Media quickly drops stories critical of Bush administration

A certain and clear pattern has emerged when a damaging accusation or claim against the Bush administration or the Republican-led Congress is publicized: Bush supporters laser in on a weakness, fallacy or inaccuracy in the story's sourcing while diverting all attention from the issue at hand to the source or the accuser in the story.

Often this tactic involves efforts to delegitimize the entire news media based on the mistakes or sloppy reporting of a few. We saw this with the discrediting of CBS's story on irregularities in President Bush's Texas Air National Guard service in the 1970s. Although the CBS "scoop" was based on faked documents, the administration's response and backlash from both conservative and mainstream media essentially relieved Bush of having to deal with the story. In other words, the allegedly "liberal" media dropped the story like a hot rock.

We saw ex-members of the Bush administration -- former Treasury secretary Paul H. O'Neill, former White House counterterrorism adviser Richard A. Clarke, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff John M. Shalikashvili and former director of faith-based charities John J. DiIulio Jr. -- similarly attacked by conservative bloggers and columnists. The mainstream media eventually backed away from coverage of their claims as well.

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For conservatives and liberals alike, attacking the media has become a cottage industry, the very thing that drives both talk radio and blogs. Delegitimizing the media is seen as a legitimate way by some to protect those you support politically from the media's critical eye.

To be clear about something, the Bush administration's attacks on Newsweek don't represent a new phenomenon. The Clinton administration often attacked its accusers and criticized unflattering media reports. The big difference is that the Clinton administration didn't have any such supportive echo chamber of talk radio and blogs that now exist to amplify it.

Neal is right, of course, that the right-wing "echo chamber" gives conservatives a huge advantage in shaping what the media covers. But he left out another "big difference": President Bush has benefited from a news media that has seemed to have little taste for following stories damaging to him, and even less for standing up to the right's assault on journalism.

To name only the most obvious example: The same news organizations that pursued the Whitewater "scandal" as though it were Watergate, Teapot Dome, and the Lindbergh Baby all wrapped into one virtually ignored Bush's controversial sale of Harken Energy stock. The basic information about that sale -- that Bush, while serving as a Harken director and member of the company's audit committee, dumped more than 200,000 shares of the company's stock shortly before Harken publicly announced massive losses -- was publicly available long before Bush ran for president. Yet The Washington Post, to name one news outlet, gave the matter a total of 26 words of attention during the 2000 presidential campaign. The July 30, 1999, edition of the Post reported:

Even now, questions linger about a 1990 sale of Harken stock by Bush that was the subject of a probe by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

That's it. Twenty-six words

On matters ranging from the Harken stock sale to his National Guard record to the Downing Street Memo and nearly everything in between, Bush has escaped the level of media scrutiny one would expect after seeing how the media treated President Clinton. Some of that, as Neal noted, is a result of conservatives' highly effective use of their "echo chamber" to push back on negative stories. But not all of it; there was no "echo chamber" drowning out coverage of Bush's Harken sale during the 2000 campaign. Such an "echo chamber" was unnecessary: the Post and other leading news outlets chose to ignore the story all by themselves.

And it isn't only that the attacks on Clinton got far greater coverage than those on Bush; the attackers did, too. In the 1990s, making wild and unsubstantiated allegations against President Clinton was a sure-fire way to become a media darling. And even when those allegations fell apart under even casual examination, the media kept going back to the David Bossies and Ann Coulters for more. Coulter made her name by suggesting it might be appropriate to assassinate a sitting president of the United States; just this week she was welcomed as a guest on CNN's Lou Dobbs Tonight, as though she is a serious person with serious policy insights. When will we see a Bush critic like Joe Conason or David Corn grace the cover of Time magazine?

Some of the media's reluctance to aggressively cover stories damaging to conservatives, and tendency to quickly back down when challenged, are no doubt the result of decades of conservative attacks on the media. From trumped-up "studies" by the Media Research Center to the statement by Bush that he isn't "so sure it's credible to quote leading news organizations," the constant stream of largely spurious conservative media criticism has cowed news organizations into a presumably subconscious pattern of giving conservatives a pass and bending over backwards to criticize progressives. That's not an original observation; similar sentiments have been expressed by journalists, former journalists, and media experts. But it is a simple reality that should be a part of any discussion of how the Bush administration avoids negative coverage.