Media

File this away under "who will guard the guardians", subfile "who will fact-check the fact-checkers." Media Matters, the leftist advocacy group that "fact checks" the media for alleged pro-conservative, pro-Republican bias, complained about a recent Politico story.  They took special exception to a point I made. 

The Politico story was about all the ways that President Obama seems to be getting away with activity that would have sent critics (critics like Media Matters, for instance) around the bend if President Bush had tried it. In the Politico story, the reporter quoted me saying that critics would have howled if Karl Rove and other political/communicator types had been as prominently featured in the strategy review that led to the Iraq surge as David Axelrod and the other Obama communicators are featured in Obama's current (second) Afghanistan strategy review. I told the reporter I was worried that this would give the appearance that Obama was viewing Afghanistan narrowly through a partisan political lens and it would complicate an already delicate civil-military situation.

Up gotchas Media Matters to claim that Karl Rove really did participate in national security strategy reviews, citing a Washington Post story about the the White House Iraq Group (WHIG), which included Rove, Karen Hughes, and other communicators, as well as policy people such as Condoleeza Rice and Steve Hadley.

The problem with the Media Matters claim is that the WHIG was not involved in deciding national security strategy -- what to do in Iraq (or Afghanistan) to protect our national security interests.  Rather it was involved in deciding national security communications strategy -- i.e., how best to explain to Congress, to the American public, and to the world what and why the President had decided regarding the national security strategy. In other words, the policy team advised the president on what should be done and the communications/political team advised the President on how to persuade the American people that he had decided correctly.  

Both functions are appropriate and necessary, but under President Bush the policy came first and drove the communications/politics, rather than vice-versa. In short, Karl Rove did not sit in on the national security strategy meetings. If Media Matters has additional evidence, I would be interested in seeing it, but if all they can point to is the WHIG, then they need better internal fact checkers (and perhaps not trust everything they read or hear in the media).  

Now a more interesting critique would claim President Bush had the political-military balance wrong. Perhaps President Obama is recognizing that his decision on Afghanistan is inescapably a political one, and that the choice of the right national security strategy hinges crucially on an assessment of what America's domestic political system will support. In that case, it might make sense that Obama's political team has a seat at the table.

I think there is something to this line of reasoning, but at least in the Iraq case I don't think it would have altered the course of history much. I don't think having the political team at the table during the Iraq surge debate would have changed the outcome -- except, perhaps, to have hastened the surge decision slightly. According to Bob Woodward's account of the surge, some of those who opposed it did so out of concerns for its political doability (would Congress support the surge and would the American people stand for it?).  Perhaps having the political team to weigh in on that question would have settled the matter more quickly. Such hypotheticals are hard to pin down with certainty.

But some things seem pretty certain to me. If the Bush political team had been as prominently involved, the critics would have howled at the time. And because President Obama has involved his political team, he will have to answer the question: to what extent was this decision - whatever it turns out to be--  driven by political considerations, especially election and re-election considerations? 

NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/Getty Images

By Peter Feaver

I had some sympathy for the Obama folks when I read this newspaper account of yesterday's meeting with Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki. Apparently, it was a solid, business-oriented meeting. And since President Obama has reportedly stopped holding regular video-teleconferencing with Maliki (a staple of US-Iraqi relations under the last Administration), this meeting was especially important.

What caught my eye was President Obama's comment at the end of the story: ""Overall," Obama said, "we have been very encouraged by the progress that has been made."

This statement struck me as both honest and misleading. Honest, because if you start with a January 2007 frame of reference -- say then-candidate Obama's claim that surge was going to have no impact on violence -- then the progress has been remarkable and very encouraging. But it also struck me as misleading in the sense that it did not also say that the recent spike in violence, and even more the recent flare-up of Arab-Kurdish tensions, is undoubtedly discouraging, and I would be surprised if the Obama team did not feel the same. Of course, as the Post story related, Obama also acknowledged that there are "tough days ahead" in Iraq. But the overall message was one of progress, a word he invoked 6 times in the prepared remarks and 3 times in the answer to the first question and that is the lede for the story.

That got me wondering: would those folks (say the mainstream Bob Woodward or Tom Ricks, let alone other people in the nuttier fringes of the Bush-bashing chorus) who established a cottage industry lambasting Bush Administration rhetoric as "happy talk" rise up and start calling a foul on President Obama? President Bush regularly caveated his statements of progress with reminders that there were "tough days ahead" and, if memory serves, Rumsfeld was the guy who coined "long, hard slog." In their coverage of Bush, sometimes the reporters would include mention of the caveats and qualify their lede accordingly; sometimes the reporters would include mention of the caveats and yet stick to a "happy talk" lede; and sometimes the reporters would simply omit any mention of the caveats, perhaps the better to advance the "happy talk" lede. Regardless of how many times President Bush presented carefully caveated assessments, the Bush-bashers could always rest their indictment on one or two off-the-cuff uncaveated remarks.

