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- Floyd Abrams
First Amendment attorney - Steven Aftergood
Director, FAS Project on Government Secrecy - Ken Auletta
Writer, The New Yorker - Dan Bartlett
Counselor to President Bush - Carl Bernstein
Reporter - Tom Bettag
Former executive producer, Nightline, CBS Evening News - Patrick Buchanan
Commentator; former adviser to President Nixon - Walter Cronkite
Former anchor, CBS Evening News - Len Downie
Editor, The Washington Post - Jeff Fager
Executive producer, 60 Minutes - Mark Feldstein
Professor, The George Washington University - James Goodale
First Amendment attorney - Seymour Hersh
Writer, The New Yorker - John Hinderaker
Blogger, Power Line - Nicholas Kristof
Columnist, The New York Times - Nicholas Lemann
Dean, Columbia University School of Journalism - Eric Lichtblau
Reporter, The New York Times - Josh Marshall
Blogger, Talking Points Memo - Mark McKinnon
Former media adviser to President Bush - Norm Pearlstine
Former editor in chief, Time Inc. - Jay Rosen
Blogger; Professor, New York University - Tom Rosenstiel
Director, Project for Excellence in Journalism - Brian Ross
Chief investigative correspondent, ABC News - William Safire
Columnist, The New York Times - Bill Sammon
Reporter, The Washington Examiner - Ron Suskind
Author, The One Percent Doctrine - David Szady
Former assistant director of counter-intelligence, FBI - Bob Woodward
Reporter, The Washington Post
The thing that strikes me is that you've got people, some of the best, least ideological people -- Andrew Card -- in the administration, being asked a direct question: "Don't you think that the press plays a sort of checking role on government?," and he said, "No, the press is just another special interest." He meant that. He wasn't saying that for political advantage.
The president's chief of staff.
The president's chief of staff. And I think that is probably the kindest, least angry response one would get from people around the president about the press, and that's very disturbing.
It's one thing to say, "Hey, look, you guys don't know what you're doing," or "You're messing up," or "You're biased," or whatever the argument is. But really, to deny flat out that the role of the press, certainly at its best, is to serve as some sort of monitor of government conduct and some sort of entity to try to help the public pass judgment on government misconduct, that's a very disturbing path we're going down. ...
... Are you seeing changes in how [the Bush administration] handles Freedom of Information Act [FOIA] requests?
There are a few different things going on. Wait times have become longer; backlogs of requests have grown; the standards under which information is released have in some cases become more restrictive. In other words, information that might have been released several years ago now gets withheld. ...
A lot of these changes were encapsulated in a policy memorandum that was issued by then-Attorney General John Ashcroft in October of 2001. What Attorney General Ashcroft said is that the prior policy, which encouraged disclosure of information unless some foreseeable harm would result, that policy was being overturned in favor of withholding information whenever there was a legal basis to do so. So the whole orientation of the FOIA program was in a sense reversed. Instead of saying, "Release whenever you can," the policy became, "Withhold whenever you have a legal argument to justify."
One can detect the influence of that policy in how FOIA requests are handled. There are all kinds of things that once would have been released or were released that now get withheld under FOIA, and it's disturbing. ...
Has there been a qualitatively different relationship this president has had with the press compared to previous presidents?
Yeah. What I think is different from previous administrations is that the Bush administration does not accept that the press has a legitimate public interest role. They view us as a special interest. When I asked Andrew Card, [President Bush's] then-chief of staff, "Do you accept that the press has a legitimate check-and-balance function?" He said, "Absolutely not." He said, "Congress has a check-and-balance function; the judiciary does, but not the press."
What he was really saying -- and this was confirmed by my interviews with Karl Rove and [Counselor to the President] Dan Bartlett and others high up in the administration -- is that they view us as people who have an agenda -- not necessarily a political agenda, though they think we have more of a liberal bias in the press than they would like -- but they think our agenda is something else.
They think it's a bias of conflict, a bias for getting scoops and [for playing] gotcha and for trapping them, and they don't want to deal with us. When their poll numbers were high, and Bush was re-elected, they didn't have to deal with us. But now that their numbers started to decline and they've had some real setbacks in policy, starting with Iraq, they feel the need to go to that filter more and to treat the press as legitimate middlemen.
[The notion about the press having a check-and-balance function, do you think that's what the framers of the Constitution had in mind?]
The framers had in mind the First Amendment, basically. ... They gave the First Amendment as a way of giving a fourth branch of government -- in fact, the press -- an ability to question those in power in any of those three branches of government. I think over the years the press, more often than not, has served that function very well. But many times we did not serve that function well, and many times we have acted like the special interests that people like Bush and others -- Democrats or Republicans -- complained about.
If you listen to Bush carefully, to his complaint about the press, he's really echoing much of what you hear from the left -- [political commentator and Air America host] Al Franken, [author and media critic] Eric Alterman and others. That complaint is that we do the bidding of our corporation owners. Bush would never put it that way -- he's a conservative, and free enterprise is good -- but the critique is the same. The critique is that the business interests that run the press are interested in scoops, headlines, selling papers, boosting circulation, and therefore they go for more entertainment stuff and more conflict stuff and more wow stuff. That's a legitimate complaint against the press.
But there are also very serious reporters who day in and day out get up in the morning thinking they have a public calling and try to do it honestly and try and find out what's really going on in Iraq at the risk of their own lives. And there are reporters who tried honestly -- Knight Ridder, for instance -- and really got the weapons of mass destruction and introduced a note of skepticism to that conversation, that maybe Iraq didn't have weapons of mass destruction. Those reporters are really performing a very vital public service, and I think politicians -- starting with Bush, but not just conservative Republicans -- too often forget that. ...
Bush has talked about getting around the media filter. ... [Is that normal, to want to sidestep the media?]
Well, every president wants to figure out a way to deliver their message unfiltered. They don't want an anchor telling you what it means. They don't want a reporter, [NBC's] Tim Russert, asking tough questions on Meet the Press. They want to be able to talk directly and not be questioned. By the way, CEOs have the same desire. So do journalists. I would love to be able to just have my version of the world and not have someone ask me inconvenient questions. We're just human beings, all of us.
The press is performing a necessary, adversarial function. Now, if we go too far and we say, "We are your adversary; we are your enemy," then I think we're stepping out of our proper role. But our job, proper role, is to ask questions of people in power, and oftentimes people in power don't like to be asked questions. It's very natural.
... What do you think of the Bush administration having so few press conferences?
The Bush administration says by having so few press conferences they've actually substituted in another way. They have press availabilities. You can come to his office, usually every day, and he gets asked two or three questions. But those two or three questions that he's asked, generally he starts with the wire services. The wire services tend to want to ask about meat-and-potatoes issues: "Is it true you're going to Russia next week?" for instance -- not a hard policy question, one that he's quite pleased to get. So you could argue the public is not being served. …
One of the functions that a press conference performs is it forces the president to get out of the bubble, to be exposed to aggressive questioning. I think … every president, living in that bubble, gets out of touch.
In terms of the message control you've talked about, things like the Web site, are there other ways the administration can get its message to us directly?
This White House has been pretty aggressive about getting its video news releases out there to local stations. And local stations, which increasingly are under cost pressures, want to raise their profit margin. They like cheap news programming. It's basically public relations masquerading as news. We shouldn't allow that without a disclaimer at least. But presidents like that because their message is unfiltered. …
... The Bush administration seemed to be strengthened by this amazing ability to speak with one voice on issues. [What do you make of that?]
Particularly in his first term, Bush has been very disciplined in a, policing leaks, not having that much leaking compared to previous administrations, including Reagan, including Nixon -- there have been much fewer leaks certainly in the first term of Bush; second, of getting people to know that this president would really be upset if you showboat, if you get a lot of press yourself, so a lot of Bush administration people are not quoted by name, much more so than, say, the Clinton administration or previous administrations, including Nixon.
He was able to police leaks and the way people talked to the press in his first term. As his poll numbers decline in his second term, and as he gets near the end of his tenure, there have been many more leaks and many more people talking to the press -- not on the record, but nevertheless talking to the press -- and I'm sure that drives him crazy. But there's not much he can do about it now. ...
... Who inside the administration is setting this tone for the intense secrecy that they seem to desire?
One person: … George W. Bush. The policy about the press is set by him. It's not set by the press secretary; it's not set by a communications director. They're just carrying out orders. It's policy that Bush wants.
Now, can they have an effect on the margin? Sure. But Bush has an attitude formed over a lifetime, probably most impressively in terms of the impression on his mind in his father's administration and his father's campaign. He remembers that Newsweek did a cover on the "wimp factor." He remembers that reporters who his father thought were his friends wrote stories that his father didn't like. He remembers that members of his father's administration leaked, and you had to surround yourself with people who were not strangers, but longtime loyalists to you. So it's a lifetime of attitude that is formed within George W. Bush. ...
In terms of the message discipline of who's deciding what the story of the day or the story of the two hours is, where is that coming from?
Well, that doesn't come from the president; that's the staff communications director's job. If you're in the communications office of any public official, the job is to try and go on the offensive. Don't let news, what happens, breaking news define your agenda for the day. Impose your agenda on the day. Increasingly you have to impose it several times a day. Their job is to figure out, how do we get our best story out there and minimize our worst story? That's not peculiar to this White House. It's not peculiar to anyone in public life. ...
I've had a number of people make the comparison, in terms of the attitude toward the press, between George W. Bush and Richard Nixon. What do you make of that comparison?
