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 Recent commentary from National Journal: Social Studies: Stop Whining, America, and Get Serious About Smallpox (February 3, 2003) America's strategic vulnerability to smallpox is clear and present, even if the virus itself is not. By Jonathan Rauch. Legal Affairs: Do We Want Another 100 Years of Racial Preferences? (February 3, 2003) The hard question is whether the justices should ban all racial preferences in university admissions. By Stuart Taylor Jr. Political Pulse: Writing a How-To Textbook on Losing (February 3, 2003) Israel's venerable Labor Party went out of its way to do everything wrong. By William Schneider. Wealth of Nations: The World Is Winning, Not Losing, the War on Poverty (January 28, 2003) New research rebuts the accepted notion that globalization is causing poverty to worsen. By Clive Crook Political Pulse: Political Facts of Life May Be Changing (January 28, 2003) The resentment of taxes has fallen to its lowest level in more than 40 years. By William Schneider. Legal Affairs: Racial Preferences in Admissions: The Real Choice We Face (January 28, 2003) The most repugnant aspect of the status quo is that it amounts to pervasive racial discrimination. By Stuart Taylor Jr. More from National Journal. |
Media 
The War GlutWhen the question is war, the news trade's most essential job, after reporting facts, is making sense of them. by William Powers ..... Everyone agreed this week that America needed more information about Iraq. Even the White House conceded the point, albeit indirectly. The hot news story, both before and after the State of the Union speech, was about administration plans to declassify intelligence that reportedly will show Iraq evading U.N. weapons inspectors-and, the White House hopes, bring the public fully on board for war. As we waited for this new information, it was remarkable to stand back and behold the sheer quantity of other information on Iraq, the mountain of war news that's already out there in the media and constantly growing. News outlets have devoted huge resources and enormous energy to this story, and every day brings a gigantic bounty of fresh work: So many different stories and ways of thinking about Iraq that sometimes you have to wonder if the media are advancing the discussion at all, or just fogging it up. When the question is war, the news trade's most essential job, after reporting facts, is making sense of them-clarifying a complicated world. Take a look around the media today, at the plethora of stories, takes, angles, and interpretations, and clarification is not the first word that comes to mind. This is not the fault of any one outlet. Taken individually, most are doing a fine job. But put it all together, watch the news as it tumbles in hour after hour, and the collective picture can be literally mind-boggling. One problem is that hard facts about the question of the hour-the precise nature of Saddam Hussein's weapons program-have been hard to come by, not just for U.N. inspectors but for journalists. Thus, the media wind up spending a lot of time on meta-stories, those soft and squishy stories-about-the-story that can be molded into any shape you please, according to the taste of each news outlet. Poll numbers, for instance, are endlessly flexible and serve the full range of journalistic needs. On the day of the State of the Union speech, USA Today reported in a front-page story that the public is "less receptive" to Bush this week than it was during last year's speech, because his job-approval ratings have dropped from 84 percent to 60 percent. It was a simple point, and it served USA Today's relatively simple purpose, which was to show that Bush had his work cut out for him on the speech and in marshaling support for a war against Iraq. This week's issue of The Economist used poll numbers to make a series of very different, very clever little points about the way public opinion affects, and would be affected by, the president's decision on war. The magazine noted, among other things, that the drop in Bush's own popularity has not affected popular support for the war, and it argued that war will be acceptable to the U.S. public as long as the domestic war opposition lacks "coherent leadership." The piece closed with this subtle thought on how the war might be spun: "In terms of the administration's freedom of action, reluctant acceptance of war without appetite looks better than bloodthirsty enthusiasm." That's high-grade PR analysis. Indeed, the one thing that strikes you as you wade through all this stuff is that as war itself has changed over the years, and become more sophisticated and abstract, so, too, has the journalism about war. Look back at the coverage of World War II, and that conflict, for all its complexity, feels very straight-ahead. It was us-versus-the-enemy, and the story was what happened yesterday. Now, the story is not just what happened, but the atmospherics of what happened, the embedded messages, the spin, the hype, the manipulation, and all the hall-of-mirror games that the media now play with pols and the military. This war hasn't even happened yet, and we're already seeing plenty of this stuff. One of the best pieces I read this week was a Newsweek story by Evan Thomas about how soldiers cope with fear on the battlefield. At one point, Thomas describes an Army training exercise in which soldiers of the Third Infantry Division fight a street battle in a mock city made of old trailers. He writes: " 'Train the way you fight, fight the way you train' is the mantra of the armed services. Yet there is no substitute for the real thing. The urban-fighting drills of the Third I.D. feel a little unreal, staged more for the CNN cameras perhaps than as preparation for a real fight." It was a small point, but emblematic of the highly media-conscious military that journalists have been covering since Vietnam. Finally, even though the first shot hasn't been fired in this conflict, there's quite a lot of journalism on what the world will look like after it begins. Speculative economics is especially prevalent. "Confidence Wanes as War Worries Mount," was the headline recently over a stock market story on the front of the Los Angeles Times business section. The problem, said one quoted source, is that everyone assumes war would be good for financial markets, so the markets "could be set up for big trouble if a war doesn't follow the script." Meanwhile, over at the Web site of The Weekly Standard, Irwin M. Stelzer was suggesting that once "the uncertainties over Iraq are resolved," the economic gloom will lift-that is, war will be good for investors. "About the best thing the politicians can do is eliminate uncertainty by getting on with the war, winning it quickly, and opening Iraq's oil industry to new investment. That would be a real stimulus package." Now that we've got that straight, who's up for a war?
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 © 2002 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved. | [an error occurred while processing this directive] | ||
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