The Media's Waterloo

For more than three decades, the U.S. news media has been living off -- or living down, depending on your perspective -- its Watergate-era reputation of helping to unseat a power-abusing president and exposing a raft of other political scandals.

But the U.S. media's debacle over Iraq -- failing to seriously question George W. Bush's case for invasion and often acting as pro-war cheerleaders as the casualty lists lengthened -- has dealt a death blow to that 30-year-old mythology. The bloody spectacle of Iraq has become the Waterloo of Washington's "Watergate press corps," its crushing defeat.

Even the nation's preeminent news outlets, such as the New York Times and the Washington Post, were sucked into the fiasco, shattering the trust that many Americans had placed in their "free press" as a vital check and balance on executive power.

By contrast, many poorly funded websites did a much better job of standing up to the political pressures, showing skepticism and getting the story right.

The third anniversary of Bush's Iraq invasion stands as a marker, too, for the slide of the U.S. news media's big-name talking heads into the status of laughingstock, even if they're too vain to know that the derision's about them.

Imperial power

Over the past three years, as the Bush administration has unveiled the United States as an imperial power that plays by its own rules, it has dawned on more and more Americans that the old institutions -- the Congress, the courts and the press -- that were supposed to protect the republic had long since crumbled into decay.

Yet, because of the lingering Watergate myth, many Americans were most shocked to find that the scrappy, idealistic Washington press corps had evolved into a careerist, courtier news media. Even well-informed Americans were perplexed over how the press had become almost the opposite of its press clippings.

After all, in the 1970s, American reporters became heroes to many for exposing Richard Nixon's crimes and revealing other abuses, such as the Pentagon's Vietnam War lies and CIA spying on U.S. citizens. Conversely, the reporters were hated by Nixon's loyalists, who called them the "liberal media."

Though these extremes of Watergate images -- of heroes or villains -- never captured the precise picture, they did serve real political and professional needs. The news media relished its elevated heroic status, while the detractors built a cottage industry around the goal of neutralizing the "liberal media."

In truth, however, reporters always operated within tight parameters set by their publishers and news executives, most of whom could be counted as wealthy members of the establishment. Journalists rarely wandered too far afield out of fear of losing a job or a promotion.

But the Vietnam War and Nixon's Watergate excesses shattered the national political consensus, creating a brief period of competing power centers and relative openness. The divisions within the establishment, in effect, gave the reporters space to obtain information and publish stories that previously would have been kept secret.

By the 1980s, however, that moment had passed. A new framework was put in place to constrain press independence. (For details, see Robert Parry's "Secrecy & Privilege.")

Still, right-wing press "watchdogs" and an expanding conservative media hammered away at perceived "liberal bias," and mainstream reporters learned that the biggest threat to their careers was to be stuck with the "liberal" label.

Terror attacks

The Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks made dissent and skepticism even riskier. Journalists, politicians and even citizens who questioned Bush and his emerging "preemptive war" policies were denounced as unpatriotic and unhinged.

As a result, the media's pro-Bush pandering reached new heights. For instance, on Dec. 23, 2001, NBC's Tim Russert joined New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Cardinal Theodore McCarrick and first lady Laura Bush in musing about whether divine intervention had put Bush in the White House to handle the Sept. 11 crisis.