There are some comparisons. I think Nixon had darker caves into which he entered, but I think that he was angry at the press; I think Bush is angry at the press perpetually. But I'll tell you a difference. ... One of the things that it seems reveals the Bush administration's attitude about the press being a special interest is the way [it] has decided -- in a way that the Nixon administration and previous administrations did not -- to aggressively go after reporters.
It had been traditional that you don't press reporters for who their sources are. The presumption is that in order for us to perform our public service function, we will often need anonymous sources to reveal My Lai, Abu Ghraib, things that we're getting from people in the military or intelligence services or diplomats, things that happen that are scandalous, that the public wants to know about, and we help bring them. ... The public wants to know that and has a right to know that, and the press is doing its job in doing that. ...
Now we have situations where the Bush administration has decided that they are going to prosecute potentially the Washington Post reporter who reported on secret prisons in Eastern Europe, and they may prosecute the New York Times reporter who reported on secret eavesdropping [by the National Security Agency (NSA)], and they may prosecute the San Francisco Chronicle reporters [Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams] in the BALCO case for saying that [San Francisco Giants'] Barry Bonds used steroids. ... They've asked the San Diego U.S. attorney to investigate leaks to the FBI in the [private investigator Anthony] Pellicano [wiretapping] case in Los Angeles, which involves two New York Times reporters. ... So you may see sometime fairly soon reporters, as happened in the [New York Times reporter] Judy Miller case, brought before the grand jury, and if they don't identify their sources, going to jail. ...
These are big issues that are going to surface relatively soon and pit the Bush administration against the press in court, demanding our sources in a much more aggressive way than even the Nixon administration did. And the Nixon administration was very blatant -- I mean, [Chief Counsel to Nixon] Chuck Colson saying to Mrs. [Katharine] Graham, who was the head of The Washington Post Company, "We're going to take away your TV licenses." That's pretty strong stuff, and I [haven't heard] the Bush administration say that. But on the other hand, [the Nixon administration] didn't threaten to put reporters in jail the way the current Bush administration is doing. ...
... Pat Buchanan said in 1969 that you could cut the liberal bias in the press with a knife. Was that true? Is that still true today?
Listen, I think the press has to be honest and be more introspective about itself and its [bias]. Every survey of the Washington media shows that when they do these secret surveys of reporters, often more of them identify with the Democratic Party and with moderate to liberal policies, not left liberal -- they're not that; they're kind of establishment. ... The job of a press critic is to try and reveal that if it's there, so the public has transparency. They can see the biases.
But my own attitude is that the operative bias to worry about in the press is not a liberal bias, or even a conservative bias, though those exist. The operative bias you've got to worry about is the bias for conflict, and I think that oftentimes does cause us to have mindless coverage of events and to focus on the wrong thing, not on policy but on who's involved in a spat with each other. That gives a nice headline. And maybe our editors and bosses who worried about circulation and ratings like that more. But it isn't necessarily the function we're supposed to perform. ...
... And what have the media done maybe to help foster that impression or damage themselves?
Oh, let us count the ways. The media damages itself in many, many ways. One, you start with the blatant mistakes that are out there, be it Jack Kelley, USA Today, who makes up stories, or the fellow [Jayson Blair] at The New York Times who makes up stories and is thrown out for that; be it the television reports that are exaggerated; be it the pictures in Time magazine that are composite on the cover. So we're constantly making mistakes and giving ammunition to our critics. ...
On the other hand, we do a lot of good things and have for many, many years. There was a period of time when [Bob] Woodward and [Carl] Bernstein were reporting Watergate in '72, '73 and early '74, where the charge was The Washington Post is biased, and people like Pat Buchanan and Bill Safire to a lesser extent were out there railing against the press, against the anti-Nixon bias. Well, in retrospect, they were right. They did a pretty good job. So the press has a mixed record like every institution has a mixed record. And we do better if we admit our mistakes. That's why it's a healthy thing to see ombudsmen or public editors or correction boxes, or to see press critics online, who hold us to account. ...
... What effect on the bias debate do you think that the Dan Rather/National Guard reporting debacle had?
Well, that's a classic. What happened with 60 Minutes [II] and Dan Rather in the fall of the presidential election, if you go back and look, you say, well, 60 Minutes actually had some good scoops in there. ... They had some evidence presented that Bush shirked his duties when he was in the National Guard and didn't really fulfill his functions and get away with it because he was politically well-connected.
But then they went the next step and said they had a document that proved all of these things and more. And that document -- in part because of the power, the speed of the Internet -- within hours, bloggers were up on the air over the Internet saying, "Hey, wait a second," or, "This can't be true; this IBM typewriter didn't exist at the time they said this report was issued, and it was typed on this IBM typewriter."
So the bloggers quickly got in, and then the Bush administration jumped in; a lot of people jumped in. But CBS, for 10 days, didn't acknowledge it may have made an error. It was full speed ahead; we stand by our report. They were not being transparent, not being humble, which is what we're supposed to be as journalists. We should never be sure of anything. ...
Ten days later, they had to admit that they may have made a mistake and they were launching their own internal investigation, reinforcing a view -- not just among conservatives, but certainly among conservatives, but also among others -- that the press doesn't always get it right, often gets it wrong, and when it does get it wrong, doesn't admit quickly that they got it wrong. That was very harmful to CBS. ...
Was there something in how the Bush re-election campaign played the "Rathergate" story so that it ended up focusing on the one wrong document out of all of it, or was it just a lucky break for them?
It was a lucky break for them that CBS made a big mistake, but they did more than that. The Bush administration is very good about going on the offensive. If you look at the campaign, starting with the way they were running against a war hero, ... they were able to change the narrative that [Democratic presidential candidate] John Kerry wanted to present because they were aggressive about it.
And they were aggressive about CBS. They attacked Dan Rather for his well-known "bias" against the Bush administration -- not just this Bush administration, but his father's administration, and they used every technique to impugn Dan Rather and CBS. Unfortunately, CBS gave them some ammunition to do that. .....
[It] seems safe to say there are more conservative voices in media. The landscape has changed.
Oh, I think there is no question there are more conservative voices in the media. You just start with Fox News. Start with bloggers. Those are all things that didn't exist 10 years ago. You've got a lot more voices, and that's a very healthy thing.
But the important thing is transparency here. That is to say, if someone on Fox News -- if their slogan is "Fair and Balanced," is that a true slogan? Does that represent the truth? It doesn't. Sometimes it does, but oftentimes it doesn't. ... And when someone claims they have no interest, and they have an agenda -- be it a liberal or a left agenda or a right agenda -- it should be exposed.
But the good news is that you've got so many different sources of information out there -- cable news, the Internet, newspapers, magazines, television, satellite television, your iPod -- that people in a democracy can choose. That's a good thing. And if they want to choose a conservative blogger or a Fox News or a CNN, good for them.
[Is it always a good thing?]
It is more ways to get around the filter. That's a healthy thing. It's also an unhealthy thing in the following sense: You have so many sources of information that you don't have any common sources of information. It used to be that our common sources of information were the networks, let's say. So on a typical evening at 6:30 at night, 90 percent of Americans were watching one of three network newscasts, which were fairly similar. ... And in a world that is increasingly polarized between left and right, people have an excuse now to say: "Hey, I don't trust your news. I want my news. I want Fox News. I want The Nation news. I want whatever news that shares my views." Therefore that common source of news declines in value, and that's a problem in a democracy, which is based on compromise. ...
What do you make of the accusation that the press has sort of wimped out on Bush in covering him?
I don't think the press today is too soft on George W. Bush. I think there was a period of time, particularly after 9/11, where America was attacked, a lot of casualties, a lot of frightened people, including press people, and a lot of patriotic people included press people. America was at war, and it was a war unlike other wars, where you didn't know who the enemy was. You knew generically who it was -- militant Islam -- but you didn't know whether it was someone sitting next to you on the subway or not who carried a weapon.
People were frightened, and people probably gave Bush in the press more benefit of the doubt than they should have. So when he announced that somehow Saddam Hussein was connected to our enemies, including Osama bin Laden, and then had Colin Powell, the secretary of state, come up to the U.N. and show these horrifying pictures of places where the weapons of mass destruction were stored and manufactured in Iraq, there was a natural tendency to believe it. They were aided by the fact that if you go around the world to other intelligence services -- the French, the Germans, the British, the U.N. weapons inspectors -- there was a general consensus that, in fact, Saddam Hussein did have weapons of mass destruction. ...
So the press was hamstrung in part by the fact that it seemed there was a consensus that he did have these weapons of mass destruction. Very few people thought he didn't have them. Now, people thought he might not use them, ... but it was a hard story to get, because you couldn't find good sources, intelligent sources, who said the opposite of what the Bush administration was saying. Nevertheless, the press went through a period of time where their coverage was too soft on Bush and not enough skepticism. ...
[What has changed the relationship between the press and government?] Has anything changed for good in terms of the relationship between the government and the press?
Things like technology change the relationship with the press as much as anything else. If you think of 20 years ago, 15 years ago, a president can think about: "What is my story of the day? What's a story we want to promulgate today, we want to get out today? What's the headline we want in tomorrow's paper or tonight's evening newscast?" and, "Who are the people, the key people, in the media we can communicate this to, either through a leak or a sit-down for interviews?" etcetera.
How do you do that today? You don't have a knot of six or seven people who determine what's going to be written. You don't have that filter that everything runs through, be it The New York Times, The Washington Post or the three networks. You've got three cable news networks. You've got bloggers. You've got the BBC, which has an office here. You've got people who are alternative means of communication.
