Tonight’s Reading: Taranto on Today’s Media

In a lengthy opinion piece, James Taranto takes on the mainstream media for their biased and disingenuous coverage of the Iraqi theater, Gold Star mom Cindy Sheehan and the supposed blown cover of Valerie Plame.

While I agree with Taranto that the media have worked themselves into a growing credibility problem through poor journalistic practices — indeed, I have stated often that my opinion of today’s media was a driving factor in my starting this site — and have been afflicted with an internal rotting since the 1968 Tet Offensive, I find myself far less optimistic than Taranto about the current ability of our media to cost us victory in the present conflict. Taranto’s stance is as follows:

It would be fatuous to deny that this dour drumbeat of defeatism has some effect on public opinion, which after all is driven by the most fickle members of the public. By last fall, polls consistently showed that a majority of Americans thought it had been a mistake to liberate Iraq, though some 70% had favored the war when the shooting began in March 2003. But a majority continue to oppose a precipitous withdrawal. Most Americans, it seems, do not want another Vietnam, which they understand to mean a self-inflicted American defeat.

The media’s one-sided coverage may actually undermine the antiwar cause. It does a disservice to antiwar politicians by giving them the impression that the public is fully behind them–an echo-chamber effect similar to that which helped John Kerry lose the election of 2004 (see “Kerry’s Quagmire,” July 20, 2005). Thus in December, when Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean responded to the media panic by declaring that “the idea that we’re going to win this war is an idea that, unfortunately, it’s just plain wrong,” fellow Democrats scrambled to distance themselves from him.

And the media’s adversarial approach has proved costly in public trust. In a Pew Center survey conducted in early November, just after the indictment of Scooter Libby, only half of those polled said the press was fair to the Bush administration. The president’s approval rating in the same poll was just 36%, so this was far from a pro-Bush poll.

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With the mainstream media facing a skeptical public and competition from those with other viewpoints, it seems unlikely that Iraq will turn out to be another Vietnam–a war lost in large part because of the media’s opposition.

I feel differently, believing very strongly that the media still have sufficient power to seize defeat from the jaws of victory but need more bad news and American blood upon which to base their efforts. As it is, their are forced to steadily beat the drum of quagmire and despair, scantily covering success and heroism while carefully restraining from providing historical perspective that may reflect well on our current endeavors.

Taranto does provide himself a giant caveat — the wild card of another terrorist strike in the American homeland. Hat tip to In the Bullpen‘s Chad Evans, who gives his thoughts on the possible fallout of Taranto’s wildcard situation.