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 Recent commentary from National Journal: Legal Affairs: We Don't Need to Be Scofflaws to Attack Terror (February 5, 2002) Disregarding the Geneva Conventions will undermine the ability of the United States to wage war. By Stuart Taylor Jr. Political Pulse: Long on Character, Short on Details (February 5, 2002) Bush's speech was aimed at supporters who are not yet partisans of the GOP. By William Schneider. On Books: An Exposé, Starring the Author (February 5, 2002) dot.bomb: My Days and Nights at an Internet Goliath proves that even those who fail at business, or who work for failures, can find a gullible publisher. By K. Daniel Glover. Media: Sentimental Journey (January 29, 2002) As the Enron story emerges, journalists are transported back to glorious White House scandals past. By William Powers. Legal Affairs: Beware of Cures That Are Worse Than the Disease (January 29, 2002) What Enron did stinks to high heaven. But that doesn't justify passing the badly flawed Shays-Meehan bill. By Stuart Taylor Jr. Political Pulse: 'Daddy Issues' Grab Center Stage (January 29, 2002) Even among women voters, 'mommy issues' are viewed as less important than they were before September 11. By William Schneider. Social Studies: Don't Fear Bin Ladenism's Strength. Fear Its Weakness (January 29, 2002) The West faces not the clash of two cultures but—what may be trickier—the catastrophic collapse of one. By Jonathan Rauch. More from National Journal. |
Media 
Enron's Gift?What if the Enron quake doesn't pan out as many journalists suspect—and the Bushies are squeaky-clean? by William Powers ..... Maybe Enron will be the downfall of this Administration. Maybe we don't yet know all the ways in which Kenneth Lay and company corrupted the government. Maybe the Vice President is sitting on those secret documents from his energy policy meetings because, having come of age in the first post-Watergate White House, he knows that a fish rots from the head down—and now he's the head. Most American news organizations are operating on the assumption that these are live possibilities, and so they should. From the early days of this scandal, when the President tried to obfuscate his ties to Lay, there has been something weird and suspicious about the White House's behavior. Since weird, suspicious behavior is the fount of all great journalism, the Enron story deserves every ounce of energy it's getting from us news people. Right now, this all looks really bad for the Bush Administration. But what if the Enron story doesn't pan out the way many journalists suspect—and quietly hope—it will? What if all the denials and stonewalling are nothing more than knee-jerk self-defense? There's a chance, remote though it now seems, that no one will uncover evidence of high-level Administration wrongdoing in the Enron saga. That this story will turn out to be not a cancer on the presidency, but a large benign tumor—a tale of corporate malfeasance by a few friends of the regime, and poor regulatory oversight way down the federal chain of command. Imagine such an outcome, and suddenly Enron looks a lot less like a problem for the Bushies. In a strange way, it might even wind up being an odd bit of good luck. Ridiculous? Not if you look at how the story has changed the news landscape in the past few weeks. Cast your mind back to December, when Enron was still cooking quietly in the background, and the story that mattered most was the war. By any measure, Afghanistan had gone very well for the White House. Bush's sky-high popularity ratings were making headlines, and the Defense Secretary had become, against all odds, a kind of movie star. The Philadelphia Inquirer's December 29 headline said it all: "Do Ya Think He's Sexy? He's Vigorous. He's Direct. At Nearly 70, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld Is TV's Newest Stud." Sometimes it's embarrassing to be a journalist. Even as similar headlines were popping up everywhere, Vanity Fair was going to press with a February cover story on the war leadership, featuring Annie Leibovitz's portraits of Bush, Stud Rumsfeld, and all the rest. In modern popular culture, the lather doesn't get any thicker. But as any savvy news consumer knows, it couldn't last. In this business, anyone who is riding really high has already been teed up for a major fall. Indeed, just as the media's pro-war wave was cresting, there were new signs of trouble for the White House. First came the questions raised in Britain and elsewhere about the treatment of the detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. A Los Angeles Times story of January 23 was typical: "Rising to counter mounting criticism after months of favorable wo rld opinion for the war effort, U.S. officials forcefully denied Tuesday that Al Qaeda suspects are being treated inhumanely at a makeshift military prison in Cuba. In the last few days, critics ranging from members of the British Parliament to U.S. civil rights groups have accused the United States of mistreating the detainees, who are being held in 8-by-8-foot wire cages at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base." That story ran on the front page, and the same news played prominently elsewhere. But despite the Cuba story's prominence, and its extremely dramatic visuals—photos of prisoners bound and on their knees, their faces masked—it didn't get a lot of traction, and certainly didn't become the "dark-turn" story that it might have been. There are several possible reasons, among them the continued domestic popularity of the war, and the Administration's effective defense of conditions at Guantanamo. But there's another explanation: Enron. On the same day the L.A. Times ran that 1,170-word Cuban prison story, it also ran as the front-page lead a 1,725-word piece under the irresistible headline: "Federal Agents Probe Shredding Inside Enron.... Inquiries Will Widen After Wastebasket Full of Material Is Discovered in Houston. Bush Expresses Outrage Over Harm to Investors." Tell the truth: Which story would you read first? So it goes lately. Even when war coverage gets technically better play than Enron—the top of the newscast, the lead position on the front page—it feels a bit perfunctory and second-class, because the Enron news has all the juice. Now that the press has turned so much of its attention to Enron—the media are not good at holding two thoughts simultaneously—the huge spotlight we had shone on the war has dimmed considerably. Which undoubtedly makes waging the war somewhat easier for the Administration. If the war continues to go well, and Enron isn't another Watergate, we'll never know for sure whether the White House will have the curious workings of the modern media to thank for its good fortune. But absent Enron, it was a pretty sure bet that the media would eventually have gone negative on the war (and, of course, they still might). This week, the Project for Excellence in Journalism released a new study on the war coverage. It found that "the press heavily favored pro-Administration and official U.S. viewpoints," while offering "minimal" criticism of the government. Normally, this sort of thing sends journalists scurrying around to correct themselves. But not now. They're too busy chasing Enron.
What do you think? Discuss this article in the Politics & Society conference of Post & Riposte. More from National Journal. More on politics and society in Atlantic Unbound and The Atlantic Monthly. William Powers is media columnist for National Journal. He recently spent three months in Japan as a Japan Society Fellow, studying the role of reading in Japanese life. This column appears every week in National Journal, a weekly magazine covering politics and government published in Washington, D.C. For information on National Journal Group publications, see NationalJournal.com. Copyright © 2001 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved. |
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