So what happens today, the president and his staff wake up; they don't say, "What is my news story for the entire day?" They basically say, "What are the five or six news stories we can come up with today that will top each cycle of news?" because there are ... many more opportunities for another news cycle and another headline to develop. So it's totally changed, and technology is the major change agent.
Where do you see the White House press corps in five years or 10 years?
We're going to see more of the trends we've begun to see in the White House and the press relationship. This started, by the way, with Nixon, when Nixon said, "I want to avoid The New York Times or Washington Post filter and go out to local newspapers and get them to communicate my story." They very aggressively organized to do that to try and get around the filter.
In the Clinton administration, Clinton got very angry at the press in his early years and talked about how he's going to avoid using the middleman, using early technology, which was satellite, communicate directly to local press around the country, etcetera, and calling in people who would be honored to be in the presence of the president to do interviews. Bush has extended that, and technology allows him to extend that.
I think what you're going to see more in the future is White House using its own Web site. … They can basically chase the press out of the White House press basement, put back the swimming pool that was covered over there, say: "Go out and do your job however you want. We're not going to help you by giving you these briefings. Check our Web site twice or five times a day. If you want [former Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld's speeches, they're there." They'll do what [Vice President Dick] Cheney's been doing. Cheney travels all over the country, oftentimes without the press, kind of a stealth vice president, and it's an attempt to control the way we cover the news.
They have the power to do that. Will they dare do that? Politics may make it harder for them to do that if the public saw it as an attempt by a future administration to deny the public information. ... Bush has done fewer live press conferences than any modern president. Does the public say at some point, "Hey, where's his transparency?" We want it for Enron; we want it for corporate America; we want it for the press. What about for the president? In a democracy, you can't act unilaterally. You might want to. You might want to say: "Hey, deal with my Web site. Get all the information from that. You don't like my spin? Tough." Well, it may not be politically possible for you to do that. ...
[Former White House Chief of Staff Andy Card told The New Yorker that he doesn't believe the press serves a check-and-balance function, and the president's former media adviser Mark McKinnon told us he agrees.] What's your view of the role of the press in terms of the administration?
We actually believe the press plays a valuable role for the American people and is a fundamental aspect of our democracy. Without the media, the American people won't have the type of information they need to hold their leaders to account.
The relationship between government and media has always been strained, and I think most of the time that's a healthy strain. I think our relationship with the media particularly has been different maybe than past administrations'.
It's pretty strained. It has been very strained.
Well, sometimes the conversation about our administration and the media -- two different areas get conflated. One is the issue of the so-called access. We're not the type of administration ... who leaks a lot to the press, uses the media in the way maybe past administrations have, to advance personal agendas, policy proposals.
The other strains come from, I think, more from just being a country during a time in war. When there [is] a lot of more classified information, there's more conversations that should be happening in secret. There is the issue of access in that respect that has obviously played out very publicly and has been a strain.
But the administration in, let's say, the NSA [National Security Agency] eavesdropping story that The New York Times did, the president himself said it was, I think the words were "despicable," what happened.
Yes.
And there were calls by the Republican Party and allies of the administration, including the attorney general, for the possible use of the espionage statutes.
Well, I can't speak of prosecutorial tools, but I will say that we do think it was a fairly egregious decision made by The New York Times. That's what I was getting [at]. A difference between the day-to-day relationship we have with reporters who cover the White House is one thing; the other is these issues during times of national security where there's decisions made by certain news organizations that we think are not in the interest of the country.
It was a very, I'm sure, a difficult decision for The New York Times to make. I think they made the wrong decision, and it actually really is a reflection of the type of war we're in. The media has been always traditionally very sensitive about not reporting on things that could harm the national interest, but it's taken a very traditional definition: troop movements; something that would [put] someone in the harm's way for an operation.
But now that so many elements of this war are fought through financial means, through surveilling the enemy, through conversations on the telephone, then maybe there's a different standard by the media used when it comes to the threats that may have [been made] to the American people.
But the reporters involved and the editors involved say all they reported on was the question of the legality of the program -- they didn't reveal how it worked -- and that the terrorists, if you will, know we're listening.
Well, they don't know all the aspects of how we're doing it. And for you to get into a conversation about whether it's legal, there are strong insinuations about how the program works, and the disclosure of such a program, whether it be on the one hand the NSA program, or on the other hand the financial programs, SWIFT, that I know you've looked at, those are putting up a big billboard to the enemy saying, "This is how they're defending their country." We think it's wrong.
[New York Times executive editor] Bill Keller said to us that when he left the White House after a meeting he had about this, the president was saying that The New York Times was going to give aid and comfort to the enemy. That's what he was being told; that he would have blood on his hands, basically, if he published.
Well, the president said nothing like that. The president did stress the importance of this program remaining secret. Our conclusion when this came out was that this has been one of the most effective tools in preventing attacks on our country. It's one of the most vital tools that we've had in our arsenal to defend America, and for The New York Times to make the decision to put it on the front page harmed the national security interests of our country. The president felt obligated, if he felt that strongly about it, that he ought to tell the person who was in charge of that paper how he felt.
But should they be prosecuted?
I'm not going to get into prosecutorial decisions made by the Justice Department. I'm not a lawyer, nor would I try to be. But it's an important debate for the country to have, for the media and government officials and others to have, who watch this issue closely, because we are in a new paradigm, where the enemies of our country use the very technology and comforts of our lifestyle against us.
It is a new paradigm in many respects, and it deserves a lot of debate and scrutiny and discussion. Whether it be shield laws that are being debated in the United States Congress or other things, this is a healthy debate for our country.
When we go on the air with this in February, two reporters in San Francisco, for example, are facing jail for reporting a story which the president himself has said was in the national or public interest. That's the BALCO [Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative] case, the steroids-in-baseball case. Yet they're facing jail because the Justice Department, using its discretion, has decided to try to force them to comply with a grand jury subpoena. Does the administration back that decision?
I don't know the details of that case, and it would not be appropriate for me to comment on an active investigation. But there is generally an important debate that we ought to be having in our country about the ... knowledge of criminal activity ... and the pursuit of a criminal investigation.
But this is playing out in several different cases, not just this one, and I think the courts are going to have to weigh in in this matter.
But the administration has a discretion, through the Justice Department, whether or not to bring certain cases. And I guess in this particular case, the question is, what's the rationale? You're going to shut down reporting on something which everyone says has been to the interests of our public health and to our youth who are involved in sports.
Well, I think that's subjective, to say that it would shut down. These are tough calls. We put very seasoned and experienced prosecutors in these positions, these U.S. attorney positions, to make the tough calls. But ultimately, that's why there's the checks and balances of a court system. The courts will ultimately vet that out.
So we cannot expect the administration to back down on the BALCO case?
Again, I speak only personally for the president. We would not interject from the White House into a criminal prosecution. The U.S. attorneys involved in this have broad discretion to pursue these cases as they see fit.
There's been a change, it seems, in the relationship of the administration recently to the press, sort of a reaching out. The president was on 60 Minutes; you're sitting here now. What's happened?
I think there actually has been a better relationship with the journalists who cover us on a daily basis than maybe some of the broader or more high-profile disagreements, such as the one with the NSA program, has shown. The president understands that the relationship is a two-way street. If he wants to communicate with the American people, he has to have a relationship with the media, and vice versa, if the media wants to learn about what this president is thinking.
So there was not a conscious decision, I guess, recently to increase our role. But I think if you looked over the course of the last -- now that these elections are behind us, that the president has been very accessible.
Well, the executive producer of 60 Minutes, when we interviewed him a couple of months back, said, "Oh, this administration isn't cooperating with us." It's been the worst he's ever seen. He went through a whole litany, and then two weeks ago he e-mailed me and said, "It's changing." So you'd have to convince him.
I wouldn't conflate our issues with 60 Minutes with the media writ large. If you recall, there was an issue with 60 Minutes' broadcast [about] the president during his re-election campaign, with Dan Rather. There's a whole new regime in place at 60 Minutes, including Jeff Fager, the executive producer for 60 Minutes. And we have a working relationship with Scott Pelley, a very seasoned journalist who interviewed the president recently. So I wouldn't use that as a microcosm for the rest of the press. ...
The perception has been that the administration wants to go to a friendly venue [rather] than the so-called mainstream media usually, whether it's Fox or whether it's local news -- get around, if you will, the filter that Pat Buchanan talked to us about. [Those efforts] began during the Nixon administration.
Well, I've heard that charge. We've increased our access to maybe the local media or the others, but I don't believe it's been at the expense of others.
The president has met with all the top anchors. He's done more than, I think, two interviews with Brian Williams since he's been the anchor [of the NBC Nightly News]. He did an inaugural interview with Katie Couric when she took over [the CBS Evening News].
So I know there's an reputation about this administration with the press, but if you look at the facts, we've been more accessible than people have suggested.
So you don't sense ... the hostility of the press?
Not on a personal level. ... Like I said, we've had some high-profile disagreements with certain media organizations, particularly on the national security front. But I can say with confidence that the president genuinely likes a lot of the reporters that he deals with on a daily basis; has good relationships, actually, with many of the reporters; and he respects their role.
Let me take you back to the Espionage Act discussions, because the result of that ... and other aspects of subpoenaing reporters, there is a sense that the press is at odds -- and not since the Nixon administration has it been at such odds -- with the White House.
Well, again, I think the interim timeframe between then and now is we are a nation at war. And it's a very unconventional aspect --
Well, we were at war then, too -- the Vietnam War.
Very traditional war. What I was saying is that we're in a very unconventional time in our lives where people who hide themselves as civilians are using the very daily elements of our lives -- telephones, computers, e-mail and the like -- to try to harm our country.
