"Dedicated to exposing the lies and impeachable offenses of George W. Bush"

Same old GOP song: Blame the media
Philadelphia Daily
By PAUL WALDMAN
December 26, 2006

LAURA BUSH has some news for you: You don't know the real Iraq.

Sure, the country may be gripped by nightmarish violence as sectarian massacres become an almost daily occurrence - but have you heard that some schools are being built? And there are parts of the country that are actually peaceful!

When she was asked recently by an interviewer about public pessimism about the war, the first lady said, "I understand why those polls are like that, because of the coverage that we see every single day in Iraq...

"But I do know that there are a lot of good things that are happening that aren't covered. And I think the drumbeat in the country from the media, from the only way people know what's happening unless they happen to have a loved one deployed there, is discouraging and you know - I know that the facts are not as discouraging."

The actual facts, as the Iraq Study Group reported, are that the Pentagon is dramatically underreporting the number of violent attacks occurring in Iraq.

But Laura Bush's argument is one we thought we had left behind - that Americans think the situation in Iraq is awful only because the media insist on reporting things like bombings, murders, kidnappings and the country's spiral into bloody chaos. If only the public knew that in parts of Kurdistan people can walk down the street without being murdered - that's the real news, or as Mrs. Bush says, "the facts."

Uh-huh.

It isn't the first time the first lady has gone after the media. When an interviewer read her a critical quote about her husband's performance after Hurricane Katrina, she responded, "Consider the source" - as though the fact that the quote appeared in the New York Times meant it couldn't be reliable.

Back in May, she claimed that newspapers were being unfair by reporting on the president's abysmal approval ratings. "When his polls were really high, they weren't on the front page," she said.

It turns out that her claim was completely false - when Bush's poll numbers were high, that fact was routinely trumpeted on the front page of major newspapers.

But whether the attack has a basis in fact isn't really the point.

WE'VE SEEN IT many times before: When things go bad for Republicans, they blame the media. Nothing, not even the disastrous consequences of their decisions, is their fault. If the public has turned against the war, it can only be because the media have fooled us into thinking success is actually failure. If they lose elections, it can only be because the media were biased against them.

It's a song and dance that got old a long time ago. In a 1995 interview, Bill Kristol, the editor of the right-wing Weekly Standard magazine and a frequent Fox News talking head, explained it:

"The liberal media were never that powerful, and the whole thing was often used as an excuse by conservatives for conservative failures."

It was a rare moment of candor from a conservative and things haven't changed since then. And today, as the administration continues to blame the media for its own mistakes, it sounds more and more like contempt for the public. Just how dumb do they think we are?
Paul Waldman is a senior fellow at Media Matters for America (www.mediamatters.org).

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