Journalists often refer to the Bush administration’s foreign policy as “unilateral” and “preemptive.” Liberal pundits like to complain that a “go-it-alone” approach has isolated the United States from former allies. But the standard American media lexicon has steered clear of a word that would be an apt description of the Bush world view.

Paranoid.

Early symptoms met with tremendous media applause in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Skepticism from reporters and dissent from pundits were sparse while President Bush quickly declared that governments were either on the side of the USA or “the terrorists.” Since then, the paranoiac scope of the administration’s articulated outlook has broadened while media acceptance has normalized it — to the point that a remarkable new document from the Pentagon is raising few media eyebrows.

Released on March 18 with a definitive title — “The National Defense Strategy of the United States of America” — the document spells out how the Bush administration sees the world…

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President Bush just told reporters that he has no intention of setting any timetable for withdrawal. “Our troops will come home when Iraq is capable of defending herself,” he said. Powerful pundits keep telling us that a swift pullout of U.S. troops would be irresponsible. And plenty of people have bought into that idea — including quite a few progressives. Such acceptance is part of what Martin Luther King Jr. called “the madness of militarism.”

Sometimes, an unspoken assumption among progressive activists is that the occupation of Iraq must be tolerated for tactical reasons — while other issues, notably domestic ones, are more winnable on Capitol Hill. But this acceptance means going along with many of the devastating effects of a militarized society: from ravaged budgets for social programs to more authoritarian attitudes and violence in communities across the country…

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Related links:

David Enders, author of Baghdad Bulletin: Dispatches on the American Occupation

Woolsey withdrawal resolution

Sadly, it has come to this. Two years after the invasion of Iraq, the online powerhouse MoveOn.org — which built most of its member base with a strong antiwar message — is not pushing for withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.

With a network of more than 3 million “online activists,” the MoveOn leadership has decided against opposing the American occupation of Iraq. During the recent bloody months, none of MoveOn’s action alerts have addressed what Americans can do to help get the U.S. military out of that country. Likewise, the MoveOn.org website has continued to bypass the issue — even after Rep. Lynn Woolsey and two dozen cosponsors in the House of Representatives introduced a resolution in late January calling for swift removal of all U.S. troops from Iraq…

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Once in a while, mass media outlets give a fair hearing to radical ideas that make sense. But those ideas have little chance to take hold — mainly because followup is scant. Instead of bouncing around the national media echo chamber, the offending concept falls like a tossed rock.

That’s what happened a few weeks ago when Parade magazine featured an essay directly challenging the nation’s TV commercials.

“With the advent of television, the nature of concentration was altered,” Norman Mailer wrote in the magazine’s Jan. 23 edition. “Yet children could still develop such powers by watching TV. Video and books had a common denominator then — narrative.” But television did not long retain the continuity of “uninterrupted narratives.” Before long, for viewers, “there were constant interruptions to programs — the commercials.”

Year after year, the situation has worsened…

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An Associated Press dispatch from a Thai fishing village summed up the media spin a few days ago: “Former President Bill Clinton’s voice trembled with emotion as he and George H.W. Bush put aside their once-bitter political rivalry…”

Ever since his initial checked-out responses to the catastrophic tsunami two months ago drew worldwide derision, the current president has largely relied on two predecessors to do the image-repair chores. In effect, an ad hoc PR outfit — Bush, Bush & Clinton — has the three partners laboring to make themselves look good as compassionate great nephews of Uncle Sam. But there are deeper messages and functions here than mere image-polishing.

When an American president wants to make war, he doesn’t rely on private contributions. The U.S. warfare in Iraq has already cost taxpayers more than $150 billion, not counting the regular Pentagon budget that is now well over a billion dollars per day.

The global-scale PR work of Bush, Bush & Clinton underscores the idea that the era of big government is over — for humanitarian efforts, anyway…

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When I think of newspaper journalists who became authors and had enormous impacts on media criticism in the United States, two names come to mind.

One is George Seldes. As a young man, he covered the First World War and then reported on historic events in Europe for the Chicago Tribune from
1919 until 1928. Seldes quit the paper and went on to blaze a trail as an independent journalist — ready, able and eager to challenge media business-as-usual. Naturally, he earned hostility from the kind of media magnates he skewered in “Lords of the Press.” The renowned historian Charles A. Beard called that 1938 book “a grand job.”

Forty-five years later, another emigre from newsrooms wrote a book that turned out to have profound effects on critical thinking about media. When “The Media Monopoly” first appeared in 1983, the media establishment and many of its employees shrugged; if they paid any attention, it was usually
just long enough to dismiss Ben Bagdikian‘s warning about consolidation of media ownership as alarmist…

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Since the 1950s, many young Americans have first encountered critiques of mass media in the pages of Mad. With its intricate cartoons and satirical sendups, the monthly magazine gained a reputation for skewering politicians, advertisers, TV shows and a variety of print outlets.

One of Mad’s recurrent shticks has involved making fun of gaps between words and meaning — an especially welcome form of humor because mainstream news so often amplifies the words of public figures with scarcely a hint of irony, much less deprecation. Notwithstanding the zany image of Alfred E. Neuman, the magazine’s grinning icon of absurdity has overseen plenty of sobering antidotes to the phony self-importance of major media.

One-third of the way through February, looking at a few of the day’s
top news stories, I tried to imagine the properly Mad way to annotate them…

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Curiosity may occasionally kill a cat. But lack of curiosity is apt to terminate journalism with extreme prejudice.

“We will not set an artificial timetable for leaving Iraq, because that would embolden the terrorists and make them believe they can wait us out,” President Bush said in his State of the Union address. “We are in Iraq to achieve a result: A country that is democratic, representative of all its people, at peace with its neighbors and able to defend itself.”

President Johnson said the same thing about the escalating war in Vietnam. His rhetoric was typical on Jan. 12, 1966: “We fight for the principle of self determination — that the people of South Vietnam should be able to choose their own course, choose it in free elections without violence, without terror, and without fear.”

Anyone who keeps an eye on mainstream news is up to speed on the latest presidential spin. But the reporters who tell us what the president wants us to hear should go beyond stenography to note historic echoes and point out basic contradictions…

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