The ability for us to defend our country has changed, and the ways we have to go about defending our country. That doesn't mean you ignore critical aspects of the law. You still very much respect them.
But that has to change, in some respects, the relationship of how the media has approached some of those issues. And again, ultimately these have been very complex issues. They have been ones that have come under a lot of scrutiny, and it's one where obviously the courts are going to have to weigh in on it.
But you've already changed your policy. You've already said that the FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court, can oversee this terrorist surveillance program, something that initially the administration said was not possible.
And after a lot of work with the court, after a lot of conversations on different elements of it, we were able to satisfy-- they were able to be satisfied with how we were going about these activities in a way that they could be comfortable with of putting it under a FISA order. And we are able to do that without any dimunition in the effectiveness of that program.
So it really is a solid victory for the American people that such a valuable program can not only go forward, but can go forward under the auspices of this court.
Finally, I just want to get your reflections on the [famously contentious] relationship of Richard Nixon and the press. ... How does that compare to George W. Bush and the press?
First, Nixon's relationship to the press was consistent with his relationship to many institutions and people. He saw himself as a victim. We now understand the psyche of Richard Nixon, that his was a self-destructive act and presidency.
I think what we're talking about with the Bush administration is a far different matter in which disinformation, misinformation and unwillingness to tell the truth -- a willingness to lie both in the Oval Office, in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, in the office of the vice president, the vice president himself -- is something that I have never witnessed before on this scale.
The lying in the Nixon White House had most often to do with covering up Watergate, with the Nixon administration's illegal activities. Here, in this presidency, there is an unwillingness to be truthful, both contextually and in terms of basic facts that ought to be of great concern to people of all ideologies. ...
This president has a record of dishonesty and obfuscation that is Nixonian in character in its willingness to manipulate the press, to manipulate the truth. We have gone to war on the basis of misinformation, disinformation and knowing lies from top to bottom. That is an astonishing fact. That's what this story is about: the willingness of the president and the vice president and the people around them to try to undermine people who have effectively opposed them by telling the truth. It happened with [Sen.] John McCain in South Carolina. It happened with [Sen.] John Kerry. It's happened with [Sen.] Max Cleland in Georgia. It's happened with many other people. That's the real story, and that's the story that [the press] should have been writing. ...
It's very difficult, as a reporter, to get across that when you say, "This is a presidency of great dishonesty," that this is not a matter of opinion. This is demonstrable fact. If you go back and look at the president's statements, you look at the statements of the vice president, you look at the statements of Condoleezza Rice, you go through the record, you look at what [counterterrorism expert] Richard Clarke has written, you look at what we know -- it's demonstrable. It's fact. Now, how do you quantify it? That's a different question.
But to me, if there is a great failure by the so-called mainstream press in this presidency, it's the unwillingness to look at the lies and disinformation and misinformation and add them up and say clearly, "Here's what they said; here's what the known facts were," because when that is done, you then see this isn't a partisan matter. This is a matter of the truth, particularly about this war. This is a presidency that is not willing to tell the truth very often if it is contrary to its interests. It's not about ideology from whence I say this. It's about being a reporter and saying: "That's what the story is. Let's see what they said; let's see what the facts are." ...
You've dealt with a lot of presidential administrations in your long career. ... But the Bush administration has had a very particular relationship with the press. ... Could you talk about that and how it's changed?
Well, one, I think the Bush administration was extremely well put together in thinking about how we're going to deal with the media. They've just got some very bright people who thought this through. But I think they're also the beneficiaries of the fact that there isn't an oligopoly that they have to deal with. There [aren't] three networks, and if indeed you don't get on one of those three networks, you don't get on; you don't get your message out.
Now, with this multiplicity of outlets, they saw that we can stiff all three networks if we have to, and we'll get our message out on Larry King [Live on CNN] or on Fox or on Rush Limbaugh. ... They've used that extremely effectively in seeing the changed media climate, ... and used it well, which is absolutely their right.
Let me give you a Bush line: "I'm mindful of the filter through which some news travels, and sometimes you just have to go over the heads of the filter and speak directly to the people." That's really your line.
He sounds like Pat Buchanan 35 years ago. Uh-huh, you do; there's no question about it. Look, a president's got an obligation to communicate with the American people. ...
That's why when you say "go over the heads of them," we would go over the heads of national television, Nixon would. In the Reagan era, we would bring in the anchors from local [media], what we called "regional media," from, say, the Midwest, and bring in all the anchors into lunch with Reagan, and we would have briefings for them. Then Reagan would speak to them and he'd take questions at lunch, and the national press would be outside of it. In that way, all of these individuals would take back segments to their local districts.
That's the whole war -- the battle between the White House and the national media is the battle over who controls the national agenda. ... The real power of the left was in the national media. ...
When you see what happened back then with Nixon and that confrontation with the press, and you see what's happening today with the Bush administration and the press and the way in which the press is characterized, ... what do you think?
I think that there has been little change there. I think, however, in the present situation, that White House is so buttoned up, so lacking in associating with the press really, that the press itself, ... [the print press] who cover the White House, are embittered by the fact they're kept so distant from the people of authority, that they aren't answering back. ...
But do you think that this administration, in a way that we haven't seen since the Nixon administration, has a hostile relationship with the press?
All during the time that I've been working at The Washington Post, every administration at one point or another has had a hostile relationship with the media. It comes and it goes. Obviously the Clinton administration was very angry with The Washington Post during the period in which we were reporting on Whitewater, Monica Lewinsky and impeachment. ...
The Carter administration, when they first came to Washington, were very unhappy with the reporting that indicated that they were off to a slow start in their administration, making mistakes. The first President Bush was not pleased at all with the way the press covered him and blamed the press for his not being re-elected.
Probably the one administration that had the best relationship with the press, ironically, ... was the Reagan administration, because they knew that to get angry at us was not helpful to their cause. So instead they would try to kill us with kindness. Jim Baker, when he worked [as chief of staff] for President Reagan, was always available to reporters who covered him, ... but of course he was trying to manipulate them the whole time. So they had an entirely different approach.
This administration came to town determined, like all administrations, to control the message, and they tried to do it through secrecy. ...
But they're just the opposite of the Clinton administration when it comes to, let's say, freedom of information, declassification of documents. They're reclassifying things.
Yes, that's correct. The rationale they use is that we're now at war against terrorism after Sept. 11, 2001, and I believe that rationale is not nearly adequate to cover a lot of the secrecy that they're trying to carry out.
This president had fewer press conferences than almost any president in living memory, so access has changed. I know you were trying to be evenhanded there, but it seems like there's a war with the press going on, not just with terrorism.
Certainly the relationship between this administration and the media is not a good one, and certainly we believe that the secrecy has been excessive, quite excessive. But at the same time, their job is to do their job, and our job is to find out what's going on. This always happens with the administrations after they've been around in Washington for a while: Personnel begins to change; schisms occur within the administration itself; its control over the message begins to fray. We're finding out more and more all the time. ...
At least if that is the thinking, I can see why that would have been very upsetting. The mistake was admitted. The report that came out actually proved that there was no bias involved, or at least stated that. I think you have to move on. I guess one of the legacies of this White House will probably be a disdain for the reporters of the world whom they worked with, and that's just unfortunate. There's always a tension with the White House and the press; this one just seems to be more intense. ...
There's always a tension between the White House and the press, and we always feel it. I just think that the president made it apparent that he's not necessarily reading the newspaper every day, that he's not watching the broadcast. There is a certain distance that the White House has had from us from the get-go, and I think that they are prepared for us to not be fair to them. ...
I'm trying to put myself in the seat of [Counselor to the President] Dan Bartlett and the White House: "Here comes 60 Minutes, and they do Abu Ghraib to us. And then they try to do a pre-election story [with] apparently phony documents. And you're not biased?"
I'm not going to try to defend the document story. ... I will defend Abu Ghraib forever. Of course we're not biased. You're doing reporting, important reporting about the war that ended up being -- the American public had to know that. The Pentagon, the Department of Defense cooperated with us in the end on that, gave us an interview with the general [Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt] who really sealed that piece, and we aired it with their cooperation eventually.
So we're doing our job there, and it's not an easy job to do. Nobody wanted to report what was going on in Abu Ghraib. We were the first to report it, and it was a tough thing to do, and it took an awful lot of time to vet it. We worked that story forever in terms of fairness and making sure that those pictures were accurate. ...
When did you first realize that the White House really didn't care what you said or what you did with this program?
I don't really know when I first realized it. I got the message over and over again -- a lot of our people did -- that: "We don't want to cooperate. We don't want to help you. We don't want to help you tell your stories, because we don't think there's anything in it for us." We didn't get that message in a soft, subtle way; we got it loud and clear.
Now, I feel like we have done some stories that were very fair to the White House and to the president. I also think we did -- at least this organization did -- one that was incredibly unfair by using the bogus documents. So if that had something to do with their feeling toward 60 Minutes -- even though the four people involved with that ended up losing their jobs -- I suppose you can understand that to a degree. ...
One of the things I was surprised about when I read the report, ... they were not told to try to check the documents as to their veracity, were they real or not and where they came from, actually.
Right. And I think that's a shame of the entire episode, which is that nobody knows if they were real or not. The unfortunate part is that it's not for us to put something on the air and tell the viewer to prove it's not true. The onus is on us to prove it's true before we use it. ... I can see how that would have upset the White House.
Or in the end helped them?
Or in the end helped them, because we're a good target. [It's] proven time and time again that if you take on 60 Minutes or any big news organization, it can really help you as a politician. ...
