Why Was Petraeus Able To Shift The Debate On Iraq? The Media Enabled It
September 2, 2007 -- 9:12 AM EST // //
So who's to blame for the fact that General Petraeus' aggressive PR surge is showing signs of success in advance of the September showdown between the White House and Congress over Iraq?
Kevin Drum has a provocative post up in which he concludes that the liberal blogosphere and liberal establishment were badly "outplayed" by Petraeus' PR "blitzkrieg." Kevin reaches this sobering conclusion: "Even though there's been no discernible political progress, minimal reconstruction progress, and apparently no genuine decrease in violence, he's managed to convince an awful lot of people that the first doesn't matter, the second is far more widespread than it really is, and the third is the opposite of reality."
Meanwhile, Atrios adds that part of the blame lies with our elected leaders, who "have chosen to play along."
Without discounting any of these conclusions, I think it's necessary to add another explanation for the apparent success of Petraeus' PR push: The media, in some cases out of incompetence and in others by design, helped him get away with it, and indeed actively enabled it.
If you step back and survey the totality of media's performance this summer on the Iraq debate, it becomes a good deal clearer just how awful it's all been -- and just how complicit these failings were in helping to shift the debate:
(1) Big news orgs repeatedly twisted the words of Democrats who had returned from Iraq to make their assessments sound more positive than they were.
This has happened again and again in recent weeks. When Democratic Senator Carl Levin came back from Iraq and said that the escalation was showing measurable results but has "totally and utterly failed" to reach its goal of political reconciliation in Iraq, big news orgs repeatedly spun Levin's words to make it sound as if he were saying that the surge was succeeding, when he wasn't.
And when Hillary Clinton claimed in a recent speech that various tactical changes in Al Anbar province were showing results, news outlets reported again and again and again and again that she'd said the "surge" was "working," when that isn't what she'd said at all.
(2) Big news orgs shifted the definition of the success of the surge from a political goal to a military one.
This is a subset of the above category, but still noteworthy. In reporting on the testimony of Dems returning from Iraq, multiple news organizations dramatically downplayed the most important fact about the Dems' conclusions: Specifically, that they were noting that the surge had failed to achieve its ultimate goal of political reconciliation, and that this failure reinforced the argument in favor of withdrawal. Thus, the meaning of the phrase "surge is working" was shifted to indicate scattered military successes, even while the surge was still falling miserably short of its own stated political goal.
(3) Many news organizations gave tons of coverage to outside experts who said the surge is working, while giving little to none to people who said it wasn't.
When Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack published their infamous New York Times Op ed saying that the surge was working, an extraordinary number of big news outlets lavished coverage on it. Worse, the news orgs uniformly blared the false message that O'Hanlon and Pollack were "war critics," thus infusing their conclusion with false portent and significance.
It can't be overstated just how perfectly the media's performance on that Op ed dovetailed with the White House's propaganda push at that moment: At precisely the same time, multiple White House and Republican officials were publicly delivering precisely the same message about these "war critics" finding success in Iraq that the big news orgs were. Meanwhile, the same news outlets gave little to no coverage to people -- the troops included -- who were far more pessimistic. Perhaps most dispiriting of all, some news orgs used the O'Hanlon Op ed to push a larger falsehood: That war critics in general had decided the surge was working.
(4) Multiple news outlets repeatedly and falsely described the September Iraq assessment as representing the sole judgment of Petraeus, echoing White House propaganda.
Even after it was widely reported that the September Iraq report wouldn't represent the sole word of Petraeus but would actually be written by the White House, multiple news organizations continued describing the report for days and days and days as representing solely the Gospel According To Petraeus.
It can't be overstated just how central to the White House's PR strategy the Petraeus Report sham was. The idea was clearly to put a new public face on the September report and separate it from the people who have been lying to us all along about Iraq, in order to enhance its credibility in advance. To that end, White House officials repeatedly described it as the Petraeus Report for weeks and weeks until the news broke that it wasn't going to be the Petraeus Report at all. Having watched Petraeus' PR savvy in action, we now understand, of course, that even if the report were Petraeus' sole word, it's unclear how much this would really enhance its credibility, anyway.
(5) News orgs and pundits are now baselessly asserting that the White House is "confident" that it will "win" the September showdown with Dems over Iraq.
Perhaps the most dispiriting thing about this development is its eerie echo of press coverage of the 2006 elections, where reporters and commentators kept on asserting, no matter what the polls showed, that Republicans were "confident" and "gleeful" and "on offense" against the Dems. Now this is happening again in advance of the September Iraq showdown. This has only just begun, but it wouldn't be surprising if it increased to a roar in coming days.
When you look at the totality of the media failure here, it suddenly becomes clear what a smoldering wreck it all is, doesn't it?
Again, this isn't to minimize the failings of liberals and Dems here. As I noted some time ago (too lazy to find the link), the Dem Congressional leadership was for some time surprisingly mute while Petraeus and the White House kicked their campaign into high gear. This is partly a function of Congress being on recess -- any Congressional staffer will tell you how hard it is to wrest a statement from members of Congress during August -- but this just ain't a good enough excuse.
Still, media coverage does play a big role here -- though gauging just how big is dicey -- because Congressional insiders are heavily attuned to, and influenced by, shifts in media tone and insider pundit opinion. So the coverage, should it continue in this vein, probably will end up helping persuade skittish Congressional Dems that Petraeus' ongoing PR surge just can't be resisted, if it hasn't persuaded some of them of this already.
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