm. Of course, the administration has some challenge getting its story straight. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in a memo leaked last week that Afghanistan and Iraq will continue to be a "hard slog." How does the Bush media campaign play with the people? At best, results are mixed — and apparently overshadowed by Americans' fundamental concerns about the war in Iraq. On Tuesday, the Pew Research Center released results of a national poll, conducted Oct. 15-19 among 1,515 adults. It indicated that 38 percent of people agree with Bush that news organizations are presenting too bleak a picture of the situation in Iraq, while 36 percent say news reports from that country are fairly accurate. An increasing number say U.S. forces in Iraq should be brought home as soon as possible. In the October poll, 39 percent express that view now, compared with 32 percent in late September. Permit me to demur from my president, and say that he's got it wrong. I see comprehensive coverage of the war by most national and metro newspapers. We are not the "patriotic press" plugging a war in the style of Fox News; we don't have people like Geraldo Rivera out there packing a gun and threatening to kill Osama bin Laden. We work to cover the war the old-fashioned way, accurately, fairly, comprehensively and with shoe-leather reporters such as Larry Kaplow of Cox Newspapers. He is on the ground in Baghdad and other cities talking with our troops and with Iraqis and giving you a balanced report. We have published Kaplow's articles on school openings, new currency being distributed, the return of water and electricity and the rehiring of Iraqi police. But these stories also compete with the nearly daily death toll among U.S. soldiers, the United Nations bugging out and contractors unable to do their work because of security concerns. "We're not chasing those stories (about setbacks); they're finding us. They happen every day in a place that the United States has adopted for better or worse," says Chuck Holmes, Kaplow's editor in Washington. Still, we abide by the squeaky wheel theory. Locally we report traffic deaths, not safely completed highway travel. In Washington, we'll spend more time looking for what doesn't work. We shed light on malfeasance, the misappropriation of tax dollars and a well-intentioned but bungling bureaucracy. "Should we do more stories on what government does well, programs that are working as designed, dedicated federal employees who overcome the bureaucratic lethargy or red tape to get the job done? Yes we should, but not in place of the stories about what goes wrong," says Holmes. When Bush says news is being "filtered," his complaint really is that reporters refuse to be good court stenographers. Bush's "filter" is merely a matter of contextual reporting, and holding the government accountable. Rich Oppel is editor of the Austin American-Statesman. http://www.statesman.com/opinion/content/editorial/oppel/1003/102603.html
