Blame the media - it always works

I've been saddened to see again how pussy-whipped the U.S. news media have been by the current Bush administration - the latest evidence being the cowering response to the vicious and undeserved administration attack on Newsweek over the retraction of its anonymously sourced story about the Koran being flushed down a toilet in Guantanamo Bay by U.S. interrogators.
Frank Rich, in a Sunday New York Times piece (reprinted in Truthout.org), notes the insane lengths to which Scott McClellan went to pin the blame on the media, thus:

"Our United States military personnel go out of their way to make sure that the Holy Koran is treated with care," said the White House press secretary, Scott McClellan, as he eagerly made the magazine the scapegoat for lethal anti-American riots in Afghanistan. Indeed, Mr. McClellan was so fixated on destroying Newsweek - and on mouthing his own phony P.C. pieties about the Koran - that by omission he whitewashed the rioters themselves, Islamic extremists who routinely misuse that holy book as a pretext for murder.

That's how absurdly over-the-top the assault on Newsweek has been. The administration has been so successful at bullying the news media in order to cover up its own fictions and failings in Iraq that it now believes it can get away with pinning some 17 deaths on an errant single sentence in a 10-sentence Periscope item that few noticed until days after its publication. Coming just as the latest CNN/Gallup/USA Today poll finds that only 41 percent of Americans think the war in Iraq is "worth fighting" and only 42 percent think it's going well, this smells like desperation. In its war on the press, this hubristic administration may finally have crossed a bridge too far.

What, the administration going too far in unfairly slamming the media and being held to account for it!? Oh, I don't think so! Not if Patrick Healy, writing in the same "Week in Review" in Sunday's Times is to be believed. He recounts a battery of statistics (many of which I've mentioned before) showing just how low public trust has gone in the U.S. media. Here are the most stomach-churning examples, fyi:

In the post-Watergate 1970's, some 25 to 30 percent of Americans reported to the Harris Poll that they had a great deal of confidence in the press, more than they had in Congress, unions or corporate America. In the 2005 poll, the press ranked only ahead of law firms, with 12 percent reporting high confidence in the media.

Another poll, in 2003 by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, found that 66 percent of Americans see news reports as slanted, compared with 53 percent in 1985. Even more stunning to some analysts, 32 percent judged news organizations to be immoral, up from 13 percent in 1985.

"Today we have a case where the public is suspicious of the values of the news media as well," said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center. "I don't know if it's a crisis, but it's a hell of a growing problem."

For the first time, Pew also asked Americans in 2003 if they believed some news organizations, which were not identified, were becoming too critical of America. Nearly half the respondents, 46 percent, said yes; 48 percent said no.

"More people think media companies are motivated by profit, and put stories on the front page to serve that interest, and that reporters are motivated by their own career advancement more than any concern about the country," Mr. Rosenstiel said.

Perhaps an even more dire forecast came in another Pew report, Trends 2005, which found 45 percent of Americans saying they believed little or nothing of what they read in their daily newspapers, up from 16 percent two decades ago.

So, no problems for the Bush administration spin doctors there, then. Even as their poll numbers plummet, they can clearly continue to blast the pernicious media - whose own popularity numbers will always be lower - and get away with it. No charge is too outrageous to throw at the media, as Scott McClellan proved last week.