ABC News's White House correspondent Terry Moran claimed he was offended when he overheard two print reporters talking inside the briefing room in January 2002, as they awaited spokesman Ari Fleischer's arrival to face mounting questions about the administration's role in the burgeoning Enron business scandal. "I heard people saying, 'All right, we're back, to hell with the war [in Afghanistan],' as if chasing the shadows and ghosts of potential appearances or possible conflicts of interest [regarding Enron] was more important than the war the country had been thrust into," Moran told American Journalism Review. "I was shocked ... I'm not sure that lower Manhattan had actually stopped smoldering." Four months after the attacks of 9/11, Moran thought it was still inappropriate for reporters to pose tough questions to the White House.
That was the prevailing MSM attitude as 2002 unfolded. Then halfway through the year the administration doubled down and secured another round of free passes when it signaled its interest in invading Iraq. Between the War on Terror and the war with Iraq, the Bush White House all but guaranteed itself a timid press corps that emphasized its megaphone function. The MSM coverage of the War on Terror and their reporting during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq were inexorably linked. By the time the invasion was launched in March of 2003, the press was so comfortable having spent the previous year lying down for the White House and its foreboding War on Terror, that it could not muster enough energy to get up off the floor.
What was telling, and often ignored by the MSM, was how the White House's choreographed terror alerts so often coincided with crass political maneuvering; jockeying the MSM refused to acknowledge. For instance, the first noticeable wave of terror scares came in early 2002, in the weeks surrounding Bush's hawkish "Axis of Evil" State of the Union Address, in which the first seeds for an invasion of Iraq were publicly planted. In his speech Bush warned about "thousands of dangerous killers" who had spread throughout the world "like ticking time bombs set to go off without warning." Later, White House communications director Karen Hughes told reporters 100,000 men had been trained in al-Qaida camps and were now scattered in sixty countries.
The same week, FBI Director Robert Mueller warned Americans that undetected al-Qaida sleeper cells might still be operating on American soil. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld warned Americans to prepare for other attacks that "could grow vastly more deadly than those we suffered" September 11. And CIA Director George Tenet sent a report to Congress indicating agents found crude diagrams of nuclear weapons in a suspected al-Qaida safe house in Afghanistan. Maybe the scariest scenario of all was an alleged terrorist plot to fly a commercial airliner into an American nuclear power plant.
The bad news came so fast and furious that it was hard to get a handle on what was more upsetting; that the Bush administration, which had previously maintained absolute secrecy about its domestic anti-terror operations, was suddenly so talkative, or that the media reported the thinly documented terror threats so breathlessly and uncritically. This was the same administration, after all, that refused to identify hundreds of mostly Middle Eastern immigrants jailed in the United States in the wake of September 11, that ordered many routine immigration hearings closed to the public and mandated records of the proceedings not be released to anyone. It also refused to release the identities of al-Qaida fighters held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and proposed that accused terrorists be tried in secret military tribunals. Yet when it came to suggestive and potentially deadly terrorist scenarios, the White House opened the spigots for the press.
Of course, for careful news consumers who read deep into news stories and searched out lots of different perspectives, they soon realized the dire warnings coming from the White House were not all that they appeared to be. Those 100,000 al-Qaida -trained terrorists roaming the world? One week after the allegation was made by the White House, Newsweek reported that intelligence officials thought the number was inflated ... by 90,000.
The White House alone controlled virtually all the information about the war on terrorism and it alone decided how that information was disseminated. The press, anxious for access, eagerly played along. That snug relationship was on stark display on January 17, 2002, just weeks before Bush's State of the Union Address. That's when Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Mueller held a hurried press conference, carried live on CNN, to unveil five videotapes found in the rubble of a home near Kabul, Afghanistan, owned by Muhammad Atef, a top aide of bin Laden's. Five men seen on the tapes were identified as deadly terrorists, who, in the words of Ashcroft, "may be trained and prepared to commit future suicide terrorist attacks."
What made the discovery so unsettling, Ashcroft said, was the fact that "the videotapes depict young men delivering what appear to be martyrdom messages from suicide terrorists." The nation's top crime fighter added that the seriousness of the threat demanded the information be released immediately. The names and pictures of the five al-Qaida members were distributed to the press as a sort of worldwide version of the TV show "America's Most Wanted," as Ashcroft asked for tips from concerned world citizens in helping track the men down.
