On Signature Machines
Dean
You know a political leader is simply on someone's s*** list when they start pillorying him for trivia. Case in point: this week, some began attacking Secretary of Defense Donal Rumsfeld for not personally signing letters of condolence to the family of fallen members of the service.
Can anyone tell me any war in which a Secretary of Defense was expected to personally sign every such letter? It doesn't, to me, strike me a reaonable to expect the Secretary of Defense--ANY Secretary of Defense--doing that. So why does this supposed "falure" make national news?
Powerline has a letter you should read on this subject.
The irony of their use of Bush as a higher standard of behavior will no doubt be lost on administration critics...
History has several examples of this phenomenon, and it is not limited to the US.
My take is, Rumsfeld got an undeservedly bad rap. I believe this is only because it is the Legacy Media's attempt to get to Bush through Rumsfeld. If they can bring down Rumsfeld, it makes Bush a little weaker in the public debate.
Ask the troops and they pretty much love Rumsfeld.
The interesting thing being that, although shortages of some sort or another have always been something soldiers gripe about, it's also the case that our troops are better armored and better protected than they ever have been in history.
The amount of ignorance by the public on issues like this is simply staggering.
Its like this: War is by nature a crisis situation. Shortages are a sympom of a crisis. The fact that so many humvees *were* armored and more are going to be means, logically, *no* crisis exists.
Merry Christmas!
They couldn't drive Cheney from the ticket. They couldn't get Bush to apologize. They couldn't get him to admit a mistake. They couldn't drive him from office. The most-hated Cabinet posts have already been changed out by the triumphant Bush. Who else is left to pick on, what battle is there left to fight? So Rumsfeld is the target of hysteria and unfair reporting.
After all, they have to have *something* to report.
One of the key lessons of the Vietnam era is that public perception is one of the most important aspects of running a war in the modern (aka television) era. This lesson has apparently been forgotten. Blaming the public perception on some agenda of the mainstream media is laziness, because there is more to public perception than just the mainstream media news from Iraq, for the media also repeat almost unedited statements from the White House and the administration with little commentary or perspective added. You cannot say that the administration does not have the bully pulpit that Teddy Roosevelt spoke of.
However, if the picture painted by the administration is not consistent with the pictures coming out of the country (and the administration can make sure that "the good things" are shown) then the line taken by the administration painting the rosy picture is not believed. The recent acknowledgment by President Bush that the Iraqi police forces are not what we would like them to be adds credibility to what the administration says in the future, because he has actually admitted a problem. Nothing is ever as rosy as the situation in Iraq has been portrayed by the administration, just as it is not as bad as the reports directly from Iraq would indicate.
It is the responsibility of the White House to get it's message out, and it is the responsibility of the media to find out the things that the government wants to hide. This is the nature of the adversarial system that has evolved in our country. Just as the court system is adversarial, with a prosecutor aimed at convicting the defendant, the media feels that its job is to ferret out the hidden secrets that people in power always hold and in holding the secrets ultimately degrade democracy.
Merely saying "the mainstream media doesn't want to show the good things and is unfair" does not hold the administration to account for not getting the message of the good happening in Iraq out, and is yet another variation of blaming the messenger instead of analyzing the message.
Now how and where does one start?
I guess the first thing is to say this: supposing the MSM doesn't WANT to show those good things? Then what exactly does the administration do? Control the media? Play favorites? Put out something the MSM would call spin? Simply put, if the MSM doesn't want to show something - any actions on the administration's part quickly become a lose-lose situation.
Now, let's look closely at the use of the word "blame". News is supposed to be just that: news. Facts, not opinions.
So far we've freed a country from a dictator that had well over a dozen UN resolutions demanding he stop certain practices and open his actions up to investigation. A dictator who killed tens of thousands of his citizens. We did this with a RECORD LOW amount of casualties on our part. We're about a month away from holding elections too.
But what does the MSM continue to lead off their news with? Everything from daily accounts of insurgent actions that kill a few soldiers to how our Secretary of Defense had the audacity to not personally sign letters to the families of those who died. How about that UN corruption scandal that probably was the real reason France and Russia didn't support the war? How about some real investigative reporting on who is behind the insurgents?
Yet somehow you see fit to "blame" the Bush administration for what the MSM networks decide to lead their news reports with?
Finally, one is left with "analyzing the message". Are we talking about the one where the MSM decided to not inquire into how Kerry felt our "historic allies" include Russia and Germany? Or are we talking about the one that wants to blame everything that's happened in Iraq since 1988 one either of the Bushes - while somehow overlooking the facct that there was 8 years in the middle there where Bill Clinton was running the show?
The MSM is very good at a few things. Soundbites. Putting things in black-and-white. Ignoring the grey. My point to breaking down your last paragraph is only to show that you can't be that simplistic anymore. That both sides - be they Democrat/Republican, MSM/Administration, Arab/Western - both sides have things to be proud of and things to be ashamed of. They both use spin. They both have agendas.
You find it very easy to say the administration can make sure that 'the good things" are shown yet you refuse to acknowledge the immediate and likely reaction of the MSM if they actually do it. Believe it, they would scream long and hard about such a thing.
I have to disagree with this Brannon. Sorry, I agree with much of what you're saying, but this is wrong.
The administration has to put up with whatever snippets of what it says that the media chooses to distribute. It is a much weaker bully pulpit than Teddy Rossevelt ever had because of this. The media routinely and without apology quotes whatever the administration says out of context, and is shameless about putting its own spin on what little it does choose to quote, and often quotes things in a way that are the exact opposite of what the administration says.
Just look at how many times the media has reprinted the bald-faced lie that President Bush declared "mission accomplished" on the back of the U.S.S. Lincoln for a perfect example of this.
This was not true for the media in Teddy's day, when the media routinely reprinted verbatim transcripts of whatever the administration said--and which the media almost never does now.
I agree with much else you say, but today, in truth, Presidents are MUCH more vulnerable to the out-of-context, sound-bite quote by the media.
Interestingly enough, the White House has begun to figure out ways to bypass this artificial filtering process by the mainstream media.