Things have gone at least 300, if not 360 degrees in a circle. What you have now is an administration that is waging a war on the news media in a way that no administration has since the dark days of Richard Nixon. You have an administration that is going after the press in a fashion we have not seen in a generation. Threatening to prosecute reporters for espionage? I mean, espionage! That's for spies. That's for saboteurs. That's not for reporters. ...
You've had a whole host of other ways that this administration has gone after the press -- as minor as not allowing photographers to Dover Air Force Base to take pictures of the coffins, of caskets returning from the Iraq war. That's not about national security. That's about political security. That's about not wanting to fuel anti-war opposition in this country. So they ban the press even though there's no national security threat. They have done all kinds of things to go after the press in a way we haven't seen since Nixon's day. ...
... I think that Bush is as anti-press as the Nixon administration [was]. The Bush administration, however, is a little bit more diplomatic about what it says about the press. But no doubt in my mind the Bush administration would be very happy if the liberal press were decimated. ...
It's very important to have a powerful mainstream media, ... because we know, among other things, the Bush administration believes in the powerful executive. They've said so. They've nominated Supreme Court justices who like that theory. We must have countervailing power. You can't have countervailing power if the press turns over everything it has to the power ... it's supposed to countervail.
Why would they then want to do things like prosecute you under the Espionage Act or call your editors and tell them not to run the story -- there's documentary histories out there, Sy, on the public record.
Well, it's not different now under this guy [Bush] than it was 30 or 40 years ago. Then it was that if you write this story, why, the Communists will be sending paratroopers into the foothills of San Francisco.
It's the same story. What we do in the business is pretty simple. We get a lot of secrets, and some we publish, and some we don't publish. Where the problems get in, as you know, is sometimes when there's stuff that should be published that isn't published. I think that's more of a problem. ...
What do you mean?
Well, it's the classic stories like the NSA story not being published for a year, the Times story not being published for over a year, etc., etc. You know, I generally think you publish.
You think that the NSA story should have been published a year and a half earlier?
I really don't know all the facts of it. I know what I think are the public facts. I'm like a lot of people. I'm generally inclined to think you should publish, and that's why I'm a reporter and not an editor.
Most editors are different than you and me. I always think that they're all mice training to be rats, basically. So editors have a different point of view, and reporters have a different point of view, and that's the way it works.
There's been a truce, in effect, hasn't there, since at least 1974, when the [Justice Department] guidelines went in about subpoenaing reporters?
I'm not a legal scholar. I don't really know. I sure have been threatened enough with action, so I'm not sure there's much of a truce.
Lowell, I've been reporting, what, for about 40 years now on national security, some heinous events -- My Lai, Abu Ghraib. I don't think I've ever met a public official that didn't think he was doing the right thing. I can't think of one.
It's just the way it is. It's the inevitable, horrific conflict. You've got people in power, people in the public life, who are absolutely convinced they're doing the right thing, just like they were in Vietnam, just like they are in Iraq, just like they were at Abu Ghraib. ...
But the bottom line is people tend to think that they're always virtuous, and we always look at people as less than virtuous. That's our job. You can call it chasing conflict, but it's sort of chasing -- that's what we do for a living. We're there to say, "Hey."
So there's going to be horrific consequences always. And sometimes it will spill over in jail, and sometimes it won't. But none of this is going to change the structure. I think the moment anybody seriously tampers with the First Amendment you're going to see an outcry.
I've spent my life hearing that reporters [are] not popular in any way -- until somebody really challenges the First Amendment. Then all of a sudden you're going to see this country rise up, because it's really inherent. It's a great, powerful fact that we have on our side, which is that this is a nation that publishes. That separates us from a lot of other nations, and I don't think you can change it. I don't think this president can change it ... or one trial can change it, or some reporter's doing something right, or some reporter's doing something wrong. It's just there.
It's very, very powerful. And that's why, ultimately, whether the government likes it or not, we wear the white hat, because we are there, ringing the little bell, saying, "Truth, truth, truth," or at least our version of it. And it works.
So if you were to compare what's going on today to the Nixon era?
Same stuff. Remember they had the enemies list there? A lot of reporters were on it. We're never going to be popular with people that think they're doing the right thing that aren't doing the right thing. And of course, we ultimately have the ultimate say. We can shape public opinion, and we do.
Many people believe the Bush administration came into office with a hostile attitude toward the news media. Fair?
I don't know of any evidence that the Bush administration started out with a negative attitude toward the news media. Anybody who's in politics as a Republican knows that when you're talking to a reporter, there's probably somewhere between an 85 percent and 95 percent chance that you're talking to a Democrat. I think that's the basic reality.
Reporters always like to say: "Gee, I'm a Democrat, but it doesn't influence how I report; it doesn't influence my other attitudes. I can be fair. I can be neutral." If you had an environment where half the journalists are Republicans and half the journalists are Democrats, half are liberals, half are conservatives, the individual reporters would at least have a fighting chance of keeping their biases under control, because they'd be in a culture that had diversity. But when you're in a newsroom where there's 40 people and 38 of them are liberals, and you're one of the 38, the idea that that is not in any way going to impact how you report the news or what news you choose the report is unrealistic. ...
The Bush administration is profoundly different from most of its predecessors. I think there's a much deeper skepticism about our role in the press -- much less willingness to cooperate, often less willingness to leak to us as well.
I was struck in interviewing President Bush when he was governor and running for the president. From my point of view, here is this son of a president, this blueblood who's governor of Texas and perhaps about to become president, and he seemed the epitome of authority to me. It became clear in the course of the interview that he saw himself as this Texas good old boy who was being interviewed by this authority figure from The New York Times and that we each saw the other as the establishment figure. I found it kind of bizarre that he would perceive The New York Times to be the establishment, given his own background, but I think that there is something to that in this White House staff.
But I think that there also is a genuine distrust, a genuine sense that the press doesn't like them, that we're not going to treat them fairly. We also have different kinds of values.
And what does this case say about the relationship of the Bush administration to the press?
Well, what it says to me is sort of counterintuitive, because everybody goes around saying, "This administration is the most leakproof and the least hospitable to the press ever, the most hostile to the press ever." I've covered Washington on and off for a long time, and I don't disagree with that. This is an administration where you can't just stroll into the White House and the Executive Office Building and phone people up and go see them. It's pretty locked down.
But what this case shows is that even the Bush administration, because of the way Washington works, is in constant, chummy, off-the-record contact with the press.
Selected members.
Selected members. But the people that they're talking to are a mix of friendlies and fairly neutral people. In other words, [Time magazine reporter] Matt Cooper did not have a reputation as a member of the conservative media or somebody sympathetic to the Bush administration or unsympathetic; just a reporter covering the White House for a major news organization.
Is this administration different?
Well, certainly it has the reputation as being secretive even by the standards of the White House. [Times reporter] Scott Shane did stories recently about the National Archives reclassifying documents from the 1950s about Soviet agriculture programs that the intelligence community felt were wrongfully declassified in the first place, and that caused quite a backlash when that came out, because there had been millions of documents that were once in the public record that have now been pulled and reclassified. ...
You don't think the press had done a very good job covering the Bush administration.
No, no. And some of that is undoubtedly just because of my own political viewpoint, that I'm a critic of the Bush administration. But I think it goes beyond that. I think it stems from a few different reasons.
One reason, again, is the resurgence of conservative media in this country over the last couple decades -- Fox News, talk radio, all these kind of things that have pushed ... the dialogue in a rightward direction. 9/11 clearly had a huge part of that. The press felt very cowed after that. In some ways, I think that the Bush administration has played to the weaknesses of how journalists understand journalistic objectivity. ...
What's to stop partisan journalism, like Fox News, for instance -- I think you would call that partisan journalism, right? -- from the slippery slope of becoming propaganda? I think in a lot of cases, Fox News has already slipped down that slope. They've fallen and they can't get up. It is a slippery slope.
What stops engaged opinion journalism from descending into propaganda is the integrity and honesty of the reporters and editors who produce this stuff. What the media has to rely on in general is having a sufficient diversity of voices, so that you're not depending on the individual integrity or honesty of writers and reporters; that you have enough diversity of voices that if parts of the news media is slipping into propaganda -- the fundamental dishonesty with readers that propaganda is -- that you have other voices that are bringing them back to the facts. ...
Who establishes the media strategy for the Bush campaigns?
The president. This is a president and a candidate who … said: "These are the issues that I want to talk about, ... so here's what I'm going to run on. Now, you all can do what you do and do your jobs well and help us try and communicate those issues." He was quite clear about what his message was going to be. Let me put it this way: We did not have to remind him of his firmly held convictions.
Would you argue with him about what's practical and what's going to get him elected?
Sure. We said: "Social Security is a very problematic issue. Many candidates have run on that issue, and their bones are in the political graveyard." He said: "I don't care. I think it's the right thing to do, and we're going to run on it." Those are the best kind of candidates: candidates who are clear about who they are, what they believe in. That's why he won that election. John Kerry didn't know what he was all about. People like President Bush's character. Even if they disagreed with his policies, they believed that he knew who he was and where he was going.
In [writer and media critic] Ken Auletta's article in The New Yorker, he referred to an interview that he did with the president's former chief of staff, Andy Card, who talked about the press just being another interest group. What is the president's or the administration's attitude toward the press?
I don't think the president thinks, nor do I think, that there's an inherent ideological bias in the press. The president has described the press as a filter, which is exactly what it is. It filters the news and presents it in a way that it determines is the best way to present the news. But we live in a different information age today, ... so the president and the White House, unlike any other White House, has opportunities to deliver news straight to viewers and straight to voters without the press filtering it. ...
