The headline made me wince. “Bush has bad day at Sydney Opera House.” Oh no, what now? Such ominous banners usually mean “embarrassment dead ahead!” Did our President have a tense exchange with the Australian Prime Minister akin to the just concluded talks with the leader of South Korea? Was Mr. Bush booed or heckled by Australians fed up with the Iraq war? With trepidation I began to read the article. The first sentence was not encouraging. “President Bush had a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day at the Sydney Opera House,” a promulgation which led me to believe the snafus about to be revealed were on the level of an assassination attempt.
In fact, the remainder of the news piece, written by Tom Raum of the Associated Press, was embarrassing, but not for President Bush. Mr. Raum assembled the following trilogy of events to confirm his lead line. First, Mr. Bush referred to “OPEC” when he should have said “APEC,” a mistake the President, by Mr. Raum’s account, quickly corrected. Second, our President called the host country’s troops “Austrian” rather than “Australian,” a goof left uncorrected until the White House released the text of the speech with “Australian” where the President had clearly said “Austrian.” Finally, Mr. Raum opined that immediately following the speech, Mr. Bush had trouble finding the platform’s centrally located staircase.
That’s it? That’s it. I haven’t been so let-down since my first reading of Casey at the Bat. My relief that nothing significantly bad had happened to our President was soon replaced with anger at the fraudulent journalism before me. President Bush has made his share of mistakes, and we all know he has a special relationship with the English language, something he himself frequently jokes about. To read Mr. Raum’s columns consistently is to know that Presidential blunders are nearly ever-present. Why then make up such a blatantly misleading headline and first sentence? Why try to create bad news when there isn’t any?
One is tempted to conclude that liberal media bias is to blame. Journalists like Mr. Raum see themselves in the political middle and most Republicans, and certainly President Bush, on the radical far right wing of the political spectrum. Bernard Goldberg put forth this thesis in Bias. The journalistic left doesn’t consciously brainstorm ways to twist the news. The Tom Raum’s of the world simply believe they are educated, enlightened, sophisticated, and urbane, and those on the political right are not. What appears to the political right to be calculated media distortions are, in fact, just the way the political left sees reality.
However, this analysis falls to explain the article in question. Media bias, in line with Mr. Goldberg’s understanding, would cause Mr. Raum to question and perhaps warp a Republican President’s policies or motives. But there were no policies mentioned in Mr. Raum’s report from Sydney, and the President’s deeper intentions were not discussed. The three inconsequential bloopers mentioned, plus a couple of logistical problems not directly involving the President, were the heart and totality of the article. Thus, the inescapable conclusion is Mr. Raum was not reporting, but propagandizing, presenting a thinly veiled attack piece defrauding the news reading public. The only bad news presented was the article itself.
Manufacturing “terrible, horrible, no good, very bad” journalism and calling it news violates everything cherished in publishing. Dishonest reporting is a contravention of the sacred trust between writer and reader, and should have no place in the important arena of political dissemination. Mr. Raum has left the realm of serious journalism for the nether world of disinformation and hogwash, tripe unbefitting a venerable news organization like the Associated Press. If the AP has any integrity, Mr. Raum should change his ways or his employer.
Posted by Jerry Pomeroy in Media