This argument — that political journalists have improved their collective performance, but that this improvement comes with an asterisk — seems to be a popular one. “My take on it is, it came to a point where it couldn’t get any worse,” Boehlert says. “When Bush is at 28 or 29 percent in some polls, eventually the Beltway press corps is going to sort of wise up. They can only be played for so long. But I’m almost certain that if Bush were even at 45 percent in the polls, we wouldn’t see the aggressive nature that we’ve seen the past few months.”
Perhaps not, though it’s worth noting that the relationship between poll numbers and coverage is murky. After all, if the president’s ebbing popularity invites more aggression from the media, aren’t the media also responsible, at least in part, for that very drop in public esteem? This quickly becomes an epistemological argument that neither side can really win. If you deny the press credit for Bush’s drop in popularity, you’re suggesting that some facts (New Orleans being destroyed by flooding, say) can transcend the press and have an almost-unmediated impact on the public. If you think the press is at least partly responsible for Bush’s low approval ratings, though, you’ll probably respond that nothing — not even Katrina, or Michael Brown’s shitty handling of it — becomes known to the American public without first passing through the media filter. (Massing sees poll numbers and press attitudes as symbiotic; Boehlert thinks the former generally determine the latter.
Another complication in sizing up the press’s current state of mind is the basic ambiguity of the term “press” — an ambiguity that’s matched and possibly surpassed by the word “media.” The Post’s Dana Priest may have become the scourge of the Bush administration, but what about smaller newspapers across the US, either in their news coverage or on their op-ed pages? Or the various broadcast-network-news programs? Or cable news? (For some pointed criticism of how the Today show covered the fourth anniversary of the Iraq War, check out liberal watchdog group Media Matters for America’s analysis) Or broadcast radio — which, National Public Radio’s finer moments notwithstanding, isn’t exactly a hotbed of muckraking?
“Our leading newspapers — the Times, the Post, and as we’ve seen from the Pulitzer nominations, the Globe, to its credit — are really leading the way,” says Dan Kennedy, author of the Media Nation blog and visiting assistant professor of journalism at Northeastern University. “But you still see a real reluctance to deeply question what’s going on by the major networks, and certainly by the cable channels.
“For progressives who are looking for some truth-telling in television news, the best thing they’ve got going for them now is [MSNBC’s] Keith Olbermann, who’s very smart and does terrific commentaries,” Kennedy adds. “But he’s a talk-show host with a sports background. He’s not Ted Koppel, who’s done some serious reporting. And at a certain level, it’s difficult to take him seriously.”
Learning curve
In October 2005, outgoing Post ombudsman Michael Getler criticized his paper for downplaying stories that questioned the administration’s casus belli before the Iraq invasion, usually by burying them deep inside the paper: “I cannot think of a story in the past 40 years that offers more warning signs for journalism and for the role of the press in our democracy,” Getler wrote.