The press eagerly complied. The New York Times played the story on page 1, where it also ran color head shots of the men. The Washington Post also printed the story on its front page, reporting excitedly that "five al-Qaida members ... may be on the loose and planning suicide attacks against Western targets." (Then again, they "may" not.) Meanwhile, CNN reported extensively about the "extraordinary videotape." In fact, there wasn't a television news operation in the country that didn't display the government's most-wanted poster of the five al-Qaida members. It was the best War on Terror prop producers had had in weeks.
Naturally it's newsworthy when government officials lay out those sorts of terror warnings, and nobody's suggesting they should be ignored. But it's also the press's job to seek context and perspective, and pry additional information from officials to determine just how dire the threats might be. Because there was something odd about Ashcroft's breathless news bulletin. For instance, pressed further at the press conference, Ashcroft seemed to back away from his original, already tentative description of the taped utterances, suggesting, "We believe that these could be, and likely appear to be, sort of, martyrdom messages from suicide terrorists." Sort of? Either the statements were martyrdom messages or they were not. Even the overworked Arabic translators inside the government should have been able to make that simple distinction.
Meanwhile, what exactly did the men say on the tapes? Journalists were never told, because before being shown snippets of the tapes, the government stripped all the sound off and refused to provide a printed transcript. Reporters instead were reduced to describing the men's silent gesticulations in an effort to wring out any meaning. There was even less to the story than that. Ashcroft and Mueller did not know, or would not say, if the men planned any imminent attacks, when the tapes were made, when the tapes were found, who found the tapes, what the nationalities of the five men were, if they were in America, or even if they were dead or alive.
No matter. The tapes were universally treated as very big news. Two weeks later, though, in a brief, 235-word aside, the Washington Post revealed intelligence officials had determined the martyrdom tapes had actually been made more than two years earlier, raising doubts about the fear of "imminent" suicide attacks. Would the Post or the New York Times have originally played that story on Page One if Ashcroft had forthrightly announced the so-called suicide tapes had been made in 1999? Probably not. But that's how the War on Terror press game was played; Ashcroft garnered huge headlines with frightening allegations about terrorist threats, and then when the stories petered out the MSM obediently looked away.
On February 20, 2003, when Ashcroft personally announced the terrorist indictment of Sami Al-Arian, a former University of South Florida professor, the news conference was carried live on CNN (Ashcroft tagged Al-Arian the North American leader of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad) and the story generated a wave of excited media attention. Al-Arian's case never had anything to do with bin Laden or Saddam, but Bush's Justice Department, which indicted Al-Arian just one month before the invasion of Iraq, made sure to leave the impression that the crucial terror case would keep America safe. That night, ABC's World News Tonight led its newscast with the Al-Arian indictment. Both NBC and CBS also gave the story prominent play that evening. But fast forward to December 2005 when, in an embarrassing blow to prosecutors, Al-Arian was acquitted by a conservative Tampa, Florida, jury. Big news, right? Nope. That night, neither ABC, CBS, nor NBC led with the terror case on their evening newscasts. None of them slotted it second or third either. In fact, none of the networks reported the acquittal at all. The odds that the networks would have ignored the conclusion of the Al-Arian trial if the jury had returned a guilty verdict in a case that the government had called a centerpiece to its War on Terror? Zero.
By early 2003, with the war in Iraq only weeks away, the MSM, and particularly the cable news outlets, had taken their unique brand of "Fear Factor" programming to new extremes (remember the duct tape scare?), never pausing to ask whether the red-hot terror rhetoric streaming out of the administration was intended to accomplish anything besides whip up hysteria about Arab terrorists and placing the country on a firm war setting for the Iraq invasion.
"With terrorists out there somewhere, how scared should you be?" asked CNN one month before the invasion. Terror experts displayed the hottest models of gas masks on television, the way toy gurus usually run down the must-have gifts during the Christmas buying season; endless what-if chatter about possible terrorist attacks replaced the kind of hype that usually comes with the arrival of a category-four hurricane. ABC News, trotting out its "Good Morning America" home improvement editor, showed viewers how to turn a laundry room into a fallout shelter with duct tape and drop cloths.
Solid reporting could have helped relieve some of the anxiety surrounding terror threats, instead of heightening it. For instance, the Pentagon's decision to deploy Avenger surface-to-air missile launchers around Washington, D.C., at the time clearly ratcheted up the panic level. The New York Daily News simply reported they were there to "protect prime targets -- the White House, Congress and the Pentagon -- from an aerial attack."
