Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush (Hardcover)

by Eric Boehlert (Author) "On the night of September 2, 2004, standing at the podium on a custom-made, theater-in-the-round stage in Madison Square Garden, President George Bush accepted his..." (more)
Key Phrases: press haters, memo story, leak investigation, White House, New York Times, Downing Street (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From The Washington Post
Aside from the U.S. military, not many American institutions have paid a price for the war in Iraq. One signal exception is the mainstream media, known in the blogosphere as the MSM -- the big commercial and cable TV networks, the major newspapers and the news magazines, all of which have taken a pounding from both right and left.

The latest to join in the pounding is Eric Boehlert, a contributing editor for Rolling Stone. "Battered by accusations of a liberal bias and determined to prove their conservative critics wrong," he argues in the bluntly titled Lapdogs, "the press during the run-up to the war -- timid, deferential, unsure, cautious, and often intentionally unthinking -- came as close as possible to abdicating its reason for existence in the first place, which is to accurately inform citizens, particularly during times of great national interest." With this for his central argument, Boehlert has written an important book, but one that probably will not be welcomed in newsrooms; journalists don't like scathing criticism any more than the rest of us.

Unfortunately, Lapdogs may be easy for some to write off: It has flaws that too often overwhelm the valuable research and provocative analysis that Boehlert has assembled, including material on subjects beyond Iraq ranging from the "press haters" on the right who seek to dismantle independent journalism to the question of how the 2004 campaign was covered. One obvious failing is that a book by a journalist attacking the press ought to have included some responses from editors and reporters who disagree with Boehlert's conclusions. There is basically none of that here.

Another defect is that Lapdogs too frequently appears overtly political; the book is written as though a cadre of Bill Clinton's defenders were its editors. Boehlert's case that a timorous press was intimidated by President Bush frequently rests on comparisons to the media's supposedly more aggressive approach to Clinton and former vice president Al Gore. This is arguable, at best, and the tactic diminishes the book's overall impact. Moreover, Boehlert reinforces this problem with an odd ending. "While the point of Lapdogs," he writes, "is to document the press's failings and not necessarily to offer Democrats communication or campaign strategies, it does seem obvious that if Democrats have to battle both entrenched Republicans as well as a MSM that refuses to give the party out of power a fair shake, then Democrats are going to continue to have trouble winning elections." It's not easy to be a credible media critic when you're also being, at least indirectly, a Democratic s!

trategist.

Moreover, the book starts out by waving another red flag. In the preface, Boehlert writes, "The goal of Lapdogs is to cut through incessant rhetoric about a liberal media bias, and to show, factually, just how the mainstream media has tipped the scales in President Bush's favor for going on six years. The proof for that is all in the public record; in the voluminous pages of the New York Times, Washington Post, Newsweek, and Time, just to name a few, as well as in the mountain of transcripts produced by network and cable news programs." Laying this out, he writes, "makes the conclusion -- that the press rolled over for Bush -- inescapable." But there is no way to prove that this is "inescapable," which would mean knowing what was inside the heads of producers and editors at the time their news decisions were made.

I firmly agree with Boehlert that the press was seriously derelict in its prewar coverage. (Indeed, he refers to some of my critical columns during my tenure as The Washington Post's ombudsman.) But topics such as Saddam Hussein's weapons programs were tough subjects to get at -- although U.S. newspapers ran quite a few good stories, produced by Knight Ridder's Washington bureau, the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post, among others. One big problem, however -- especially at this newspaper -- was that these challenging stories were far too often run inside the paper rather than on the front page. Other stories that challenged the whole premise of an invasion were simply missed or minimized.

So does that mean that the editors who made those calls were pro-Bush or cowed by the aftermath of Sept. 11, fiery right-wing bloggers, conservative broadcasters and a mean White House press strategy? Or did some editors simply exercise poor news judgment or lack the experience or determination to make sure that nothing was left unsaid, unchallenged or uncovered? Or were they convinced that a war with Iraq was coming and were too focused on getting ready to cover it?

