Eat The Press

Kurtz: Still Convinced The Media Has A Bad Attitude On Iraq

Posted Monday June 19, 2006 at 11:39 AM

On yesterday's "Reliable Sources," host and Washington Post media columnist Howard Kurtz once again posed leading questions to his guests suggesting that the media had an agenda to report only bad news from Iraq. To guest John Fund:

KURTZ: Fund, let me turn to you. Is this the first break the media has given the president on this war in a long, long time, at least a year?

JOHN FUND, OPINIONJOURNAL.COM: Well, when the president goes on Baghdad it's news and it's a good photo-op. So obviously they are going to get favorable coverage. But I just don't think the media is excessively negative on Iraq. We have found computer files in Zarqawi's computer which shows he was very pessimistic about the insurgency and said time was on the Americans' side. That got very little coverage even though my intelligence sources say it's been completely authenticated.

KURTZ: And so you believe this is because of a negative media mindset on the war?

FUND: I think that the media has decided this war is going badly and short of the surrender of the insurgency, that's the storyline. So I think the body count continues to be covered and Zarqawi's computer drive revelations aren't.

For the rest of the mindset, he refers back to the position of "John Fund" that the media is negative on Iraq. See the following exchange with Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page:

KURTZ: Clarence Page, within a couple of days of the president's trip there was a suicide bombing in the Shiite mosque. As you noted the U.S. death toll reached past the 2500 park and you mentioned the kidnapping of the two U.S. soldiers.

So for whatever Bush got out of the trip and the killing of Zarqawi, isn't the press going to always keep going back to the daily violence? Isn't that the storyline that just is inescapable for the journalists?

PAGE: That's a natural default position, of course, isn't it, Howard? News is what happens when things aren't going the way they're supposed to and sadly enough, not a lot of things in Iraq are going the way they're supposed to. John Fund raises a good point, though that a piece of intelligence from Zarqawi. In some ways, I think we've been kept cal of it because it sounds almost too good or too much outside the normal storyline to be given credibility immediately.

KURTZ: What about John Fund's suggestion that the reason for that and the sort of downbeat tenor of the coverage of the war is that journalists have turned again this war?

PAGE: I think journalists are, again, our default position is to look for the news. And ...

KURTZ: Why is it that the violence is always the news? What about progress in Iraq?

PAGE: The signs of progress have not been that strong.

Guest Jim Lehrer has the same answer for Kurtz: there aren't many good stories because there aren't many good stories to report. Note how Kurtz spins it:

KURTZ: Let's talk a little bit about the war. The administration as you well know insists that quiet progress is being made and to some degree faults the media for relentlessly focusing on the car bombs and the suicide attacks and painting a negative picture. Is there some validity to that complaint?

LEHRER: No. No. I mean there's probably -- well, from their perspective, I can understand why they may seem -- why they might complain.

KURTZ: There's an awful lot of violence on the table.

LEHRER: There's an awful lot of violence on the table. We're in the reporting business. We not in deciding, well we got to have so many good stories and so many bad stories. Whatever the stories are on a given day, that's what we must report.

KURTZ: Right, but then the question comes, what constitutes a story? If there's an attack on U.S. troops, if journalists are injured as Bob Woodruff, as Kimberly Dozier was, that's obviously a story. In a way, that's an easy story for television to tell, but if there's more schools are opening and more health clinics and it's hard to get out in the country because of the danger to journalist, isn't that a harder story to tell in Iraq?

Perhaps, possibly because, as Kurtz's own Washington Post reported, yesterday, conditions in Baghdad continue to deteriorate and it is highly unsafe to venture beyond the Green Zone, driving reporters to leave (according to the NYT's Dexter Filkins, there are less than 50 reporters of any nationality in Baghdad now, compared to thousands at the war's beginning). These facts continue to suggest that Kurtz's constant pushing of the "negative media" spin is not consistent with conditions in Iraq nor with the media's reporting on those conditions.