But an aerial attack from whom? The newspaper never asked. Neither Saddam nor bin Laden had planes or missiles that could reach America. Of course, al-Qaida successfully turned commercial jets into missiles. But if seventeen months after 9/11 the government was placing surface-to-air missile launchers to shoot down hijacked planes as a last defense before crashing into U.S. targets, what did that say about the country's national defense? The press was entirely uninterested in that debate.
There's no question that the White House, teaming up with the MSM in early 2003, succeeded in scaring the hell out of Americans, with an amazing 82 percent of those interviewed by CBS/New York Times pollsters saying they expected America to be hit by a terrorist attack in the next few months. For the White House, the scare offense made for great politics. First, the anxiety level helped boost support for the war in Iraq since Bush -- falsely -- assured Americans an invasion would help eliminate Islamic terrorists. And second, Americans routinely gave the Bush presidency its highest marks for his handling of terrorist threats. (By early 2006, polls indicated that battling terror was virtually the only issue Bush scored well in.)
The media's obedient brand of terror scare reporting extended all the way into 2005, as the MSM dutifully played up the White House's selected theme for Bush's second inauguration: terror. The MSM's signature timidity was on full display as it detailed the massive, unprecedented, and largely unexplained security blanket that turned the nation's capital into something akin to an armed fortress. Snipers were positioned on rooftops, bombers flew overhead, Humvee-mounted antiaircraft missiles dotted the city, manholes were cemented shut, and news racks swept off the streets. Specialists in chemical, biological, and radiological terrorism prevention mingled with the spooked inauguration crowds. Armed Coast Guard boats patrolled the Potomac River. And there was even an emergency engineering unit on standby to deal with any collapsed buildings.
The MSM, though, were too afraid to ask the simple question, why? Why were tens of millions of taxpayer dollars being spent -- nearly 9,000 police officers and military personnel were deployed -- to transform a public celebration of democracy into a show of foreboding military force? And was it all simply a political ploy for a White House that thrived on the issue of national security? Keep in mind, the military clampdown came despite the fact an assessment compiled at the time by the departments of Defense, Homeland Security, and Justice declared, "There is no credible information indicating that domestic or international terrorist groups are targeting the inauguration." Indeed, Homeland secretary Tom Ridge refused to raise the terror alert level, announcing on the eve of Bush's second swearing-in, "There is nothing that we've seen that gives us any reason to even consider [it]."
Another way cable news outlets boosted Bush's War on Terror was by simply handing over huge chunks of airtime to the president for him to use however he wanted. By the spring of 2002, Bush's afternoon stump speeches from cereal factories, elementary schools, and chambers of commerce had become a staple on the cable news networks. CNN officials insisted the coverage reflected the unique war on terrorism being waged. "CNN, like all news organizations, makes decisions about its coverage based on the stories of the day. In covering a war at home and military action overseas, it is necessary to cover the administration making the decisions, regardless of political party," said a network spokesperson.
The high-minded protestations of the news channels notwithstanding, the fact was that the majority of the Bush events the cable outlets rushed to cover had nothing whatsoever to do with the war on terrorism. Viewers who regularly watched CNN in 2002 saw it break away from programming to show Bush delivering prepared, extended remarks in front of friendly, partisan crowds about faith-based charities, defense modernization, education reform and tax cuts, education, simplifying tax codes for small business, strengthening Social Security, protecting the rights of investors, welfare reform, and on and on and on.
The irony was that in May of 1999, CNN's high-profile anchor Lou Dobbs got into an on-air tiff with then CNN chief Rick Kaplan. A noted friend of the Clintons, Kaplan demanded that producers cut away from Dobbs' program in order to show Clinton addressing a ceremony honoring the victims of the shooting at Columbine High School. Dobbs, a firm Republican, was incensed. As the New York Post reported, "Dobbs, who didn't consider the staged event breaking news, was absolutely livid." But no one at CNN seemed mildly concerned -- let alone absolutely livid -- about the countless staged events CNN aired for Bush. Once again, the MSM came up with new, more convenient rules for the wartime president.
Excerpted with permission from "Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush," by Eric Boehlert (Free Press, 2006).
About the writer
Eric Boehlert, a former senior writer for Salon, is the author of "Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush."
Story finder (3 ways to search Salon)
Salon Directory (browse by topic)