But do you see the press as another interest group?
Yeah, I think the press has an interest. I think the press has an interest in communicating to its viewers or readers, and their viewers or readers drive profit for those news organizations, so I think those news organizations have a certain bias toward their own readers. Yeah, I think they are a special interest. Of course they are. …
Would you say that the so-called mainstream media is biased against President Bush?
No, not necessarily. I think it's just a bias toward conflict. I think they'd write a conflict story about Bush just as they'll write a conflict story about Kerry. I don't think that the press in 2004 was any more unfair to Bush than they were to Kerry. The same thing with the 2000: I don't think they were any more unfair to us than they were to [Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Al] Gore. They were unfair to both of us.
So you simply just don't trust them.
I simply don't trust them. I know that they want [to] write a story that has conflict. I know that, I acknowledge it, and I proceed accordingly.
Listen, it doesn't matter if I go on CBS, PBS or Fox. Whoever is interviewing me is going to want to create some conflict in the story, or it's not interesting. That's just the way the news is. We can go out in campaigns, and we'll try and strategize: "Let's go do a press conference on our policy on the environment. Let's go to a manufacturing plant and talk about our economic plan" -- zero coverage or the back of [page] D17. We do the story attacking Kerry -- page 1. Biased for conflict.
I think the press are good people; I think they're educated people. But when they go to report, it's going be about conflict.
But you don't think that the press, especially the Washington press corps, has a bias against the president and the vice president?
The Washington press corps would have a bias against whoever is president. It doesn't matter who's there. ... I think that the Bush administration recognizes that coddling the press doesn't get you anywhere. ... And with the proliferation of news organizations now, the president can't sit down with every news organization in the world and have interviews, so they pick and choose their opportunities to get their message out in the way that they think will best communicate their message. Pretty standard operating procedure for any presidency. ...
So you don't accept the idea that there is a professional form of journalism that attempts to be objective.
I think everybody tries to be objective, but what's objective? Everybody has their own idea of what the truth is. ...
I'll just run a standard definition: presenting both sides of the story. I think most journalists try and do that. Why do you need to get around this filter if it's going to present both sides of the story?
Because both sides do it differently. Everybody presents their own side and their own versions of what both sides are. ...
This administration had a lot of discipline in the way in which it has controlled its message. Did you talk about that with the president? Was that explicitly stated?
The president has always been disciplined about his message, and the campaigns have always been disciplined. We've always determined, it being a campaign, what we want to talk about, and we stick to it.
I would imagine that every presidential candidate, every administration, has said that at the beginning. This one really was very successful keeping people on message, in line.
That's right. You have a guy at the top who knows who he is and what he stands for, and he's very clear about what kind of campaign he wants to run. If [the campaign] starts to get out of bounds, he lets us know. If we get off message, he lets us know. And we have a team of people that have worked together a long time. We know what works, and we know what doesn't.
So this is just discipline? It's not authoritarian control?
No, not at all. Not at all. It's good political strategy. Good political strategy suggests that even if you've got flawed strategy, you stick with it, rather than change your strategy every month, which is what John Kerry did. We may not have had a perfect strategy, but we stuck to it. ...
[Political commentator] Pat Buchanan said the Nixon administration, faced with the networks and their commentators, decided to strike back and do two different things: one, to publicly criticize the news media, which had not happened before; and two, to go around the filter and directly to local media and others. Is that basically what's going on now? ...
I think Pat Buchanan was a smart guy, and I think every presidential administration since Nixon has tried to determine what [its] message is and how to best communicate [its] message in a way that it gets to the public unfiltered. Now, it's going to get filtered by the press in some way, and the job of the administration and the press office is to figure out a way to get that message out in the clearest way possible.
But is there a perception that there's political capital to be made by attacking the press, by saying that the press distorts, is biased toward conflict, and therefore you'll get political points by attacking the press?
I think there are other presidents that have attacked the press much more than this president. ...
... So what I understand from what you're saying is you don't think the White House press corps really is as powerful as it once was.
There's no question it's not as powerful as it once was. The White House press corps' influence is considerably diminished from years ago. They used to be the only funnel through which news was poured to the public, and today there are hundreds, if not thousands, of news channels beyond the Washington press corps for getting information out to the nation and to the world. ...
Why do you think that so many journalists believe that this administration not only wants to get around, but also wants to discredit what is called mainstream media?
I don't think it wants to discredit mainstream media so much as it wants to acknowledge that there is other media. I think mainstream media doesn't want to acknowledge the fact that there's other people out there. The mainstream media wants to hold onto the monopoly it once held. That has dissipated. And the mainstream media gets mad when the administration goes to some other news outlet.
Well, what they point to is Clinton had 191 press conferences, and the Bush administration, as of middle of '06, had 74.
The last time I read the Constitution, there was no obligation to do any press conferences. I think 74 is plenty. ...
My own experience with the Bush administration was that I was told, "We don't really care what the mainstream press says; we'll get our message out anyway."
As I said, unlike a decade or two ago, there are [now] thousands and thousands of press channels. Every administration going forward is going to determine the channels that it wants to communicate its message to. ...
The news was once controlled by a handful of news organizations, and now it's not controlled by anybody. In fact, any administration now can walk out and put its news out to the world totally unfiltered, because it's covered live.
And you can spin it, too, via the Internet and blogs.
Well, it goes both ways. There are thousands and thousands of people spinning it back the other way. You've got the blogosphere, and you've got others who are putting their own spin on what the administration is saying. There is just as much pushback on the administration as there is on the administration pushing its news out. It's a hurricane of information and people trying to filter it both ways. ...
... Yeah, but you can have, for instance, your own bloggers, your own paid bloggers in a campaign, right?
Yeah, sure. That's just another way of getting information out.
But you don't label it as advertising as you would before or say that this is a paid political ad. You can just simply put it on the Internet without any connections to where it came from.
Well, I think consumers know if they're reading a blog that they understand that that's the blogger's opinion. ...
But do you remember another administration paying someone and getting them credentials into a news conference to ask questions?
It's apples to oranges. It's a different time. It's a different world. It's a different universe. Listen, I don't condone that. I think that was a mistake, and others have acknowledged that was a mistake. But the point is that this administration, like every other administration, has a message. They try and get it out, and they use whatever channels are available to them. In 2006, there are thousands of more channels available to this president than there were to presidents previously, so this administration picks and chooses the channels with which to communicate, which any president would do. ...
When 60 Minutes II was doing its story about Bush's National Guard service, what was the reaction in the Bush campaign? You knew it was coming.
Right. It was another National Guard story. ...
How did you use it? I mean, you must have thought about the advantage it was going to give you.
I think it did its work on its own. ...
Before it was discredited, did you see Dan Rather as being biased?
I would say that he had a pretty consistent [record] of producing stories unflattering to the administration. ...
You didn't expect Dan Rather to do a positive story about the administration.
I certainly didn't.
But you would expect, for example, that [Fox News'] Brit Hume might do a more positive story about the administration.
Every administration looks out at a sea of reporters, and ... [they will be] evaluated for what kind of reporting they do, whether or not it's objective and fair. Every administration will take that into account for who they do interviews with. ...
Let me take you back to Ken Auletta's interview with Andy Card. "Do you accept," he was asked, "that the press has a legitimate check-and-balance function?" And he said, "Absolutely not." He said, "Congress has a check-and-balance function; the judiciary does, but not the press." And Karl Rove and apparently [Counselor to the President] Dan Bartlett and others that Ken Auletta talked to confirmed that. Is that the administration's view? Is that your view?
I think Andy Card was right. I think the true checks and balances are the judiciary and the Congress. The press is not elected, so who's going judge which press outlet is the proper check and balance?
But the First Amendment -- it's there for a reason. President Jefferson said he'd rather have a free press.
Sure. Nobody's suggesting that there shouldn't be a free press.
But do you see it as having a check-and-balance function in terms of especially the federal government?
I think that the press has a duty and an obligation to report on local government, state government, federal government -- to be aggressive, to do its job. And its job is to report on whatever it's covering. The administration's job is to make policy and execute policy, and the press's job is to report on that.
When The New York Times reported on the National Security [Agency's] wiretap program, was that a legitimate function of the press? ...
Listen, the press is going to report what it gets. The problem is with the leak, not the report of the leak.
The problem was that somebody didn't stay on message.
Right. Yeah.
Because apparently they thought, according to the reporters involved, that there was something illegal going on.
Well, I think that there was a true national security interest at stake there, and the Times chose to do what it did. We happen to disagree with that.
Well, more than disagree. There's a leak investigation, and there's been some calls for prosecutions, not only of the leakers, but of possibly the reporters or the news organization.
Right, correct, as I think there should be.
You agree that the press should be prosecuted.
In that particular instance, yeah.
Even though a federal judge has said that, at least initially, that the program was illegal.
Well, we'll see how it ends up. ...
But you think it did damage national security.
Yeah, I do.
And the news organizations should be held responsible.
Well, I think the leakers should be held responsible for sure, and the news organizations should be held accountable as well. And well, we'll see where this goes. ...
You went to jail, right?
I did.
Why did you go to jail?
First Amendment issue.
Explain.
In 1980, during the hostage crisis, a representative of the shah came to speak at the University of Texas. I was editor of The Daily Texan, the newspaper at the University of Texas. Some students demonstrated -- some Iranian students -- and local law enforcement officials arrested and prosecuted those individuals. The prosecutors wanted unpublished evidence of the demonstration, which we refused to hand over. I was held in contempt of court and jailed briefly.
You believe in civil disobedience.
Sure, absolutely. I believe in the First Amendment.
