Bush, Clinton, and the Press

Stephen Colbert scorched the Earth tonight in his finale address at the White House Correspondents Dinner and never looked back. He was amazing and succeeded in both making me laugh hysterically and making everyone in that ballroom uncomfortable. This will be the buzz of the town for the next day, for sure. More on that in my next entry; hopefully can find clips online.

During the part of Dinner when everyone was eating, C-SPAN showed clips of old speeches, including President Clinton's first (1993) and last (2000) dinners. There was some funny stuff in there. It was also an interesting way to disprove the revisionist history that Clinton was adored by the media, who supposedly covered up for him at every turn. That couldn't be further from the truth. Many comments from 1993 revolved around the increasing scrutiny in the press that surrounded his first 100 days in office. Many of his year 2000 comments revolved around healing the tensions between himself and the press, the result of a bitter impeachment battle and the continued scrutiny he received.

There was one line in particular, from 1993, that stuck out to me-

"It is your job to report on what we do... to analyze it, to probe it, to criticize it. To lift it up to light and turn it around and show all of its facets to the American people. I think it's my job to try and do something beside just enjoy the honor of being the President of the United States. And in the interplay of our efforts, sometimes I will misstep. Sometimes you will too. But the Constitution provides for you a freedom that is virtually without limit, because the Framers recognized that without it, people like me who get power with the best of motives would inevitably abuse it."

I can't picture these words being spoken today.

Particularly since the press now finds themselves a potential enemy of the current administration...

Earlier administrations have fired and prosecuted government officials who provided classified information to the press. They have also tried to force reporters to identify their sources.

But the Bush administration is exploring a more radical measure to protect information it says is vital to national security: the criminal prosecution of reporters under the espionage laws.

Such an approach would signal a thorough revision of the informal rules of engagement that have governed the relationship between the press and the government for many decades...

The implications of this are constitutionally frightening.

Going back to the above Clinton remarks from 1993, about the duty of the press to expose the underbelly of political actions, the media certainly heeded this call. President Clinton was criticized by the press heavily and appropriately.

Supporters of President Bush would counter that Bush is also hammered by the media and they would insist that the media has an agenda to destroy Bush and undermine our country! I suppose these people were asleep between late 2001 and mid-2005. The critical examinations of the President are a new phenomenon (and even then they try to downplay any of the negative developments). Up until September of last year, the press at large seemed asleep at the wheel- too scared of the post-9/11 patriotic zeitgeist and 'liberal bias' charges to bother turning a spotlight on the many scandals that the Bush administration had kept below the surface. Even now, in the post-Katrina era, the media's low attention span seemingly keeps them from doing any long-term, hard-hitting coverage of the current administration. Most notably, they consistently fail to note that seemingly unrelated scandals- warrantless wiretaps, secret prisons, lack of congressional oversight- are all part of a larger story... a President who believes that his inherent powers put him above the law and the system of checks and balances. A big scandal like pre-war intelligence or the CIA leak scandal gets only as much (or less) coverage as what's the status of the Natalee Holloway investigation.

Every inpropriety that occurred in the Clinton administration- Travelgate, Whitewater, Lincoln Bedroom sleepovers!- was treated as if it were Watergate on steroids. Even the more absurd allegations- Hillary had Vince Foster killed!- were treated with great seriousness. Yet now, with an unpopular President who shows a deep and open hostility to the press itself, they fail to treat current events with the same fervor. With increasing evidence of intelligence abuse before the Iraq war, the failures during Katrina still having ripple effects, massive and increasing debt, attacks on science and secularism, and numerous abuses of Executive power, is it too much to ask that the press realize that we will never get answers on those issues until they decide to ask the right questions?

Perhaps when the first group of journalists is jailed, they will wake up.

President Clinton was right... it's time to take this administration and turn them up to the light.