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Atrios links to a interview with Josh Rushing, the military press liaison who featured prominently in the film Control Room. Control Room, you might remember, is a documentary by some Al Jazeera reporters about the international perspective on the coverage of the war. The film was alright, but Josh Rushing’s part in it was among the more interesting pieces. The interview is pretty good and well worth reading for his take on how he was portrayed in the film, the type of liberties the filmmakers took, etc.
I do want to highlight one important piece of the interview, though:
Matthew Felling: On the issue of polarization, one of your quotes that got massively publicized was when you compared Fox News Channel to Al Jazeera. In your book, you mention a few anecdotes about how Fox was reporting on the war. How did you view their coverage?
Josh Rushing: When I would go out and give reasons why we were going to invade Iraq, having been given the messages from a Republican operative that was my boss, he would give me the theme of the day. Sometimes it would be “WMD,” others it would be “regime change” and others it would be “ties to terrorism.” I would go out to a Fox reporter and they would say “Are there any messages you want to get across before we get to the live interview?” And we would script the interview around the government messaging, and they would thank me for my service at the end of it. And out of fairness, that wasn’t just Fox. There were a number of American networks who did it. The reporters were in a position where there was no way their editorial leadership or their audience for that matter, wanted to see them be critical of a young troop in uniform.
But the devious part of that, is that the administration knew that and understood that and used young troops in uniform to sell the war in a way it knew couldn’t be questioned or criticized. If you look at MSNBC, they packaged their coverage with a banner that said “Our Hearts Are With You.” So when that banner is under my face and I’m giving the reasons why we need to go to war, is anyone going to ask me a critical question? Of course not, their hearts are with me. And there’s a danger in that.
The media’s purpose in a democracy is to be professionally skeptical of anything that anyone in a position of authority or power says. If they’re not, who is? Nobody, and then the people in authority and power can say and do anything they want. So I was disappointed in that.
(Italicized portions were bolded in the original piece, and the bolded sections above are my emphasis.)
He’s absolutely right, of course, but that won’t get our media to do the right thing here and think critically about the information they’re being given by government sources. When politics are involved, as they always are with the Bush administration (and in most issues in any administration), that critical filter has to be there. There are ways to respectfully ask critical questions and get at truth without having to disrespect a soldier in uniform or, well, anyone.
When history looks back at this period, I think that will be the largest theme of this era, the horrible Republicanization of the news media, where supposedly independent outlets acted as if they were just propaganda rags.
July 31st, 2007 at 10:24 pm
Republicanization of the news media?
You’ve got to be kidding?
CNN, The New York Times, ABC, CBS, MSNBC, Public Television… just about every major newspaper of record except a few in the South and the Wall Street Journal are left wing.
You know better than to try to make the media out to be conservative. There is no more hostile world for Republicans than ANY press room.
Fox News is a conservative grit of sand on a liberal beach.
July 31st, 2007 at 10:59 pm
Evidence?
The media is not conservative, they’re lazy and Republicans push the limits on that front.
I offer you, again, evidence above that you ignore. Go ahead and assert what you want, but I offered a specific charge, that the media was reporting only what the government wanted to let out, rather than taking a critical look at the war.
If you want a catalog of contrived Republican talking points and how Republicans get an inordinate amount of mileage out of their talking points, I’ll send you to Media Matters. They catalog conservative and Republican spin and half-truths in the media, and note a lot of bias being shown.
Like I said, though, you don’t have to go to that much trouble… Media Matters covers every spin or omission, big and tiny and that could take a long while. I listed a specific example and this blog is full of other reports where the press has simply accepted Republican framing of issues as fact even though they’re often the opposite of the truth.
August 1st, 2007 at 6:20 am
That’s not evidence, Sujal. That’s citing one isolated example.
I can send you to either mediaresearch.org or news busters . org or even aim.org . Republicans tend to have the uphill battle when Democrats seeking elective office have “supporters” while the Republican’s have “followers”. I’ve been round and round on this bias thing before, every fair study shows that Republicans get hosed by the media. You wrote “Republicanization of the media” that’s what struck me.
Hey, but after reviewing your site… you are welcome to whatever viewpoint you contrive. It’s clear you are extremely liberal, and anti-Republican. I don’t see too many criticisms of Democrats in the same way you attack, Bush and the GOP.
But that’s ok. Congress under Pelosi is a joke. All her and Reid’s fire, piss and vineagar is a bad idea. At least Congressional Republicans worked with Clinton to get some legislation passed when he was in office. Congressional Democrats this time around are focused on going after Republican House members for their attire (even when they dress in T-shirts themselves) and criticizing the President. So much for working together. The media should expose that. Or maybe you can.
August 1st, 2007 at 7:55 am
While this is a single example… it’s an example that lays out one systemic bias in all reporting about the war. That’s quite different than a single report about a single issue. Rushing is saying that the media deferred to Pentagon talking points on the war rather than investigating or even taking a critical eye to the claim. I think that’s pretty significant, especially in a democracy.