Bad Press

     I don’t know why Dick Cheney’s office held off a day before announcing the Vice President had accidentally shot his hunting partner but I can guess. The Bush administration in general and the Vice President in particular face the most openly hostile press corps since Richard Nixon. Now, three days into the coverage they are portraying the incident as the crime of the century. The New York Times web site leads with three separate articles on the front page, an op-ed piece, and an editorial, all excoriating the White House. It’s much the same at The Washington Post. At a press briefing on Monday reporters were all but throwing chairs. There were calls for Cheney’s resignation, even a criminal prosecution. There is nothing new about incivility and a lack of decorum in White House press briefings but this was extraordinary. Those people were out of control. Don’t they ever listen to themselves? No wonder the media is held in low public esteem. This was a hunting accident!
     Much of the coverage focuses on the delay, and on the fact that the first reports came from the Corpus Christi Caller-Times, which the Eastern establishment apparently considers a hick town rag. It would be an understatement to say the media insinuates the administration attempted to cover the incident up. They are using it to drag out and re-hash old grievances about everything from Iraqi weapons of mass destruction to hurricane Katrina.
     At least this incident really happened. The press isn’t always so particular and over the past few years false reporting has been rampant. It was particularly prevalent during Katrina, with reporters passing on every rumor of murder and mayhem without even a pretense at verification. I don’t know why. The storm was bad enough without their exaggerations. But they have been at their worst when they have faked the news and deliberately misrepresented conditions in order to influence public policy and even swing elections. The Dan Rather attempt to falsify George Bush’s National Guard service record wasn’t a lapse of judgment but representative of a belief that a lie told in a greater good isn’t really a lie. Depending on whose ox is being gored it is an attitude common to many who like to call themselves journalists.
     Most truly despicable has been the reporting from Iraq. In an effort to produce a debacle they have attempted to paint it as one. The fact is the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was a brilliant military success and efforts to put down the ensuing insurrection have gone pretty well, as insurrections go. If conditions were as chaotic as presented there would be masses of refuges and we haven’t seen them. Schools and hospitals are open and functioning. If I look in the background in the nightly images of suicide bombs, I see people going about their business. I think I would recognize a catastrophe if I saw one and Iraq isn’t it.
     Maybe some good will come of the hunting incident. Maybe a few cooler heads in the press will come to their senses and realize they have gone way overboard in their attempts to vilify the administration, and not just in this. It is something that has been building for years and some of it is more than an otherwise harmless embarrassment for the Vice President. The public deserves news, not vituperative. For now we’ll pretty much have to go to the internet to get it and we’ll have to do our own separating of the wheat from the chaff. The main stream media isn’t going to do it.