Why Bush Can't Win in Iraq

Howie Kurtz has an interesting discussion on his weekend show Reliable Sources. Here are excerpts:

FUND: "We have found computer files in Zarqawi's computer which shows he was very pessimistic about the insurgency and said time was on the Americans' side. That got very little coverage even though my intelligence sources say it's been completely authenticated."

KURTZ: "And so you believe this is because of a negative media mindset on the war?"

FUND: "I think that the media has decided this war is going badly and short of the surrender of the insurgency, that's the storyline. So I think the body count continues to be covered and Zarqawi's computer drive revelations aren't."

So, just as I experienced firsthand in the First Gulf War when all the Boston Globe and Toronto Globe & Mail would talk about was bodies, this war is dumbed down by a stupid media? Actually, it's a little more complicated than that.

"BORGER: Absolutely. They know they have a huge problem on the war, that it is unpopular with the American public and they decided that they'll make it a very clear choice and you saw what was going on Capitol Hill this week with the vote on the war and the choice they want, the storyline they want is do you want to be a Democrat who wants to talk about cut and run or do you want to finish the job that we set out to do in Iraq? That's a clear storyline for them as they head into the mid-term elections in 2006."

"KURTZ: Clarence Page, within a couple of days of the president's trip there was a suicide bombing in the Shiite mosque. As you noted the U.S. death toll reached past the 2500 park and you mentioned the kidnapping of the two U.S. soldiers."

"So for whatever Bush got out of the trip and the killing of Zarqawi, isn't the press going to always keep going back to the daily violence? Isn't that the storyline that just is inescapable for the journalists?"

"PAGE: That's a natural default position, of course, isn't it, Howard? News is what happens when things aren't going the way they're supposed to and sadly enough, not a lot of things in Iraq are going the way they're supposed to. John Fund raises a good point, though that a piece of intelligence from Zarqawi. In some ways, I think we've been kept cal of it because it sounds almost too good or too much outside the normal storyline to be given credibility immediately."

KURTZ: What about ...

What about John Fund's suggestion that the reason for that and the sort of downbeat tenor of the coverage of the war is that journalists have turned again this war?

PAGE: I think journalists are, again, our default position is to look for the news. And ...

KURTZ: Why is it that the violence is always the news? What about progress in Iraq?

PAGE: The signs of progress have not been that strong. We -- and again, as the government begins to form itself and take control then you can say that we're seeing a light at the end of tunnel, but right now it looks like this will certainly be a big political issue domestically this year and a big tragedy.

KURTZ: John Fund, I want to get you back in here. Do you think that the growing unpopularity of the year as mentioned by polls, for example, the latest CNN poll, 54 percent say the invasion of Iraq was a mistake is emboldening news organizations to be more critical in the way they were not in the early days?

FUND: Of course. Look, the war isn't going well, but the polls still show that the American people don't want to pull out because they realize there could be something worse than what we have and that's anarchy. But it raises the question, Howie, what if something really dramatic happened? What if we found a secret cache of chemical weapons shells or WMD or we learned it had been transferred to Syria. How would the media treat that, would they treat it as Bush vindicated or would they say it's a pre-election dirty trick by Karl Rove?

KURTZ: That's a hypothetical. But you just said a moment ago the war is not going well. And I certainly don't have an argument with that. At the same time you say the media is being too negative in reporting that the war is not going well.

FUND: "The media has a responsibility to also report what the alternative is, what would be the negative consequences, and the collapse of the Iraqi government if we pulled out prematurely, the instability it would create in the region and how it would embolden our adversaries. We've seen what happened after we pulled out of Beirut and Somalia. I think there needs to be some historical context by the media here."

From my limited experience during the First Gulf War, where I was the only reporter among hundreds with both experience in the military area [I had been Pol/Mil Officer in the US Embassy in Jidda for two years] and in petroleum [I was covering the war as International Editor of the Oil Daily], the media are impervious to historical context.

Indeed, except for some smart newsies [Judy Miller of the NYT among them], it was the US military that wanted to ask me some questions about technical matters, particularly when Saddam began dumping crude from Kuwait into the Gulf and I went on PBS with Judy Woodruff explaining how bombing the pump stations on-shore would cease the oil dumping into the sea. The US military heard it on MacNeil/Lehrer, asked me about it, and promptly bombed the pump stations a day later.

The media hacks were aware of this, but only a few could wrench themselves away from "body count" thinking. Old habits die hard.

The media's real default position is to go with the flow, follow the thundering herd, and realize that the trend is your friend.