|
WASHINGTON, 31
January 2003 — Lest anyone forget the power of incumbency,
President George W. Bush delivered a few reminders in the
past few weeks. The capture of Saddam Hussein and the announcement
that Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi had agreed to open his
country to weapons inspections demonstrated that ability of
the occupant of the White House to generate positive and transformative
news.
This is a critical
fact to note in an election year. Not only can the incumbent
administration make news more easily than its challengers,
but it can also better manage news as well.
Challengers must
fight to get press coverage. And at this point in the Democratic
primary process, with the nine candidates sharply attacking
each other and the Bush White House, the news coverage that
they generate usually has a negative tone.
The president,
on the other hand, has been on an upswing. Congress supported
his proposal to reform the way that senior citizens pay for
expensive prescription drugs. The nation’s economy is continuing
to show signs of recovery, and now Bush can bask in the glow
of two significant foreign policy successes.
The Democrats’
dilemma is clear. While the president’s victories have produced
simple straightforward headlines, their criticisms are more
complicated and, to some ears, may sound like mere complaining.
Also of concern
has been the ability of the administration to manage bad news
and change the subject of coverage when they needed to.
Who remembered
the Enron or Halliburton scandals of the summer of 2002? And
whatever became of the challenges to the vice president’s
dealings with oil company executives in planning the administration’s
energy policy?
The war with Iraq,
which was itself a “subject change,” provides yet another
case in point. The raison d’etre of the war was the danger
posed by the Baghdad regime’s possession of weapons of mass
destruction (WMD) and the not so subtly implied links between
Iraq and international terrorism.
The former is no
longer mentioned, while continuing violence in Iraq is now
noted as proof of the connection between terror and the former
regime.
In the American
public’s mind Sept. 11, Afghanistan and Iraq have all been
morphed into a vague but clearly threatening reality — a “reality”
that has been cultivated by carefully managed news.
In this picture
the details have been ignored or deliberately pushed aside.
What has been promoted as important to consider is that “we
were attacked and we are fighting back — and our power has
been decisive.” That Afghanistan is in a state of upheaval,
that Pakistan may very well have been destabilized and that
Al-Qaeda remains a very real threat - are not subjects for
discussion. What matters is that “we are fighting terror”
and, in this vague fight, we are told “we are winning”.
The coverage is
managed and “spun” and, when needed, shifted to new topics
— positive stories of victories. For a while, for example,
as daily attacks against US forces were taking their toll,
public support for the war was declining. This required management.
To a degree, the effort has been successful. Americans and
Iraqis continue to die, on a daily basis, but the stories
of these deaths no longer generate front-page news coverage.
For example, a series of attacks on US forces on Christmas
Day resulted in four American deaths. A review of a number
of major US daily newspapers found the story on page 39 in
one, page 18 in another and not even appearing in another
two.
In most instances,
US deaths are reported buried in much larger press round-ups
of Iraq-related news. In the past, they were featured as separate
stories.
In a similar vein,
Iraqi civilian deaths, resulting from actions by coalition
forces, have all but disappeared from the US press. After
pre-war polling showed that the US public was highly sensitive
to such “collateral damage” deaths, the Pentagon refused to
release such data forcing US reporters to hunt for these numbers
on their own. Often times they had to go to Iraqi hospitals
to learn casualty figures. Now, however, the coalition-administered
Iraqi Ministry of Health has joined the Pentagon’s efforts
by forbidding hospital staff from issuing any information
to the international news media. Still some negative news
will, on occasion, leak out, but it is episodic and incomplete.
As a result, the
management of “bad news” has been quite effective, leaving
the field wide open for coverage of what is termed the “larger”
political news coverage of “progress”.
All of this is
to say that the United States public is in the dark about
much of what is happening or not happening in Iraq and Afghanistan
and the magnitude of the challenges facing both countries.
What they know is that the United States is facing an upgraded
“Orange Alert”, “Saddam has been caught” and the “United States
is still fighting and winning the long war against terror”.
Even with this,
the public remains deeply divided. But with accurate news
so difficult to come by in this “cloud of war” that has descended
on the country, it is increasingly hard to discuss the merits,
or even the reality, of this war or the foreign policy that
led us into it.
This will continue
to be the situation in the next year. Reality may, on occasion,
break through and the press may respond with tough stories,
asking hard questions. But as the past few weeks have shown
the administration has more arrows in its quiver, and, as
the situation warrants, they may decide when and how to use
them.
|
