It's always been tempting to think that media pay less attention to President Bush's lies about matters of life and death than they did to President Clinton's lies about a personal relationship because there existed videotape of a clear, concise lie by Clinton that could be replayed over and over by the broadcast media and endlessly quoted by their print counterparts. “I did not have sexual relations with that woman,” the thought went, was a simple, direct, unambiguously false statement -- so it lent itself to media coverage in a way that “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa” did not.
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Media downplay new videotape showing Bush lied about Katrina failures
Media downplay new videotape showing Bush lied about Katrina failures
It's always been tempting to think that media pay less attention to President Bush's lies about matters of life and death than they did to President Clinton's lies about a personal relationship because there existed videotape of a clear, concise lie by Clinton that could be replayed over and over by the broadcast media and endlessly quoted by their print counterparts. “I did not have sexual relations with that woman,” the thought went, was a simple, direct, unambiguously false statement -- so it lent itself to media coverage in a way that “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa” did not.
It's tempting to believe that the media's disparate focus on presidential lies during the last two administrations can be explained by these superficial differences -- but it's increasingly obvious that this explanation doesn't hold water.
As we recently explained, television news has virtually ignored Bush's April 2004 statement that “any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires ... a court order.” That's a clear, concise statement -- as clear and concise as you'll hear from this president, anyway -- and it is unambiguously false, as we now know from Bush's own acknowledgements that he has authorized warrantless domestic spying. Yet the broadcast and cable news outlets that aired video of Clinton's Lewinsky lies so often you would have thought it was exclusive footage of a shark attacking a missing rich white woman who just won the lottery after leaving her fiancé at the altar ... those same news outlets virtually ignored the video of Bush's 2004 lie.
This week, newly disclosed videotape of a briefing in which President Bush was told, the day before Hurricane Katrina made landfall, that the possibility that the levees might not hold back stormwater was “a very, very grave concern.” The newly disclosed videotapes and transcripts of Katrina briefings attended by Bush -- along with former FEMA head Michael D. Brown's statement that he had warned Bush that the levees could be breached -- clearly show that Bush's post-storm comment on ABC's Good Morning America, when he defended his poor response to Katrina by saying “I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees,” was a lie. People did anticipate the breach -- and they warned Bush about the possibility. He knew this at the time, and he lied. His lie was clear, concise, and videotaped. And his lie was about a matter of utmost importance: his government's failed response to a natural disaster that left hundreds of thousands of Gulf Coast residents homeless, helpless, jobless, and hopeless -- and those were the ones lucky enough to live through the nightmare.
Yet news organizations virtually ignored Bush's Good Morning America lie. The New York Times, The Washington Post, and USA Today left it out of their initial coverage of the new videotapes. CNN anchor Fredricka Whitfield interviewed White House spokesman Trent Duffy about the new disclosures; during that interview, Duffy asserted that “the White House was very well aware and concerned about the integrity of the levees.” Yet -- inexplicably -- Whitfield didn't bother to ask Duffy why, if that was true, Bush had claimed on Good Morning America that “I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees.” MSNBC's Norah O'Donnell also interviewed Duffy; like Whitfield, she also chose not to ask him about the president's lie. Even ABC World News Tonight anchor Elizabeth Vargas, during her March 1 report about the new evidence showing concern for the levees, decided not to mention the lie Bush told on her network.
The news organizations that did address Bush's Good Morning America lie tended to uncritically accept the administration's spin about the comment. CBS correspondent Bob Orr unquestioningly reported the White House's explanation that Katrina was a Category 3 storm when it made landfall, so nobody thought warnings of what could have happened had the storm been stronger were relevant. One problem: At the time, Katrina was assessed as a Category 4 storm -- it wasn't until months later that the storm was retroactively downgraded to Category 3. So the fact that the storm was only Category 3 can't possibly explain Bush's Good Morning America lie. Orr didn't tell his viewers any of that, though; he just said: “When Katrina hit, it was a Category 3. And what the White House is saying is that no one predicted that with a Cat 3 storm, that the levees would fail.”
NBC and Fox News, meanwhile, ran with the White House's excuse that Bush was warned that the levees could be “topped” rather than “breached” -- the kind of “distinction” that, had it been made during the Clinton administration, would have been roundly mocked by journalists, pundits, and late-night comedians. But the distinction is not only weak, it is also false, as Media Matters noted:
First, Bush himself reportedly raised the question of levee breaches as the hurricane hit on August 29, 2005, as indicated by a portion of the videotape that [NBC's Lisa] Myers played earlier in the segment. Second, in the early morning of August 29, just before Katrina hit land, the Department of Homeland Security warned the White House that, based on the Federal Emergency Management Agency's July 2004 “Hurricane Pam” planning exercise, Katrina could cause levee breaching as well as overtopping. And third, preliminary engineering findings from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Lousiana State University (LSU) and the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) have stated that erosion from overtopping in fact caused many of the levee breaches.