At what point will Obama's rhetoric on Iraq suffer this same fate? I hope never and, even more, I hope it never deserves to. It is appropriate for President Obama to balance "if it bleeds, it leads" coverage with mention of developments that are not getting as much press attention. And it is appropriate for President Obama in public to exhort the Iraqis towards greater progress by emphasizing the positive rather than dwelling on the negative. In fact, President Obama has talked so little in public about Iraq I would welcome virtually anything he said. Of course, I also hope that President Obama is as candid and clear-eyed about the challenges in private as his predecessor was, and I hope he continues to offer appropriate caveats even if he is stressing a publicly optimistic message. If the "happy talk police" give him the free pass they never gave his predecessor, so be it. The Iraqi challenge is hard enough without having to duck "police" brutality, even if it is only rhetorical.

SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images

By Peter Feaver

I cannot resist making another point about the media coverage. I require my students to read the New York Times (and encourage them also to read the Washington Post) because these papers of record are the best resource for learning what is happening in the world. But I also teach my students to be wise and critical readers of the paper.

Peter Baker's story today in the Times about the scope of President Obama's involvement in the daily affairs of the nation provides exactly the sort of teaching moment professors love to exploit. The story is billed as a "news analysis," which means it is not driven by a new discovery or new piece of reporting, but rather driven by people's (either the editor's, or the reporter's, or just other informed commentators') reactions to a recent big news story.

If spring semester classes weren't done, I might draw my students' attention to this story to make three points:

First, beware the unreliability of headlines and the danger of dodgy editors. Headlines are written by editors, not by reporters. In my experience, reporters are often blamed for the mistakes or boneheadedness of editors. The headline given the story -- "Obama Brings a Hands-on Style to Details, Grand and Mundane" -- is the most positive possible spin to give to the story and spins it in a misleading fashion. The underlying account is really about the vast expansion of government penetration into daily affairs and the dangers associated with that expansion. Baker observes that President Obama seems to relish this expansion, and he also observes that Republicans warned he would do this during the campaign. He does not show that Obama is actually micro-managing the policy, but he does show that Obama is willing to engage in exhortations that sound maternalistic. I can think of many headlines that convey the story better than the one the editors gave, and all of them are a bit less flattering to Obama. That is skew -- the editor's skew, not Baker's.

Second, notice how Baker, to his credit, draws the oft-ignored parallel between President Bush's exhortation for Americans to resume shopping after the 9/11 attacks and Obama's exhortation for Americans to keep their tires properly inflated and to keep their hands properly washed. Baker obliquely suggests that these exhortations may come back to haunt Obama the way they haunted Bush. But just drawing that connection raises the obvious next question: why does the mainstream media mock Bush for what he said and not mock Obama for the same sort of thing?

Third, I would then ask students whether all of those presidential comments were not reasonable responses to the challenges. Bush was dealing with an economy already in recession and with immediate post-9/11 panic about follow-on attacks in malls, not to mention generalized uncertainty. If Americans hunkered down and stopped normal commerce, then the knock-on effects of 9/11 would be far more lasting than the attacks themselves. No serious observer can claim that Bush was saying this is the only thing we needed to do in response to 9/11. But it was a tangible thing that individual Americans (the people he was talking to) could do on their own.

I credit Obama with the same pragmatic realism. He doesn't think inflating tires is the only thing we need to do to deal with the energy crisis, and he doesn't think washing our hands is the only thing we need to do to deal with the swine flu burgeoning pandemic. Which only raises the second question once again: why does so much of the mainstream media treat Bush's remarks as contemptible and the others as unremarkable?

To be clear, there is nothing wrong in Baker's piece, at least not in the bits he wrote. He is a very good reporter. He was a tough, critical reporter of the White House under Bush, and he seems to be less afflicted with the Obama honeymoon syndrome than other reporters. (And he may believe that even this tempered praise from a former Bush official is a toxic embrace that does him more harm than good!) 

It is a useful teaching device. If students read it thoroughly (and not just read the headlines), and if they read it with questioning and critical eyes, they will learn something and have their curiosity piqued to learn more. But some of what they learn will make them a bit more skeptical about media coverage in general.

By Will Inboden

On the theme raised by Peter and Chris below about media bias and distorted coverage, for yet more evidence see David Ignatius's column this week on National Security Advisor Jim Jones. Ignatius is usually an informed, insightful, and probing writer, which makes his credulous profile of Jones all the more puzzling. Jones (like almost any policymaker) not surprisingly will use the media to enhance his standing and advance his agenda. What is surprising is how a willing media plays along.

