This topic is interesting. Taking a different case and a longer social process. Consider what happened with the mainstream press and the dropping of the atomic bomb in Japan. Today we understand the horrific images of the blast, but in the aftermath the NY Times was hard at work trying to dispell any information about what happened. In fact, the NY Times correspondent was paid by the Pentagon and worked hard to attack anyone who went away from the Army line. For his work, he received a Pulitzer. Lefties, such as Amy Goodman, have worked to get the NY Times to give back its Pulitzer without success. Traditional public discourse, as I pointed out, recognizes and understands the carnage after the bombing (though some may justify it as necessary to end the war), but few saw the NY Times as an administration lacky. Most framed them as liberal elites -- or just elites. The larger question about the social discourse is what processes have to occur for people to question the entire discourse. How do previous discourses bleed into more contemporary ones? How do previous motives structure the view of current motives? My reading is that even those cynical of US foreign policy discourse from the liberal anti-Bushies don't necessarily blame the media as much as they blame Bush and Co. (though there are some media reform types out there from the liberal perspective). What has to occur for them to change their perspective on the public sphere (that the structure of the sphere, not just the actions of the actors need to change; that is, where the doves and media reform types cannot be seen as separate identities)? Does that mean a fundamental change in identity in anti-war liberals, or are these different tactics?
I'm going to apologize up front for the loopiness of this post, but I have a phone in my ear and I can't sign off (tech support), but I'm very interested in this topic generally so I want to get something off.
"Government's Little Helper" was a regular topic of discussion in graduate school (where I studied with Zaller), where we saw the paper go through several iterations.
One concern I had as an I.R. scholar was that not all "conflicts" are alike. (One reason, and a good one, for the COW operationalization of "war" as involving n > 1000 battlefield deaths.) [I know, technically greater than or equal to, but I don't know how to underline!]
It might well be the case that Zaller and Chiu find a more "balanced" press on Somalia and Haiti because those operations were small beer.
To make that somewhat more scientific, all else being equal, the lower the stakes (risks, national interest, what-have-you), the greater the probability the press will be more adversarial because it can afford to be on the "wrong" side institutionally.
(I'm reminded of Dan Rather's famous aside just after 9/11 that he "knew what the right questions" were but this wasn't the time to ask them.)
It bears noting, too, that there was substantive partisan disagreement over both Somalia and Haiti, whereas in the case of Iraq the administration -- by virtue of what we called in the Army "information dominance" -- effectively co-opted partisan disagreement with the AUMF (or, as Krebs/Lobasz have it, "silenced" the opposition).
Because there was partisan disagreement, reporters could pick-and-choose sides on Somalia and Haiti in a way they couldn't do with Iraq.
What made Katrina different? The administration -- indeed the government generally -- could not corner the market on information -- could not achieve information dominance.
This, it would seem to me, is endemic to media and I.R., especially in an era when, as comm studies and J-school faculty have taught us, media has drastically reduced its overseas staffs.
(As a self-aggrandizing aside, I wrote a paper in grad school on newspaper partisanship and the market and found that, once papers went public they became significantly less overtly partisan because their financial incentive structures changed. Even the notoriously, rabidly pro-Republican LA Times and Chicago Tribune became more "fair and balanced.")
I suspect a similar story is at work here. There is simply no market incentive for the media to provide a non-indexed foreign affairs coverage, so you can't expect to see a range of non-US-officialdom represented (let alone someone, say, at the al-Ahram Centre in Cairo).
Covering Katrina was relatively cheap -- high incentives for professional rewards, low cost, everyone speaks English, you can drive there, and you don't need to know much about meteorology or hydrodynamics or engineering to "get" someone standing on his roof awaiting rescue.
Covering Iraq would be quite costly, even if only measured in terms of private information -- the lion's share of which was held by Saddam and Bush, neither of whom had much interest in cooperating with the press.
My one issue with anything on "the media" is the confusion and inconsistency with which people refer to "the media." In good constructivist form, "the media" is both agent and structure, a duality that I think is under-appreciated.
On the one hand, yes, "the media" has actorhood--its not an actor, but a series of actors. Reporters with agendas, editors with axes to grind, corporations with profits to make and interests to protect. There is no "the media," rather, there are those in the Media.
On the other hand, "the media" is a forum, a site where politics takes place. Candidates do battle through the media, agendas rise and fall in the media. In this sense, it is no more than delivery vehicle for the messages of other actors to a wider audience.
For example--back in Iowa, there was the notion that "the media" made Huckabee. He was a media darling, they liked him, and they launched him. Now, on the one hand, I'd certainly bet that there were reporters who said, hey, this guy is fun / good / a good story and hyped Huckabee pieces to their editors. But, on the other hand, many reporters on the ground in Iowa weren't making stuff up about Huckabee. They were pitching Huckabee stories because that's what the story was--there was a ground-level movement toward his campaign that the reporters observed and they were conveying that event to a wider audience.
I don't think you can really separate the two (again, in good constructivist fashion). In that sense, though, I think its a disservice to call "the media" Government's Little Helper. Yes, some in the Media certainly fit this role. But, at the same time, the media can only report what is going on. You might remember that much of the public and most politicians were supportive of Iraq at first--yes, there were dissenting voices, but far fewer at the time than is convenient to remember now. Had a few more national leaders stood up to the administration, that would have given them a story to report. Simply blaming the media for the failings of an entire political class removes responsibility from those who should have known better or paid a stronger price for their failures of judgment.
Or, you could just watch opening bit on A Daily Show tonight....
(a bit of live-blogging, as I'm watching it now, and they pretty much skewer "the media" on this very issue for the campaign...)
It's way more sinister than "indexing".
Here's a shocking example. Rochester NY's Democrat and Chronicle, early on Sunday morning on its website in mid 2004 had a "cover" story of a young enlisted man who literally had his face blown off in Iraq. He was blind, had two holes for a nose and one for his mouth. He was left to the care of his mother. Within a hour, the story + photo was wiped, completely. Never have I regretted more not doing a screen scrape.
Here's another. I was a regular listener of the local NPR station. In the run up to the war, they consistently played "torture tapes" allegedly from Saddam's prison during the 6-7 am window. Nice sound coming from the clock radio.
Last, Tavis Smiley and others had bold critics of the war on their shows. Every darn time one of the guests would really wind up for taut criticism, the station was jammed.
So there are censors at work. Whether they were the local VFW, DoD, or Sneaky Pete, who knows?
Eppur censuravano.
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