Truth Is for 'Liberals'

[ProSense]

The Liberal media | posted June 8, 2006 (June 26, 2006 issue)

Truth Is for 'Liberals'

Eric Alterman

Here we are, five and a half years into the Bush Administration, and the press corps still hasn't figured out how to handle the White House's primary tactic of media management: lying.

During George W. Bush's first term, reporters had a powerful confluence of motivations for their difficulty in calling the President to task. First was tradition; mere journalists lacked the authority to call a President a liar. Second, post-9/11 they were intimidated by Bush's McCarthyite with-us-or-ag'in-us rhetoric as well as by a bloodthirsty right-wing punditocracy. (New York Times White House reporter Elisabeth Bumiller admitted that she and her colleagues found it "frightening to stand up there," and "no one wanted to get into an argument with the President at this very serious time.")

Snip...

Froomkin devoted a column to the incident, brazenly titled "Bush's Lie." In it he wondered at all the reasons reporters are reluctant to call a lie a lie. He quoted his own newspaper's coverage by Peter Baker and Paul Blustein, which gave no indication of the President's purposeful mendacity. "Bush, when asked about the Treasury Secretary at his news conference last night, indicated only that he had not spoken directly with Snow and quickly changed the subject to positive economic indicators." In other words: "Thank you, sir, may I have another?" (Also writing about the incident, Slate's John Dickerson explained, mystifyingly, "I'm reluctant to call it a lie, but the President abused our trust.")

Interestingly, Froomkin's attentiveness to the issue of what's true and what's false in the President's statements has earned him the reputation around the office of being an ideologue. Late last year Washington Post executive editor Len Downie spoke of his desire to "make sure people in the administration know that our news coverage by White House reporters is separate from what appears in Froomkin's column." National political editor John Harris admitted at the same time that he had "heard from Republicans" who thought Froomkin "unfair." To offer readers "balance," Post honchos demonstrated just what they consider to be the proper antidote to a twenty-year veteran reporter who submits Administration rhetoric to truth tests: In March they hired a 24-year-old former Bush/Cheney political operative named Ben Domenech, who had little (if any) experience as a journalist but plenty, it turned out, as a plagiarist.

So truth is for "liberals." Were it not for the fact that our democracy is being undermined by the liars in office, we might be flattered. But even the collapse of the President's popularity has not installed much backbone in the press corps. Bush can still lie about whatever he wants whenever he wants; treasury secretaries one day; war the next. It's "just the President being the President."

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060626/alterman

[Behind the Aegis]

1. Lies sell better...

It is a shame after all this time, as the author suggests, that the media STILL hasn't found its spine! The fact is that "truth" is not a liberal or conservative thing, but it is sadly missing from our media and the medias throughout the world.

[BrklynLiberal]

2. and you can buy and pay for lies, but not the truth.

[Behind the Aegis]

3. so very true!

However, we seem to be in a society that is comfortable with lies and deception. I feel that is so sad because we are all diminished when the truth is discarded.

[BrklynLiberal]

4. Interesting that none of these compunctions seemed to have mattered to the

press during the Clinton administration.