Whereas a few months ago Jones was eager to assert his authority to his cabinet rivals, er, colleagues, now the agenda seems to be broadcasting a smooth and collegial management style with a balanced airing of views and decision-making consensus. Perhaps the biggest eyebrow-raiser was this sentence purporting to announce a new organizational innovation: "...and he's building a new strategic planning cell that can ‘look beyond the horizon to see what's coming at us.'"

Which is a curious claim, considering that Bush national security advisor Steve Hadley created just such a cell (which, in full disclosure, Peter Feaver and I helped staff for its first two years), and even codified its interagency function with a National Security Policy Directive in August 2008 that is presumably still in effect. Nor was this wholly a Bush administration innovation, as a similar office had existed on the Clinton administration NSC, though with more of a focus on communications.  

Why Jones claims this "strategic planning cell" as a new initiative is a head-scratcher, as is the failure of Ignatius to ask the logical follow-up question of whether the office had existed before in the Bush White House or in previous NSC structures. I hope that Ignatius has not fallen prey to the affliction common among too many journalists of assuming that if an idea is sound than it could not possibly have come from the Bush administration.

For another example just this week, see this bizarre Defense News article which, in reporting on Under-Secretary Michele Flournoy's sensible and balanced speech on QDR principles, can't resist indulging in some editorializing and caricature of the Bush administration policies rather than acknowledging that many of the threats and principles Flournoy lays out are consistent with those identified by the Bush administration.

Then there is the Ignatius column's conclusion,

What comes across with Jones is a solid, experienced manager with a Marine's blunt approach to problems. Asked if he supported Obama's decision to release the torture memos, for example, Jones answered simply: "I did because I think it's the right thing to do. In my military experience, I came to believe that bad news doesn't improve with age. Better to put out bad news as you know it."

Except for the inconvenient truth that the political arm of the Obama White House seems to have seen the so-called "torture memos" as good news, not "bad news," and as an opportunity more than a "problem." Good news and an opportunity, at least, in the sense that their release of the memos served their political agenda of appeasing their left-wing base, casting further aspersions on the Bush administration, and advancing the Obama administration's narrative of itself as a paragon of virtue, transparency, and integrity. The White House communications team can be expected to peddle this type of theme; that is their job. But the media's eager compliance does not serve the marketplace of ideas or the health of the democratic system.

By Christian Brose

From where I sat at the State Department for four-plus years, I would agree with a lot of what Peter Feaver has to say about the general bias and unaccountability of much of the media. [Ah! Thou doth protest too much! Now that you are technically in the media, and a blogger no less, you relish unaccountability, don't you? -- ed. Who asked you? And you're just copying Dan Drezner anyway. Go jump in a lake.]

I would only add one point to Peter's. Another sin of the media that bothered me while in government was their attempt to create wider narrative arcs for public figures than were warranted. By that I mean, when someone was naturally riding high, the media's coverage always lifted him (or her) higher. This was not done out of bias, I felt, but more out of an expectation that a fall would come sooner or later, and it would be a far better story if that person were falling from a greater height. And sure enough, when the inevitable descent began, the media always seemed to make the lows of it that much lower. Again, it wasn't so much bias that drove this as an author's desire to see more drama in a story.

It will be interesting to watch whether and how this theory applies to Obama. He is politically near the top of the world right now as it is, and yet much of the media have managed to lift him even higher still. One assumes there is nowhere for him to go but down, and judging by the history of the presidency, events will pull him in that direction sooner or later. I'm not lining up with Rush Limbaugh here, just stating a fact of politics that I imagine even Obama may not be able to change. I wonder whether the media will heighten the drama if the shine comes off their star -- or try instead to overlook it and polish it up.

By Peter Feaver

One of the perils of blogging is the rapidity with which one can get one's comeuppance. One day after I give props to the New York Times for offering modest accountability of President Obama and boos to the Washington Post for persisting in writing only "source sweetener" puff pieces designed to curry favor with the administration, I read this bit of hard-hitting investigative journalism from the Times' Jeff Zeleny: "During these first 100 days, what has surprised you the most about this office, enchanted you the most about serving in this office, humbled you the most and troubled you the most?" This question during last night's press conference was so lame that even President Obama made a joke about it. 

Clearly the mainstream media has not yet figured out how to cover Obama. I don't expect them to subject the Obama team to the same kind of tendentious and mocking ridicule that was the norm for so much of the Bush coverage, but nor do I expect the current prevailing double-standard to persist throughout his entire tenure. The media needs to figure out how to live up to their much-heralded (by them) watchdog role, because the media serves an essential function in maintaining a functional marketplace of ideas. When the media shirks its traditional role as skeptical truth-squadder the way it has shirked during Obama's first 100 days, public debate and public understanding of the critical issues of the day suffers.