I tend to chalk up uncritical reporting on administration claims about Iraq's supposed doomsday arsenal to that combination of factors. And of course, the obvious inference from Saddam Hussein's behavior -- his use of chemical weapons against Iranian troops and his own Kurdish civilians in the 1980s, his earlier nuclear arms ambitions, his bucking of the U.N. arms inspectors -- was that this was a regime with something to hide. But maybe something else was indeed going on in America's newsrooms. If so, Boehlert's book will prove to be the most well-researched and well-argued one I've yet seen about the darker side of why the press failed.

This book takes a hard look at TV, the news broadcasts as well as the big Sunday interview programs. Lapdogs provides many accounts where TV news divisions seemed to fall short -- for instance, by not asking the right questions (thereby giving policymakers a pass) or inviting the right guests (thereby stacking the deck with conservatives and hawks). It also questions the cozy relationships between some TV hosts and high officials. To their credit, several newspapers, including the New York Times -- which had the most to apologize for -- and The Washington Post, looked in the mirror afterward and reported on their own shortcomings. Television hasn't done that.

To anyone who has been following the press saga of the last six years, the episodes in this book -- from the Swift boats and Bush's National Guard service to Terri Schiavo, the Downing Street memo and the battle for more conservative views on PBS -- will be familiar. But Boehlert fills in several strokes that present a fuller portrait. The performance of the press during the Bush years, especially in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, is so important that all serious attempts to assess it are worthy of attention. Despite the flaws, this is one of them.

Reviewed by Michael Getler
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Product Description
"Lapdogs is the first book to demonstrate that, for the entire George W. Bush presidency, the news media have utterly failed in their duty as watchdog for the public. In blistering prose, Eric Boehlert reveals how, time after time, the press chose a soft approach to covering the government, and as a result reported and analyzed crucial events incompletely and even inaccurately. From WMDs to Valerie Plame to the NSA's domestic spying, mainstream fixtures such as The New York Times, CBS, CNN, and Time magazine too often ignored the administration's missteps and misleading words, and did not call out the public officials who betrayed the country's trust. Throughout both presidential campaigns and the entire Iraq war to date, the media acted as a virtual mouthpiece for the White House, giving watered-down coverage of major policy decisions, wartime abuses of power, and egregious mistakes -- and sometimes these events never made it into the news at all. Finally, in Lapdogs, the press is being held accountable by one of its own. Boehlert homes in on the reasons the press did not do its job: a personal affinity for Bush that journalists rarely displayed toward his predecessor, Bill Clinton; a Republican White House that threatened to deny access to members of the media who asked challenging questions or voiced criticism; and a press that feared being tainted by accusations of liberal bias. Moreover, journalists -- who may have wanted to report accurately on the important stories -- often found themselves at cross-purposes with media executives, many of whom were increasingly driven by economic concerns. Cowed by all of these factors, the media abandoned their traditional role of stirring up meaningful public debate. Boehlert asserts that the Bush White House never subscribed to the view -- commonly held by previous administrations -- that a relationship with the press is an important part of the democratic process. Instead, it saw the press as just another special interest group that needed to be either appeased or held at bay -- or, in some cases, squashed. The administration actively undermined the basic tenets of accurate and fair journalism, and reporters and editors accepted their reduced roles without a whimper. To an unprecedented degree, journalists too often stopped asking uncomfortable questions of people in power. In essence, the entire purpose and pursuit of journalism was sacrificed. Riveting in its sharp denouncement, supported by dozens of glaring and troubling examples of journalistic malpractice, Lapdogs thoroughly dissects the press's misconduct during Bush's presidency and gives voice to the growing public dismay with the mainstream media. " --This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Free Press (May 9, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743289315
• ISBN-13: 978-0743289313
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.2 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (30 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #552,460 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

135 of 146 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Explodes a 35 year myth, May 7, 2006