So when you see reporters being subpoenaed not for national security but for reporting on doping in baseball, and then being threatened with jail, what's your reaction?
Are you talking about the BALCO [Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative] investigation? I generally support the reporters' right to do what they did in that particular circumstance.
As I understand it, the president of the United States personally acknowledged the work of these two reporters when he met them; he said it was a great public service, and yet now they're faced with jail by the same administration that's praising their work.
Well, the justice system will run its course. ...
So you're saying that the media landscape has changed so much that the major media that you grew up around really has lost its power.
It still plays an important role, but it's certainly not as powerful as it once was. The power has shifted, and I think that's a healthy development.
Is it easier to manipulate this decentralized media?
No, I think it just offers more channels to get information out, that's all. ...
[But these technological changes must have helped presidents stay more on message?]
Technology has had more of an impact on the presidency and how the presidency communicates than anything. News is virtual now. It is not 24-hour news cycles; it is instant news cycles. It is live. News is live all the time, around the clock. That has a huge impact on news organizations, on weekly news magazines. Their whole profit enterprise is completely turned upside down now.
It changes the way you, as a media strategist, look at a campaign as well.
Yeah, absolutely, sure. Everything we do is radically changed because we can digitally compress media now. Whereas I used to have to send a little box overnight to news stations, now we can just punch a button, and it's digitally sent immediately. In the 2004 campaign, we could produce an ad, and with one button it would go to 6 million people just like that. ...
Technology has reformed the process. We've always been accused of only communicating in 30-second sound bites. Well, I never liked that, but we were hostage to broadcast media, and that's all we could do. Now I can produce long-format video -- substantive on issues-- and put it on the Internet, and voters can see and hear and feel where our candidates are on a variety of issues without being limited to 30 seconds.
When you sit down in a media strategy now, in terms of putting a budget together, you don't necessarily have to be thinking in terms of how many minutes or hours I'm going to buy on local TV or pay the rates on local TV, because you can get around that, too.
It hasn't changed completely -- we're still buying broadcast from cable television -- but the paradigm is shifting, no question. And as I said, we can produce video; we can produce it quickly and we can distribute it broadly. We can have somebody talking about an issue for five minutes rather than 30 seconds, which is great. It's good for voters, and it's good for the candidates. ...
[Does the Bush administration have a different attitude toward the press?]
I think there's been an adversarial relationship between the press and different administrations. ... It was not easy to interview Hillary Clinton on Monica Lewinsky.
I think what's different here is that we've been in a war for the last few years that has not gone the way that the administration had hoped it would, and that has made the media more aggressive in its coverage and, I think in the administration's view, more hostile. So the administration has been less cooperative than we might like it to be.
Certainly the existence of 24-hour news networks, of bloggers, creates a plethora of outlets that has changed things somewhat considerably, and in some cases, the administration has thought it could go around mainstream media to find out outlets that it thinks will be more sympathetic. Therefore, it hasn't had to really respond to some of the reporting and certainly some of the editorializing in some of the big newspapers and so forth. The administration, the daily press conference has gotten to be an exercise in jousting rather than a place where much usable information comes out.
I don't just mean the adversary relationship, [but] reclassifying documents, not providing information. We hardly see any, for instance, Cabinet-level officials holding press conferences.
Correct. I think that this administration has certainly wanted to communicate with the American people in ways in which they can channel the message far more easily than they can going through a vigorous, aggressive questioning press. I think it's true of all administrations. I think this administration has been more rigorous in that respect than others partly because it's been more disciplined, partly because it has been so much on the defensive since going into Iraq. ...
How would you describe the Bush administration's relationship with the press?
[From] 2003, when [White House Press Secretary] Scott McClellan was appointed, to when he resigned [in 2006] was a period when the White House decided that it would manage the press by completely disengaging from it and refuting it and embarrassing it on the world stage. This represented a radical break with the past. ...
In what way?
In the age of what I call news management -- [from] 1963, when the networks first went to a 30-minute broadcast and they became national institutions, to 2003 -- during that period, White Houses, Republican and Democratic, had the same basic assumptions: that it was key for the White House to engage with the media, certainly to be mindful of its power, and to try and answer reporters' questions. ...
What we saw in this new interval -- 2003 through 2006 -- was the total overturn of that idea and basically the withdrawal from a consensus that had prevailed for four decades. The key to it was McClellan. He was completely inept in every single skill a press secretary has to have. He wasn't good on camera. He wasn't quick on his feet. He wasn't particularly eloquent. He didn't have superior command of the issues. He wasn't good at spin. He wasn't artful in his evasions. He made people mad. He basically went out there with nothing to say and produced a kind of informational emptiness that would have been thought, in the age of news management, to be suicidal, to be totally uncool -- I mean, not what a competent White House would ever allow itself to do. ...
Before, it would have been thought, well, if you're not making news every day, you're missing out on this big microphone you have to speak to the nation. If you're not trying to manage the White House press by releasing information to it carefully, they're going to go and dig up their own information. You can't do that. This is what I call the Gergen consensus, the [commentator and adviser to several presidents] David Gergen consensus. ...
... What is that?
The Gergen consensus was that look, there might be struggles and tensions in the relationship, and there are times when one side is totally frustrated at the other, and most of the time they go around grumbling about each other. But in the end, the White House and the White House press need each other and will cooperate, and so it's our job to understand them and still get our message out, get our agenda through by dealing intelligently with the Washington press. And people, [not only] Gergen but many others, strove to tell the White House how you did that.
This was the era in which people like [President Reagan's adviser] Michael Deaver were said to be media wizards, not because they shut out the press, but because they arranged for it to transmit a pretty picture that would be effective in communicating the charisma of the Reagan machine. Well, that's a strategy. It's totally about manipulation and using the press to your advantage, but it takes for granted that the cameras and what they're showing are extremely important. There was this atmosphere [not] of competition but cooperation, which ... basically described what successive White Houses did from Kennedy through Nixon through Reagan to Bush. ...
Somehow the [George W.] Bush White House overthrew that wisdom and put a whole new system in place, which is: We don't have to answer your questions. We don't care if you find us in contradiction of norms or facts. We're just going to go on as if you don't exist. That's a new idea. ... It's also a very risky strategy.
Is this what you mean by rollback?
Yeah. Rollback is just the word I used to describe a certain pattern that I see in the Bush White House treatment of the press.
Give me a specific example.
... Well, we saw it in the conversion of the White House briefing into an empty ritual. We saw it in the president vastly cutting back his encounters with an unscripted press. We saw it when, in public occasions where the press might be watching, the Bush White House decided not to allow any unfriendly questions from journalists or citizens.
We saw it in the way Dick Cheney basically made himself uncoverable as vice president. ... The White House press doesn't even know where Dick Cheney is much of the time. He doesn't have a daily schedule that would allow you to see what he is doing. That whole idea -- that you put more power into the vice president than almost any president in recent memory, and simultaneously take this person out of the public realm entirely, into a shadow world -- that itself is an amazing transformation, because it says, "This portion of what we're doing, you don't look at; you don't watch; you don't monitor."
No reporters travel with Cheney. Did you know that? That's amazing. How can that be when he has such an important role in our government? …
Let me read to you what [former Bush Chief of Staff] Andrew Card said at one point: "The press don't represent the public any more than other people do. I don't believe you have a check-and-balance function in the press." ... Does the press have a check-and-balance function? ...
Every single person who's gone into that room as a reporter believes in a check-and-balance function. If you ask them, they'll tell you that. What Card is saying is the very premise of sending you to the White House to ask us questions, we [don't agree with that] at all.
Bush has said that "we don't think you represent the American people." That's another thing every single person in that room believes. They think they're there asking the questions that the American people would ask, could ask, should ask. The White House is saying: "We don't agree with that either. You don't represent anybody. In fact, you're more like a special interest. ... We reject you as a representative of other Americans. And in fact, we kind of like it that there are people out there in the culture, in the culture war, who are discrediting you all the time, because you deserve to be discredited."
Another thing the White House did: It provided aid, comfort and ideological soulmate-ship with forces in the culture who are attacking the press, seeking to destroy and discredit it.
But how is this different than the [Pat] Buchanan/Nixon/[Vice President Spiro] Agnew/[Nixon Chief of Staff H.R.] Haldeman attitude toward the press?
It's not different at all. It's the gradual building of what started 35 years ago, until it took over the White House itself. That philosophy that the press is out to get us and is a liberal wing of the country -- just like the universities are captive to a small elite -- that notion, which started out in the political fringes, built over 30 and 40 years, and it came to occupy a central notion. ...
So if you have broken that mold, then how do you get your message out?
... You get your message out directly, through the president himself. He gives tons of speeches. He didn't stop communicating with the people in that sense, right?
What he stopped was any situation in which he could be questioned. What he stopped was explaining himself. This whole idea that part of the president's power comes from his ability to tell the story of his policy to the American people, … the Bush White House dissented from that and decided that less is more and that we shouldn't explain ourselves too much, because it dims the authority of the presidency. ...
A lot of what they did, besides rolling back the press, was try and set up their own media system or recognize the alternative one that was already there. But yes, part of it was broadcasting themselves. And you have to admit, in a day when you have whitehouse.gov, that's a perfectly good way to communicate to people, right? "Go to our Web site, and we'll tell you." Just that ability alone certainly changes the picture. And they have been very aggressive in using a whole bunch of alternative ways of becoming a media producer themselves.
One of the shifts in power going on today, beyond the White House, is that a lot of power is shifting to sources, because sources find it much easier to become media broadcasters themselves. ...
