Book Review: Dubya and the Media

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Book Review
A Dubya in the Headlights: President George W. Bush and the Media. Joseph R. Hayden. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2009. 275 pp. $75 hbk.

Note: This book review appears in the Winter 2009 issue of Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly. I post it because the book illustrates and documents news media manipulation by the White House, and how the resulting “truthiness” served to distort public understanding of events on many levels. —TP

A Dubya in the Headlights is an indictment of the George W. Bush presidency driven by compelling evidence that in no way spares the media.

Joseph Hayden, a former TV producer who teaches journalism at the University of Memphis, begins with research questions that are answered via multiple quantitative and qualitative methodologies. The author enhances statistical data on media coverage by examining individual stories for specific phrasing and imagery. Because the line separating conventional news from entertainment is blurry, he considers the impact of talk shows, movies and even Saturday Night Live, noting how Bush benefited from television’s “inattention to substance.”

Hayden challenges assertions that the Dubya White House masterfully manipulated the media. If the press “doesn’t respect you, and thinks you’re an idiot,” Hayden concludes, “you are no master of press relations.” It was not a matter of clever manipulation of the media, Hayden argues, but a matter of the media allowing (and sometimes enabling) the manipulation.

Bush’s greatest faults, Hayden thinks, was his indifference to his own ignorance and his seeming determination that everyone remain uninformed, too. John Dean said Bush and Cheney “created the most secretive presidency of my lifetime,” which is quite a statement coming from the innermost corridors of the Nixon White House. And Helen Thomas agreed: “[T]his administration’s secrecy is beyond belief, more than any previous administration.”

Beyond concealing relevant information, the Bush White House distributed what Hayden characterized as “chronically misleading information.” It didn’t even have to be an important issue. “A much-cited article in National Review about Bush’s alleged love of reading turns out to be a hoax planted by Karl Rove,” Hayden explains, because the books were simply ones Rove had given to the president. And sometimes it was a matter of absurdly fallacious logic: The U.S. uses waterboarding; the U.S. does not torture. Therefore, waterboarding is not torture.

But the blame is not just the administration’s. Hayden points to the deceptions on the road to Iraq as the most egregious example of the “failure of American news organizations to do their duty as vigilant watchdogs of the public trust.” Bush associated Hussein with WMD, the 9/11 attacks and even mushroom clouds. In a 90-minute presentation before the United Nations, Colin Powell “delivered the knock-out punch,” according to Hayden, “. . . and many Americans, including many journalists, trusted him.”

The New York Times’s Judith Miller was “one of the great enablers and dupes of the Bush White House,” quoting “senior officials” when she distributed false propaganda, Hayden notes; Bush press secretary Scott McClellan later wrote that Miller was “a valued stooge.”

Former TV journalist Karen Ryan, was one of the Bush Administration’s faux reporters. When her VNRs aired, the administration recycled them on their Websites and in promotional materials, which led to a Congressional investigation of VNRs because, as Hayden explains, spending tax dollars on “phony news reports” is illegal. Even conservative commentators squawked, one asking, “How many more of these bozos did Bush buy?”

In the post-9/11 adrenalin flow, Dubya warned, “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” Hayden questions the false choice that ignores neutrality and stifles dissent, and the penalty for dissent was indeed high—witness the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame “for her husband’s untimely criticism . . . endangering both her and the nation in order to settle political scores.” Ironically, Rove had been fired by Bush’s father more than a decade earlier for leaking a story to the same conservative columnist Robert Novak who named Plame.

Some of the most surprising criticism of Bush’s handling of the Hurricane Katrina aftermath came from Fox News commentators Shepard Smith and Geraldo Rivera. “The administration’s campaign of misinformation was eventually discredited” even by White House “insiders,” Hayden writes. In his 2008 memoir, McClellan charged that the amoral argument of “the ends always justify the means” legitimized all manner of untruths. Hayden acknowledges McClellan’s “regret for the wrongs he committed,” but notes that the Bush insider raised no objections “at the critical time when his reservations might have made a difference,” when he was “publicly defending” the misdeeds.

In his final chapter, Hayden considers Dubya’s legacy. In a 2004 poll of 400 historians, 338 assessed Dubya’s presidency as a failure. In a 2008 follow-up poll, the failure assessment rose from 81 percent to 98 percent, and 61 percent of the historians ranked it as the worst presidency ever. Even the conservative Weekly Standard declared it “a failed presidency” in a cover story.

But, as this work records, the press shares blame for that failure. Hayden has delivered a fascinating, well-documented narrative that demands critical introspection by so many in the media who bear guilt in the Dubya story.

—SUSAN GONDERS
Southeast Missouri State University