By	Eric Petrie "bookaholic" (illinois) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Spiro Agnew coined the liberal bias media back in the Nixion Administration. It was somewhat revived during the Reagan years though, as David Gergen admits, they knew the media was soft peddling with them. During the Clinton years the media was ruthless and as Joe Scarborough, republican, admits, the media was overly nasty to Al Gore. In Molly Ivins book, Shrub, she points out how the media never checked Bush's record as Govenor and faithfully wrote down what he claimed. This has been a well documented history.
After the twin blows of Katrina and Scotter Libby, with the public asking more vehemently, where is the press??? The media somewhat looked at thier behavior over the Bush Administration and admitted they gave him a pass. But, the behavior hasn't changed. Especially when you concider that even moderate republicans have been shut down in favor of the fringe of the right wing.
This important book exposes the myth, that it is a myth and that the media has been lapdogs. Well written and researched. using Media Matters, which has audio, transcripts and can back every allegation of the media, as a resource helps back up the charges in this wonderful book. With Helen Thomas coming out next month with a book on the same subject, I think it's going to be time for the media to examine thier supposed roles as watchdogs for the public good.

57 of 59 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Book of Revelations, June 3, 2006

By	!Edwin C. Pauzer (New York City) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

This book is nothing short of explosive. It debunks the myths that our press corps and main stream media are professional, aggressive or "liberal leaning" as many would like us to believe. If anything, this press has rolled over for the Bush administration, and in effect, when asked to jump for the president, they collectively asked: "How high?"

It is impossible to ignore the voluminous documentation that the author amasses with nexus searches, transcripts, video tapes, interviews, reports, etc. that make his case over and over again.

Boehlert shows repeatedly how our main stream media (MSM) are scared to death of a conservative backlash to any story they may feel is biased. They are afraid of being denied future stories if they report the truth. And they are afraid of having their careers brought to an end of they report it. In short, the press has gone along to get along, become lazy, and hit the snooze button of lethargy and apathy toward any lies that came from the White House, or other neocon sources.

Boehlert meticulously provides one example after another how the press, even such giants as the NY Times and the Washington Post, have danced to the White House tune.

Swift Boat Veteran coverage? Nightly for weeks on end. Texans for Truth, (the anti-Swifty, anti-Bush group?) Eight reports only across all networks, newspapers, and news magazines. Reports of Kerry's war record? In the hundreds. Reports of Bush's national guard absences, etc.? Almost none. Pictures of dead Americans from Iraq or Afghanistan? None. Pictures of dead Americans from Somalia (when Clinton is president?) Continuous. Investigation of auto mechanic/male prostitute getting White House Press pass? None. Investigation of Downing Street Memo that claimed the US planned to go to war all along while claiming to pursue peaceful solutions? None. Investigation of false claims of WMD's in Iraq? None. The consequences to the White House of falsely reporting about PFC. Jessica Lynch and the death of Cardinal football player and Army Ranger Pat Tillman? None. The topper has to be the NY Times sitting on the discovery of the government spying on our citizens in violation of the FISA law, and holding the story until after the elections!

In fact, the only time that the press has mobilized since the Bush presidency was to investigate the phony memo handed to Dan Rather about President Bush's national guard record. This they completed in a matter of hours. How long did it take this same press to debunk the Swift Boat lies, story changes, contradictions and inconsistencies? Months. That debunk too came AFTER the presidential election. Is there a discrepancy here?

In page after page this author dramatizes what some of us have suspected for some time. Our vaunted press has deluded themselves into believing they are doing a professional and unbiased job. They show disdain for public criticism, the same public they are pledged to serve. They have replaced truth with "balanced reporting" even if one side of that report is absurd, they will give it copy or air time. It makes you want to tune in to the BBC for "real" news.

This author has provided enough data to bring down this administration. I could not put this book down. I recommend highly that you pick it up.

It is a book of revelations.

38 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Missing With Pinpoint Accuracy., June 6, 2006

By	Robert Crawford (Hudson, MA) - See all my reviews

As apt as is the title of Eric Boehlert's book Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush, it could still be targeted by the right as being more partisan than this expos of the MSM really is. "Missing With Pinpoint Accuracy" would be at least as accurate minus the somewhat partisan tone of the actual title.

