War and the Media's Sorry Performance

If the U.S. government launches missiles at Iran sometime in 2008, we can expect that — years later — some media outlets will engage in mild self-criticism for faulty news coverage that relied too heavily on official sources.

The pattern is historic, and maddening. No matter how much was learned, temporarily, about the follies of treating top-level claims from Washington as definitive, the American news media have reverted to form when the next agenda-setting for war came around.

Mark Twain understood such habitual patterns. "It's easy to quit smoking," he said. "I've done it hundreds of times."

When the president and his team set out to prepare the media ground for war, they can rely on a repetition compulsion that's widespread in the press. Major outlets seem unable to resist marching along to drumbeats from the White House for war. Cases in point span decades, from Vietnam and the Dominican Republic to Grenada and Panama, to Iraq and Yugoslavia, to Afghanistan and Iraq again.

In the USA, superficial self-critiques have become periodic rituals at prominent news organizations. But the basic and chronic failures to engage in independent journalism routinely elude serious examination, whether by the "public editor" at The New York Times or by The Washington Post's in-house media columnist Howard Kurtz, who has long double-dipped as a punch-pulling media critic on the CNN payroll. Such media institutions have no use for analyzing deep-seated patterns of war flackery.

The belated and fuzzy outlines of the U.S. media's second thoughts are apt to appear long after the real-time coverage has aided and abetted Washington's war-planners and war-makers. So, today, with scant murmurs of concern from the powerhouse U.S. media, the quality of reporting on the Iranian "threat" is scarcely more of a departure from the official White House line than what we were getting five years ago in countless stories about the menace of Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

A pivotal assumption about appropriate professionalism continues to hold in America's high journalistic places: If you're pro-war, you can be objective.

If you're anti-war, you're biased.

Thus, as shown with network footage in "War Made Easy" (the new documentary film based on my book of the same name), the widely esteemed then-ABC correspondent Ted Koppel intoned from the front lines on camera at the outset of the Iraq invasion in March 2003: "I must say, I was trying to think of — I was trying to think of something that would be appropriate to say on an occasion like this, and as is often the case, the best you can come up with is something that Shakespeare wrote for Henry V, 'Wreak havoc and unleash the dogs of war.'"

Very few eyebrows go up when the most highly touted U.S. journalists cheerlead the latest U.S. war effort in the course of their reportorial duties. As I note in the film, "A news anchor will get no flak at all for making statements that are supportive of a war and wouldn't dream of making a statement that's against a war."

British viewers might be taken aback to see the grotesque extent to which U.S. presidents and American news media have jointly shouldered key propaganda chores for war launches during the last five decades. But complacency across the Atlantic would be ill-advised.

The American media may be in a particularly degraded and craven state while covering the great issues of war and peace, but the tandem machinations of George W. Bush and Tony Blair — and indications that the current British government is unwilling to challenge the war cries from Washington now aimed at Tehran — do not attest to overall political or journalistic health in either country.

Norman Solomon's latest book, "Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America's Warfare State," was published this fall. For more information, go to: www.MadeLoveGotWar.com. To find out more about Norman Solomon and read his past columns, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com. COPYRIGHT 2007 DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.