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Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush

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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.

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.

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.

As I write this, Porter Goss has just resigned a top government post and not one single major daily newspaper has tried to find out why. Where do I get info about it? From Bill Maher, the Daily Show, and Salon.com. It would be nice to think that the horrendous abandonment of its post by the mainstream media is over, but it is clearly still in full swing.
This excellent book covers the erosion of the Fourth Estate, and the First Amendment, in endless detail. Admittedly, there are a few points where Boehlert seems too anxious to draw conclusions or make his point (citing an investigation of Hillary Clinton in 2005 as a "media frenzy," when I can't even remember it)but he has so many powerful anecdotes to choose from his point pretty much makes itself. This is solid journalism, well researched and written, and details a shameful period in the history of our nation's media which unfortunately has not come to an end.

This is a painful read. There are so many instances explored here of the media refusing to do their job. And I think the last six years, it's never been more important to have a free and independent press. They failed. It would be a different world, a better world if they'd just done their jobs.

Boehlert gracefully catalogs the lapses and tries to analyze why this happened, why even now pundits, columnists, editors, and journalists cut Bush and his incompetent crew more and more slack. He contrasts this with the often brutal treatment Clinton, Gore, and especially Kerry received from these very same media people.

It makes no sense. It still makes no sense. But as a witness to an atrocity, Boehlert does a great job. The media's response to such criticism will no doubt be more of the usual defensiveness. But every reporter and editor in Washington needs to read this with an open mind. It's hard to admit, I know, how badly you were led astray-- but admitting it is the first step to correcting it. And anyone who reads this book -- even the pundits who have made a living the last decade from looking -away- from truth-- has to come away with an unsettled sense of a real disease in the press.

This book is a harrowing read. Boehlert piles up incident after incident of media bias, laziness, intimidation and outright cowardice.
I grew up a news junkie and at one time thought of the press, later the media, in heroic terms. I knew who Ed Murrow was and came of age while Woodward and Berstein were busting open Watergate. Even the popular media promoted this image. How many times did a dramatic point in a film, book or television show turn on informing the press about some crime or plot to insure justice would be done? Laughable now.

Think how much so many of us believed that the press, the media, played a crucial role in ourdemocracy. I believed they were the best chance for finding some kind of truth out in the world. From the revelations about the Holocaust to Geraldo's work in the mental institution, we relied on the media to give us a glimpse of what was really going on. The days right after Katrina hit gave me a glimpse of the media I used to count on.

Mixed in among the hacks, the sensationalists, the celebrity hounds there wereplain professional reporters doing their jobs, out for the truth. There are still some around, but they don't get the play that the stars of the mainstream press do. It has always been a struggle to get certain stories out that threaten the interests of the powerful, but in the past, the most important ones seemed to get on page one.

Balance wasn't about two polarized talking heads spewing spin at the top of their voices or wall to wall coverage of some unbalanced author spewing venom to drum up publicity for a new book. Balance was about facts. It was about overcoming lies with facts no matter how painful and frightening.

America used to want to prove our way of life was better than all other systems out there. Democracy, with all its warts and weaknesses, was morally superior to Communism, to the dictators and oppressive governments. I still believe it gives the individual the best chance for justice and a decent life, but morally superior? We lost the edge on that one I'm afraid. How are we different now?

When we blur the lines of decent behavior, torture, murder, what is a lie or not, when lies seem not to matter unless they are about something meaningless and sensationsal (i.e. sex)-- how are we different?

The loudest voice and the biggest stick can't be our only justification. Might can't be our measure for what is right if we are still to be that "America the Beautiful" vision so many have fought and died for.

I would recommend this book to anyone interested in how the media operates. It documents the pro-Bush nature of the press, to be sure, but more than that it illusrates how out of touch the press is with the problems facing average Americans. I would like to think that in the end this is something liberals and conservatives will agree on -- that the inside the beltway pundits do nothing but parrot ill-informed conventional wisdom.

Here's hoping that the blogs -- both liberal and conservative -- can end the Gang of 500's reign of terror over the infoscape.

This is a well researched, well reasoned and well written book. The writer deals with facts, something alien to the lunatic fringe that churns out books claiming Hillary Clinton kills babies and drinks their blood.

My only criticism of the book is that it does not deal enough with the corporate consolidation issue. It all boils down to corporate consolidation. Follow the money. It will take you to the source of the bias. You want to know where Bob Woodward's bias lies? Follow the money. He writes books. He needs access for best seller books. It is all about the money. Corporate consolidation has pretty much destroyed legitimate journalism, especially broadcast journalism. Broadcast networks and so called cable news networks, which are tabloid entertainment networks, are all owned by a handful of corporate giants. These corporate giants control pretty much everything we see and hear on TV and radio. These corporations are pretty much all in the tank with the GOP and the "journalists" who work for them fear offending the GOP. They don't fear Democrats, which is why they regularly trash Democratic leaders. They fear the GOP because they fear retribution from their corporate bosses. They would not dare do to Bush what they did to Clinton or Gore. So regardless of what their private political views are they carry water for the GOP out of fear.