Indeed, if one is looking for a good, ripping, liberally partisan attack on the increasingly right wing MSM, they may be disappointed. In virtually nowhere in Eric Boehlert's book can one find a liberal political agenda. Lapdogs is concerned with one agenda: Truth and fairness in journalism.

And on both counts, in Boehlert's 296-page sustained attack on his own industry, the MSM failed miserably time and again.

You might think, given the subject matter, the bulk of Lapdogs might be devoted to attacking the blatantly partisan Fox News but you'd be wrong. Realizing that would be like shooting fish in a barrel, Boehlert instead turns his unforgiving gaze on what Michelle Malkin (herself a frequent target) calls "the dinosaur networks", as well as the major print and online newspapers and magazines.

Lapdogs, part of a spate of books to come out since Norman Solomon's 2005 War Made Easy, starts off promisingly with an introduction ("Afraid of the Facts") that starts like this:
It must have been an awkward encounter when Bob Woodward sat down for two hours at his Washington, D.C., attorney's M Street office on November 14, 2005, to answer questions, under oath, posed by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. Woodward, of Watergate and Washington Post fame, was the most famous reporter of his generation, and Fitzpatrick, by the fall of 2005, was the most talked-about investigator in America.
Mr. Boehlert then warms up to his subject in Chapter Three ("Noted at ABC") in which he exposes ABC's inexplicably influential online tip sheet, "The Note", for the pack of GOP partisan hacks that they are. Exposing their conservative bias at the expense of the news, Boehlert also tells us how, ironically, this most Republican entity was in itself attacked for being liberal by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, the Prince of Pundits, when ABC's political director and Note founder Mark Halperin, who's hardly a rock of liberal thought, wrote a 2004 internal memo to his staff asking that both Kerry and Bush be held accountable for making misstatements instead of merely covering those gaffes. It was the kind of slip (i.e. expecting non-partisan fairness in reporting) that has resulted in the destruction of many more journalistic careers than those of Ashleigh Banfield, Eason Jordan and Dan Rather.

Boehlert keeps up the pressure, if not actually stepping it up, by segueing in the next chapter, "The Press Haters", which is devoted to how much influence is wielded by conservative bloggers like the Three Stooges of Powerline, Michelle Malkin and professional pundits like Limbaugh and Ann Coulter. As with The Note and all-too-many news organs, these self-appointed spinmeisters act as rodeo clowns of distraction for the administration in the unlikely event that George Bush is ever gored by a pointed question.

Time and again, Mr. Boehlert brings into conspicuous relief an intolerant administration that's constantly twitching to decry as liberal a supine, lapdog MSM that, with somewhat of an exception with Hurricane Katrina, manages to miss the big stories and/or the big points with pinpoint accuracy.

Well- and exhaustively researched, making use of Nexis, TVEyes, Media Matters and other media-related monitoring/watchdog groups, Boehlert proves time after time, albeit in repetitive terms (his favorite word when writing about the MSM appears to be "timid" or "timidity", as well as "supine") at a vast and longterm media conspiracy to keep their consumers at arm's length from the truth and the GOP-dominated government equally at arm's length from public opinion.

In fact, on his chapter on former CBP Chairman Kenneth Tomlinson (Chapter 5, "The War Over PBS"), Lapdogs paints a very chilling picture at how, far from a nonpartisan press simply being inept and willfully negligent, far to the right the MSM's political bias or allegiance has swung since the Clinton years (especially since January 20, 2001). Chapter Five exposes Tomlinson for being the typically incompetent GOP stooge that he was in shooting PBS and NPR in the foot for creating a liberal bias controversy out of literally nothing, thereby upsetting the cozy relationship between the CPB and the Capitol Hill lawmakers who weren't prepared to slash the Center for Public Broadcasting's budget until the Bill Moyers-obsessed Tomlinson began crying Wolf.