Contrary to the claim that Bush was warned only about “overtopping” rather than “breaching,” Media Matters for America has noted that Bush reportedly expressed concern about a breaching of the levees while the hurricane battered New Orleans. As reported in a March 2 New York Times article, then-Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) director Michael D. Brown stated at a August 29, 2005, midday videoconference that “he had spoken with President Bush twice in the morning and that the president was asking about reports that the levees had been breached.” Myers, in fact, aired this part of the August 29 videotape early in her Nightly News report, but failed to note that this statement cast doubt upon Mayfield's assertion that Bush had only been warned about overtopping.
As noted by the weblog Think Progress, Brown repeated this claim in a March 2 interview on CNN's The Situation Room.
But the most extraordinary media attempt to deflect criticism of Bush's Katrina lies came from MSNBC's Chris Matthews. During an exchange with Democratic consultant Bob Shrum, Matthews inexplicably responded to Shrum's criticism of Bush for misleading the nation about a catastrophic hurricane by attacking Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) -- who has exactly nothing to do with the matter -- for flip-flopping. Matthews's non sequitur was, by his own admission, an attempt to remind “everybody ... how his [Kerry's] positions changed” -- a brazen and irrelevant attempt to deflect attention from Bush's lies:
MATTHEWS: Bob Shrum, this is amazing, because it gets back to the point where you both admitted in a nonpartisan fashion that there's a disconnect when the president is not on top of things. Usually you hear thing from the president. Here he hears things from television. And he doesn't watch television.
SHRUM: Look, Chris, speaking of conservatives, Bush is showing that people who hate the government can't run the government. The water is now pouring over the levee of the Bush presidency. He did mislead us when he made his comments after Hurricane Katrina. And I think [National Review Washington editor] Kate [O'Beirne] can make all the arguments you want, but you look at that videotape and you know what the president is being told. And you know what he says later is not consistent with that.
MATTHEWS: Do you think he was aware of the Katrina situation before he was unaware of it?
SHRUM: He was clearly aware of it.
MATTHEWS: I'm reminding everybody of your candidate and how his positions changed.
What can possibly explain the decision by news organizations to ignore and apologize for such obvious Bush lies about such important matters? Is this simply another example of Bush benefiting from the soft bigotry of low expectations -- he's lied so often about so many issues of such great importance, nobody expects anything else out of him any more? Do journalists give Bush a pass for lying when not doing so would prove really, really inconvenient? Sounds silly, but that's essentially what Washington Post reporter Dana Milbank did when White House press secretary Scott McClellan lied about a staged photo-op. As we explained at the time:
Discussing the event on the October 13 edition of MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann, Washington Post reporter Dana Milbank commented on White House press secretary Scott McClellan's handling of questions about the event:
MILBANK: Scott McClellan, who is a good and decent guy, has to get up there and say, This is not a rehearsed event, even when they've actually released the footage showing that it is a rehearsed event. So when he has to say up is down, and he has to go taking on challenging the motives of the press corps, he's obviously got a problem. I don't know how he could handle this any better, unfortunately.
Milbank calls McClellan a “good and decent guy” -- then, in the very same sentence, says that McClellan lied to Milbank's colleagues and the American people. Then he goes on to indicate that McClellan handled it as well as he could have. When did reporters start taking the position that lying to the American people constitutes handling things as well as possible? Wouldn't telling the truth be a better way to “handle this”? Why is Milbank defending McClellan's “challenging the motives of the press corps” -- Milbank's colleagues -- when he knows McClellan was lying?
Polls show majority disapproval of Bush's handling of terrorism -- will media begin treating issue as a liability for Republicans?
Several new polls out this week show that not only do few Americans approve of Bush's handling of his job or have favorable personal feelings about him, a majority of Americans disapprove of his handling of terrorism.
Two new CBS polls found that only 34 percent of Americans approve of Bush's overall job performance, only 29 percent have a favorable opinion of him, 70 percent disapprove of Bush's decision to allow a company owned by the government of the United Arab Emirates to take control of ports in six U.S. cities, only 32 percent approve of the way Bush has responded to the needs of Katrina victims, a majority of Americans think Bush does not care about people like them, just 30 percent approve of his handling of the Iraq war, and half of Americans disapprove of his handling of the war on terror, while only 43 percent approve. There was a silver lining, though: his 29 percent personal favorability rating is 11 points higher than that of Vice President Dick Cheney.
Other recent polls have yielded similar results: a new Gallup poll finds only 38 percent approve of Bush's job performance, while 60 percent disapprove -- and 44 percent strongly disapprove. Only 40 percent, according to Gallup, think Bush “can manage the government effectively” and 58 percent think he “is not paying enough attention to what his administration is doing,” while by a margin of 53 percent to 39 percent, registered voters prefer a Democratic candidate for Congress to a Republican candidate.