I wish the writer had done more follow the money research, pointing out the regulatory favors received from various corporate giants, the war profiteering by corporations like General Electric which owns GE and MSNBC and which was a cheerleader for the Iraq war. We need a sequel for this book. The sequel should expose the money connection.

Eric Boehlert's "Lapdogs" is a forceful, damning indictment of the media's generally timid, derelict performance in covering George W. Bush and his administration. As Boehlert demonstrates with dozens upon dozens of chapter-and-verse examples, the mainstream media have often gone soft in covering Bush, for a variety of reasons, ranging from sheer laziness, to pressure from right-wingers and the Bush administration itself, to the press's perverse admiration for Republicans' skill in wielding power even if it's employed to unworthy ends. In effect, as Boehlert shows, much of the media have largely abandoned their role as watchdogs of government over the past several years, and American democracy is much the poorer for it.

All the greatest hits of the past years' media dereliction are here - the lack of skepticism in the runup to the war in Iraq; the media's collective attempt to ignore the Downing Street Memo; the trumpeting of the Swift Boat veterans' smear campaign against John Kerry; the Valerie Plame affair; the failure to probe deeply enough into Bush's National Guard service; and many, many more. Much of what's here will be familiar territory to anyone who's followed the press's performance in recent years, but when amassed together the way Boehlert has, all these disparate examples of deficient media coverage take on a collective force that make it hard to argue with his conclusion that the press has simply, consciously rolled over and given Bush a pass rather than cover the president and his administration aggressively. (And Boehlert has turned up stuff that even a journalist like me who follows news about the press avidly wasn't aware of. Some of the comments he cites from right-wing "press haters" about the murder of a New York Times reporter are just too vile for words.)

I should mention, in the interest of full disclosure, that Eric Boehlert is a friend of mine, but it wouldn't change one word of what I have to say if he weren't. Anyone who cares about the health of American journalism should read Boehlert's book, and no one who defends the press's performance over the past several years is going to be able to do so without addressing the arguments he poses.

I read this book a couple of weeks ago. Today I saw the film "Good Night , Good Luck", on dvd, in which Murrow predicts the coming trend of the media to entertain and insulate.

There is no doubt that after bashing Clinton for eight years and now currently referring to the so called "Clinton scandals", the media has generally for the most part been kind to President Bush. This despite the fact that the Bush administration, the executive branch since 2001, has overstepped bounds and shredded the checks and balances, or at least attempted to sidestep checks and balances.

So anyone watching CNN or other mainstream news media since 1993,from the concoction of the "Whitewater scandal" to the Monica frenzy, from the pronouncement of legitimacy to Bush's "victory" in 2000 to the overlooking of events such as the Jeff Gannon story and 2004 Ohio voting irregularities, there's no doubt that there has been a double standard.

However there are at least a couple of things that I would disagree with Boehlert who for the most part has done an excellent job of providing a history of the double standards of the media.

First I'm not really sure that the media is or has been Bush's "lapdog". It seems to me more that Bush is a puppet of other forces and that the media actually holds the upper hand not the government. That is Bush probably has less power than Cheney, and Cheney in turn has less power than the mutinational corporations that the media is a part of. So I'm not sure I agree with Boehlert on who really has the power.

Secondly, I disagree with his analysis of the CBS National Guard story. I would suppose in this cycnical age that if you get outfoxed and entrapped you have something to be ashamed of. But in my view Dan Rather and Mary Mapes got hoodwinked and sabotaged by some clever connivers. So this was not really a scandal on the part of CBS as Boehlert portrays.

The chapter on the Note told me lots of things that I never knew before about the media.

Prior to reading this book I read Eric Alterman's "What Liberal Media?". This book reinforced my dawning realization that something was amiss with the media. Certainly I had noticed back in 1993 that there was nothing to the Travel Office firing, that the media made this a scandal when it seemed to me properly handled. In 1996 I noticed that the media was not willing to congratulate Clinton for winning re-election or willing to relent in their scandal mongering. And in 2000 I saw that they just about totally ignored the fact that Gore won the popular vote, this was irrelevant, and they urged Gore to concede.

But it wasn't until I read books like Alterman's and this book Lapdogs that I grasped the total unfairness and preference of the media for Republicans over the Democrats.

I highly recommend this book and it makes a fascinating if somewhat depressing read.