Like a starfish exerting constant pressure on alternating points, Boehlert pries open for the layman the clam-like mainstream media and its often-Byzantine world, the decision-making processes that determine what is newsworthy and what isn't. (A small sample: In the final chapter, "Still Afraid of the Facts", Boehlert's research brings up a clip of Bush telling the American public in '04, "(A)nytime you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires... a court order." Yet, despite the fact that this was proof positive, after the NSA wiretap scandal was broken by the NY Times and that it caught the FISA-indifferent Bush in a lie, CNN, between Dec. 2005 and February 2006, made just four airings of the clip. In the same 12/05-2/06 time span, however, CNN saw fit to mention Angelina Jolie no less than 35 times. And that's a mild example of the bias and imbalance that's become the norm in American journalism.)

Lapdogs was obviously rushed through the press (Boehlert makes mention of events that took place just last March) and the two dozen or so typos, beginning with the second word in the book, makes one think that perhaps Boehlert didn't even review the galley proofs before submitting it back to the editors of Free Press. But that should be a testament as to how vitally this book needs to be made accessible to the news consumer.

It's a book that makes the concerned and perspicacious reader think and, as much as Norm Solomon's book opened up my eyes, Lapdogs has opened them up a little wider. Among the most important and alarming revelations that I've learned through this book:

<li> The MSM's capricious, GOP-friendly and often erroneous definition of what is newsworthy.
<li> Blogs represent an untapped demand for real news, a fact that has, inexplicably and maddeningly, not been picked up on by the MSM.
<li> The second Bush administration marks perhaps the first time in American journalism history in which the MSM has been openly hostile, even contemptuous, of its own consumers. We're hearing the same lines that we hear from the prickly administration: "We know what we're doing. Trust us. How dare you question us?"
<li> The MSM makes the radical right look mainstream, legitimate and reasonable while ignoring or openly ridiculing the left, suggesting, 1) that a radical right doesn't exist and 2) that a radical left does.
<li> The Bush administration treats the slothful MSM as if it's a saber-toothed tiger and the MSM, amazingly, continues taking the whips on the back. The NY Times, with the obvious partisan flak-meister Bill Keller, who actually ignored the Downing St. memos under the pretext that it was a mere "British election story", is a classic example.
<li> The MSM appeases a small percentage of lunatic fringe crackpots while ignoring the much larger demographic of news-starved consumers.
<li> It's no coincidence that as the WaPo and NY Times have declined in readership and influence, the blogs, particularly the left wing blogs that are generously quoted by Boehlert, had inherited that readership and influence. This is called equilibrium.
<li> Democrats and liberals are held to impossible standards and judged by equally ludicrous standards. As Lapdogs was being rushed through the presses, the recent re-examination into the marriage of Bill and Hillary Clinton, not yet an official contender for the party's presidential nomination in '08, became a classic example of what's considered "newsworthy" and what's considered tabloid.

The list of revelations can be endless and if you care about the quality of the news that you read and see, you, too, will be forced to make some sobering judgments on how the news is being strained and filtered down to you.

And even though Boehlert doesn't delve into this issue, I closed Lapdogs while asking myself, "Does the press truly represent the American people and should it?" In my opinion, yes. The press should be, as Helen Thomas says in the title of her own new book, the watchdogs of democracy. A free and honest press, as it says early in the book, is absolutely vital in a functional democracy. But now, thanks to progressive-minded bloggers and increasingly vocal news consumers, we as a nation are gradually beginning to realize that we have neither.

The MSM is more interested in access than hard investigation (because, denied access, the journalists of America would actually have to get up off their fat, lazy asses and chase down leads, i.e. actually do their jobs), careers instead of pursuing uncomfortable truths, in coverage instead of actual reportage and the hard-luck losers of this contemptible country-club style of "journalism" are not only the consumers who find themselves getting shut out from virtually every meaningful story but democracy itself. And when the mainstream media, which is compressed into the hands of just five CEOs, many of them defense contractors who depend on GOP favoritism for wartime contracts, continue missing with pinpoint accuracy, you have to fear for the history of which journalism is the first draft.