These poll results brought predictable media responses. Bush's head cheerleader, Chris Matthews, took to the airwaves to falsely claim that Bush has been personally popular lately and to express shock that he is unpopular:
Appearing on the March 1 edition of NBC's Today, MSNBC host Chris Matthews falsely suggested that President Bush had personal likeability numbers “going for him” until a recent CBS News poll showed them in decline. In fact, Bush's favorability ratings have been low for some time; they were low when Matthews said in November that “Everybody sort of likes the president, except for the real whack-jobs, maybe on the left.” Matthews also said that members of the military are “very loyal” to Bush, despite a recent Zogby International poll showing that most troops disagree with Bush's Iraq policies.
Matthews noted on Today that the CBS News poll, conducted February 22-26, found that only 29 percent of respondents said they have a “favorable” or “positive” view of Bush, compared with 53 percent who have an “unfavorable” view of the president. But while Bush's favorability ratings have been low for some time -- they have been in the mid-30s in the CBS poll since October, and most major polls have shown that consistent pluralities and, at times, the majority of Americans hold an unfavorable view of Bush -- Matthews suggested that the latest CBS poll result was “a staggering blow” that eliminated an issue that had until recently been a major asset to Bush.
[...]
Despite the fact that Bush's favorability numbers have gradually declined over many months, Matthews responded incredulously when he first learned, from Newsweek senior White House correspondent Richard Wolffe during the February 28 edition of MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews, that the CBS poll had found Bush's favorability rating to be so low:
WOLFFE: Twenty-nine percent of Americans have -- give him a positive, favorable rating. That's actually lower than his job approval, way lower than Bill Clinton. People don't think he is a nice guy anymore.
MATTHEWS: Wait a minute, you just jumped there. Are you sure of that last part?
WOLFFE: Absolutely.
MATTHEWS: They don't like him anymore.
WOLFFE: They don't like him anymore. His job --
MATTHEWS: Where do you find that in the numbers?
WOLFFE: It's right there in the poll.
[...]
WOLFFE: The thing that we have reported on him, from '99, when I first started covering him, was that he was basically a likable guy.
MATTHEWS: I thought that.
Media conservatives, meanwhile, grasped at straws to deny what virtually every poll has shown for the past year: People don't like Bush, don't like the job he's done, and think he's screwing up the country.
But that's nothing new. As we have explained twice in recent months:
The simple reality is that polls consistently show the following: The American people don't like President Bush. They don't approve of the way he's done his job. They don't trust him to handle key issues. They don't trust him, period. They think he deliberately misled the nation into war. They think history will judge him poorly. They think Congress should consider impeachment. They don't like his political party. They like Democrats better. They trust Democrats more on more important issues.
Any journalist or pundit who makes reference to public opinion in a way that contradicts these basic facts, without offering specific data, is simply misleading the American people.
What is relatively new is that the American people now disapprove of Bush's handling of terrorism. For years, this has been seen -- especially by the media -- as Bush's strength. Whenever a dispute broke out between Bush and Democrats over anything even tangentially related to terrorism or security, journalists and pundits were quick to warn of the political danger Democrats faced.
With Bush's handling of the issue so popular, the argument went, Democrats risked electoral disaster every time they so much as suggested that maybe -- just maybe -- a president who lied us into a wildly unpopular war against a nation that didn't attack us rather than focusing his attention on the terrorist who did might not have all the answers. Every time Bush dispatched Karl Rove to deflect attention from his own failures by threatening to bludgeon liberals and Democrats with Bush's terrorism credentials, the media ate it up.
Now that polls show that the American people don't approve of Bush's handling of terrorism, one question presents itself: Will the media be consistent? Will our newspapers and airwaves now be dominated by dire warnings from journalists and pundits to the White House and congressional Republicans? People don't like Bush's approach to terrorism; will Chris Matthews and Tim Russert and Brit Hume and Wolf Blitzer and Jeff Greenfield now talk about how much of a political liability to Bush this issue is? Will they warn Republicans that they better cave to Democrats on the issue whenever it comes up lest they risk reminding voters that Osama bin Laden is still out there, that the United Arab Emirates is still scheduled to take control of our ports, and that Iraq is on the brink of civil war?
And if not, why not?
Bush decision to hand control of U.S. ports over to foreign country continues to inspire media misinformation
The Bush administration's decision to hand control of terminals in six major U.S. ports over to a company owned by the government of the United Arab Emirates, without conducting the review that many contend is required by law, has been met with massive public disapproval -- and an unending stream of conservative misinformation in the media.
In addition to closely monitoring and correcting this information on an ongoing basis, Media Matters has compiled a detailed analysis of some of the most common -- and damaging -- media myths about the port sale. From repeatedly downplaying the taking over company as merely foreign-based rather than actually owned by a foreign government -- one with a mixed record on terror at best -- to wildly misleading comparisons of Dubai Ports World to the British company from which it is purchasing the terminals to mindless repetition of the Bush administration's false spin that it conducted a thorough review of the transaction to false suggestions that Democrats -- who have long stressed the administration's failings on port security -- are merely using the sale for political purposes, media coverage of the ports sale has been deeply flawed.
Read the full analysis here.
Jamison Foser is Executive Vice President at Media Matters for America.