What do you mean, "sources"?
Well, let's take Mark Cuban, who owns the Dallas Mavericks and is a technology entrepreneur and businessman. He once had to deal with the beat writers for the Dallas Mavericks when he wanted to talk to the fans or address an issue in the team, and now he has his own blog, Blog Maverick. He doesn't even answer the questions of the beat writers anymore, who he's very impatient with. He's a source, somebody who would be quoted a lot in coverage of the team, who just doesn't deal with the reporters anymore. ...
And the Bush administration does the same thing?
Right. They're adapting to that. ...
... Besides whitehouse.gov, what other examples are there about how the White House gets its message out?
Well, Armstrong Williams: Pay him $240,000, and he broadcasts your message in the guise of being a television host and questioner on the same show.
And write columns.
Write columns for you, yeah, and all of it friendly to the basic message that "No Child Left Behind" is a great idea and the Department of Education is charging ahead. I describe that as [going] from Meet the Press to Be the Press.
Produce video releases to local TV stations?
Yes, which were inherently deceptive, where you had a PR person saying, "This is Karen Ryan reporting," as if a government-paid employee, in effect, could be a reporter. That was a serious thing, and that was distributed by the Bush administration. ...
So what's wrong with that? ...
Well, when the executive branch, with the immense powers of the presidency, becomes also producer of news about the presidency and the main source of information that we as Americans have about it, we have just slipped into a dangerous situation if that ever happened. I don't want the main source of news about the presidency to be the presidency. And when the White House ceases to deal with independent providers of news and becomes itself the provider, we are certainly entitled to worry about that. ...
So the press is basically not as powerful as it used to be.
Exactly, exactly. ... It's not as much of a monopoly as it once was. It doesn't have anywhere near the same kind of cultural authority it once did, and I think the Bush people recognized all of those things.
What you're describing has also taken place because of all this multitude of new outlets, with a rise of what some people call "partisan journalism" or "opinionated journalism," which has put into question the tradition of objective journalism. What do you think about objective journalism? ...
What American journalists actually mean when they say "objectivity" is about 12 or 15 different things, but they're all similar. It's the idea of neutrality. It's the idea of backing up and being detached. It's the idea of not choosing sides. It's an idea of getting all perspectives. But it's also [that] we're professionals, and we're kind of trained not to react. It's caught up with the idea of being a crap detector and being a good skeptic. But fundamentally, objectivity in the American journalism was a way of generating trust and maintaining [it] over time in a particular group of people and their practices. ... But it is, in many ways, breaking down. ...
[How?]
... By being adversarial, we perform a kind of a watchdog role. And if you have completely failed the country in your watchdog role and a war resulted, then it's beyond a misplayed story; it's an evacuation of your role.
The way that the press was sold and spun and just fooled by the White House in the run-up to the [Iraq] war represents more than just a missed story. How can one say that we have a watchdog press after a performance like that? There have been many other lapses like that, but this one was so systematic, and it involved such a critical question of, should we do this as a country. …
What should [journalists] do about this situation with the White House, with this rollback?
Ultimately it becomes incumbent on the serious press to quit their relationship, to stop going [to briefings] and start reporting completely from the outside. ... They're already on the outside. They should just quit entirely and go to work on reporting the White House from the outside. ...
Are bloggers journalists?
My opinion is that people who write blogs do things that are journalistic all the time, and lots of it isn't. We really shouldn't oppose these things to one another. They are actually going to end up working together much more than they are going to be at loggerheads. I've tried to follow those principles myself in exploring the blog revolution as a blogger. But I think this bloggers-versus-journalists drama is way overdone. It's just kind of the way professional journalists react to things. ...
It doesn't mean that professionals are going away or they're going to be replaced by troops of citizen journalists. I've never said that; I don't believe it. But the picture has changed a lot. The monopoly that they once had, they don't have anymore. They just have to change and adjust to new conditions that are coming about every day.
But there are some people who are advocates for blogging, if you will, but they call it "citizen journalism." They believe that the wisdom of the crowd is superior to what has traditionally gone on [in the mainstream media].
That's not really what they're saying, no. That's what a professional journalist might hear them saying. The wisdom of the crowd is more like this: Have you ever noticed that the most e-mailed articles on the site can be interesting and cause you to discover stuff that are kind of fresh and new? It's like what a lot of people do actually has some information in it, and it's a lot easier for us today to record the choices of what lots of people do. And if we look at that and say, "What is there?" that's what people mean by the wisdom of the crowd.
Now, what a professional journalist hears when they say that is they immediately add 10 reflex reactions where they associate that to market research and giving people what they want, and all of the sudden you've lost all professional autonomy, and you're just catering to people's whims and desires. ... That's what it seems like, but it's not. ... There are certain situations in which group intelligence can be tapped. It's not a replacement for this or that; it's just a new development.
… [An example would be something like] the blog that notices something significant in the case of [Sen.] Trent Lott talking about [Sen.] Strom Thurmond and saying, "It would have been better if he had been president back in '48." The general press reported that story as, "Oh, there was a tribute to Strom Thurmond." They didn't analyze the inner meaning of that statement in terms of segregation and Thurmond and so on. …
Well, what happened with Trent Lott was very interesting. He gave these remarks at a birthday party that was covered, and [ABC] sent some young producers who were low on the totem pole to this routine event. One of the producers who thought what Lott said could be newsworthy wrote it down, but a senior producer said, "Nah, that's nothing." But it ended up in a short report on ABC, and it made it to the Web.
What happened then is that the bloggers, representing a kind of a second jury of newsworthiness, looked at it carefully and said, "You know, he really said something amazing here." Then it reverberated from the bloggers back to the traditional press, who then made a story of it, and that is when Lott had to resign [as Senate majority leader].
Now, the interesting part was the chance of your average young [ABC] producer not knowing very much about the 1948 presidential campaign and therefore not really hearing much in what Trent Lott [said], those chances were pretty high. But the chances of the blog world, interconnected the way it is, not knowing that relevant background -- zero. So the blog system was actually more likely to catch the significance of what Lott said than an individual producer or a reporter would be.
Is that why 60 Minutes II wound up with "Rathergate"?
Oh, definitely. Another big reason why 60 Minutes II wound up with Rathergate was that [CBS News] didn't have the Web literacy that they should have had. ... They didn't know what was happening to their story on the Web. They went into a defensive crouch and said, "We stand by our story." But nobody in power, nobody with any decision-making influence actually was monitoring what was happening to that story online, and they didn't know how weak their story was. They persisted for at least seven or eight days in something that many other people knew was going to fall. ... It was a case of a news organization that was not actually current with knowledge of its own story. It was extraordinary. ...
Conservative bloggers that we've talked to say, "How many times has this sort of shoddy journalism happened in the past and nobody ever found out about it?" Is that fair?
I guess it would be a fair question, yeah. Their assumption that it goes on all the time is not fair. I actually think this was an extraordinary situation, extraordinary lapse that is not necessarily typical, but nonetheless extremely disturbing. I don't agree with CBS, and I don't agree with the right-wing bloggers, either, about what happened in this story. ...
[How important is Fox News in terms of the changes that have happened in the media landscape?]
Having a news network organized on different principles is important because it breaks the monopoly. It shows that there are other ways of doing things. It says there's an alternative. It generates a new audience. Fox demonstrated that there was a market for another formula in news, and that's significant.
[Do] you like it, partisan journalism and Fox News?
I don't like Fox News, but not because it's partisan-inflected. I don't like it because it's unreliable. It's very sensationalized. It's low-cost news that puts entertainment ahead of actual news gathering. So I don't like it for those reasons. I think a conservative network that had high professional standards and was also well financed and had a large, active newsroom would be interesting. I don't think that would be necessarily a terrible thing. ...
Is the Lott case an example of partisan journalism doing good?
Well, first of all, journalists are the ones who think that opinion disqualifies someone from giving good information. In reality, lots of people connect to the public world and the political world through opinion and argument and controversy and belief and conviction. Certainly rooting [for] our side against them, that's normal. It's not abnormal. There's not something defective about it. That's the way most people participate in politics.
It turns out that getting people engaged through argument is a good way of getting them to go look for information and get interested in [something] and want more. That's the genius of the lobbying the way [Talking Points Memo blogger] Josh Marshall does it. He engages people through argument, political conviction, what you'd call partisanship, if you want to. It's his membership in the community of liberal left thinkers, and it's through the intensity of that relationship that he leads his users and readers to be interested in lots of information, new information, recently unearthed information, information buried in documents and hearings and lots of other places that he digs around in.
Now he's hired people who are investigative reporters to dig around in that. And if mainstream journalists keep looking down their nose at anything that they can label partisan, they're just going to miss what's going on in the larger world, and they're going to make themselves increasingly irrelevant.
How did the content of news coverage in the media change after 9/11?
… After 9/11, what you saw was a media culture that was scared straight. The hard-news component in network news, in morning network news and on cable news, surged upward. …
That wasn't sustained. By the second quarter of 2002, we saw the media reverting back to the mix of hard and soft news that we'd seen before 9/11 -- not completely, but it had gone about three-quarters of the way back to this somewhat more tabloid, more lifestyle-oriented news agenda. We saw that in various studies that we conducted, and that others did.
In the initial stage after 9/11, how well, in your estimation, did the news media do in covering the war in Afghanistan?
I think you have to break understanding the press coverage after 9/11 into three parts: The first part was the immediate aftermath of the attacks in New York and Washington. What happened there was that the press became very serious, and also very cautious. There was a marked effort by journalists not to rush to judgment, as there had been after the attacks in Oklahoma Cit