The best scholarship I have seen on the interrelationship between the media, public opinion, and policymaking is an article by Matthew Baum and Philip Potter: "The Relationship Between Mass Media, Public Opinion and Foreign Policy: Toward a Theoretical Synthesis." The authors improve an older model, which held that the media was just a neutral tool of policy elites who force-fed the administration line to the unsuspecting public. Instead, the media acts as a broker, arbitraging between information asymmetries. Early on in a crisis or in the emergence of an issue, policymakers know more than the public (or the media) does. Over time, the media and the public "catch up" and become more of a constraining force on policymakers.

The Baum and Potter model still does not match perfectly what I experienced on a daily basis seeing the nexus from the inside, but it is a vast improvement over earlier approaches that exaggerate the power of policymakers to control the agenda in the face of a hostile press. The "broker" image also helpfully invokes images of real estate brokers or stock-brokers, reminding us that the media is not really neutral. On the contrary, they have their own incentives and they respond to them accordingly. The media can be "trusted" the way you trust your stockbroker, provided that you factor in the known biases and skews.

Some biases/skews are obvious: the media favors sensationalism over substance, and personality over process. If it bleeds it leads. If it is alarming, it is alluring. Thus, the coverage of the "swine flu outbreak" is thick with agonizing and fairly thin with analysis on how, for instance, the preparations the Bush administration developed in the second term to deal with concerns about an avian flu pandemic are now being put to good use. I got bored even writing that sentence, yet more people are alive today because of that "boring" work than because of the "interesting" man-wearing-mask interviews.

This leads to a generalized preference for stories about failure rather than stories about success. When the Iraq war was going poorly, it was far more "interesting" than when the Iraq war was going well. When it appeared the Bush administration did not want the media to cover the Dover casket ceremony, it was far more intriguing than now when the ceremonies are available for coverage.

Other biases are less obvious, and the most important one of these may also be the most surprising: compared to policymakers, the media have far weaker incentives to tell the truth. The punishment for policymakers who flat-out tell untruths is fairly severe. The punishment for the media is fairly modest.

Of course, policymakers will dissemble and sometimes get away with it. These are "you don't look fat in that dress" sorts of untruth, like claiming that this is not a bow. Untruths that hinge, as another president reminded us, on parsing the meaning of "is" are common. And the media, more often than not, call policymakers out on it and policymakers, more often than not, ignore it and move on.

Such untruths abound in the media, too, and they are almost never called out for it -- except in the truth-squadding blogosphere. And even when they are, they face little or no real public sanction. Only when the untruths reach mammoth proportions (cf. Jayson Blair) do the media really suffer much, at least for a little while.

As a day to day matter, I am confident that far more effort is devoted to making sure what the president says is true than is devoted to making sure that what reporters say is true. When the president does utter an untruth, he is jumped upon. When reporters do, at most they have to file a "corrections" report buried somewhere. I can remember spending an entire weekend trying to verify whether a certain sentence that some wanted President Bush to say in a speech on Monday was true. Several historians and I determined that we could not say for certain it was true and so it never went into the speech. (Even when the president says something that is technically true, like the infamous "16 words," he can get in big trouble if others raise enough doubts about it. And please do not send me complaints about the "16 words" until you have read and understood the Butler Commission Report.

Presidential statements are subjected to the "can we defend this against an angry horde of reporters" test. Media statements are subjected to "can I produce two sources who told me this, regardless of whether they actually know or are even in a position to know whether this is true." This latter test, as repeated stories about pending Bush-era invasions of Iran attest, is a much, much lower standard of truthiness.

Most of the reporters I have dealt with seem genuinely interested in reporting the truth, but none seem as constrained and incentivized to do so as most of the policymakers I have dealt with. So you should take what you read in the papers and what you hear on cable news with a grain of salt. And if it is just the reporter saying it, add one or two more grains.

All of the foregoing applies when the media is functioning normally, not in the honeymoon swoon phase we have gone through these past 100 days. What concerns me about the fawning coverage of Obama is not so much the fundamental unfairness of it, nor even the tedium of it (though I do confess to some morbid curiosity to see how good the Obama team really is at dealing with the fastballs that are usually thrown in the major leagues and not the tee-balls they have swung at thus far). Rather, what concerns me is that the marketplace of ideas could become dysfunctional.

I am confident Obama will stick to the truth, if he confronts the same vigorous media scrutiny Bush or even Clinton confronted. I expect that to happen, but it is getting overdue.