Bill Israel discusses his article, “Save the First Amendment from Karl Rove,” with Dori Smith of Talk Nation Radio.
“But I think it must be absolutely clear that there is a truncheon being used here. A truncheon being used on the public, sometimes it’s subtle, sometimes it’s not.” Bill Israel, July 8, 2005
Bill Israel
teaches journalism at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
In his July 6, 2005 story “Save the First Amendment From Karl Rove,” he discusses friend and Former co-worker Karl Rove.
Smith: First, you argue that journalists have often been played for patsies by the President’s chief political strategist Karl Rove. Just talk about what you mean by that.
Bill Israel: In my experience there is no one who is more adept at working news people, or rather working the news media, than the Bush White House. And the Bush White House politically is run by Karl Rove
Karl is an exceedingly able person. When we taught together at the University of Texas seven years ago I watched and had my breath taken away I was astounded in 20 to 25 years of political reporting I had never seen anyone as good as he was. And so I say that because I’ve never seen anyone more adept at using, and effectively using news media.
Smith: Now in the years, let’s say the Rove years, since he made his way from Texas with George Bush to the White House he sort of changed media didn’t he? In adding more of a public relations angle to journalism because of the way that he worked the media? Just talk about what that means now that you are looking at this First Amendment challenge about sources and disclosures.
Bill Israel: Well I’m not sure how different in approach Karl has been from the Nixon White House. He once called himself a “die hard Nixonite.” The nature of media or operating with media in the Nixon White House was to effect control. President Nixon use to say to his public relations people: “Let’s not get up in front of the media until we know exactly what we want the headline to look like tomorrow.”
No statement, for example, might be over 100 words in order to maintain control of what the message would look like. Certainly Karl has refined on that approach but in short we are looking at a means of control. So fundamentally I’m not sure the motive changes. It’s the refinements that have been astoundingly effective. And those aren’t totally Karl. We are looking at a huge change in the culture of media in this country over a period of about thirty years. It’s not just the media in the country that has become more right leaning. It is all of the institutions behind them that have helped change the dialogue in the country.
So, for example, there was one right-leaning think tank in the 1940s when it was founded, the American Enterprise Institute. But by 1980 when Ronald Reagan took office there were 70. Now there are 500. And those institutions are helping the White House change the dialogue; change the culture politically of the entire nation.
In terms of Karl, why is this different? This is different because in my judgment, although almost all the time journalists must protect the confidentiality of their sources. It seems to me that in this instance they are protecting someone who has used the media in order to perpetrate a fraud if you will.
The entire argument about the Iraq war was dubious at best as we now know. And in using the First Amendment, or rather in invoking the First Amendment now to defend not giving up a confidential source; in this case I believe to be Karl, I believe, that the journalists have been used to protect the perpetration of a fraud as opposed to being used, having the Amendment used, or rather there is a confidentiality provision used, to advance all of the points of view that need to be aired here.
Overwhelmingly, Presidents by definition of what news is get first shot at the news. The news really is the President’s to use as he will, or as she will we hope ultimately, because prominence is an important news value. As one looks at eight or night news values that govern or certainly reflect what gets aired on radio or television or over the net, prominence figures high on the list of who gets aired. And there is no one who is more prominent than a President.
As a consequence Presidents go in with great advantages in dealing with the news and have an opportunity to abuse it. I mean, there are many examples of that over a long period of time in both Republican and Democratic administrations.
But in this instance it’s very clear that one of the central schemes if you will of what this White House has been about has been advancing a war in Iraq who’s footings were dubious at best and now in this instance we see an effort to protect that flank and the effort by the special prosecutor to get at it is apparently getting into how delicate the White House position really is, and…
Smith: …Now it would be delicate, just to add a question here. It would be delicate if there were a lot of power left in the law and in the checks and balances that are supposed to coincide with this rise to power of someone like Karl Rove.
Israel: …Well I think it’s delicate because the administration’s venture into this war was not well considered at the time. In terms of it’s legitimacy it was dubious at best and so the effort to bring Ambassador Joe Wilson under control by effectively outing his wife was an effort to get at Wilson in order to protect the President’s position.
As you know any time you advance a lie with another lie as Mark Twain says you have to keep making up more.
Smith: Let’s go to the issue of the reporters. We see Judith Miller, still in jail as I understand it, (day 2) and going back to the Vietnam era I don’t recall that any reporter stood out as someone who helped the process of defending the war in the way that someone like Judith Miller has in the sense that she worked very closely with one of the Pentagon’s prime architects of the propaganda that went back and forth between Iraq and America. That was Ahmed Chalabi. And so now we see Judith Miller, she didn’t even involve herself in the writing of a story about Valerie Plame, the woman who was outed by whoever leaked her name to the press and we are thinking now that’s Karl Rove.
So Judith Miller goes to jail. How ironic is that? And I mean to what extent does that reveal either hyper control of media, and of realities and truths, versus a kind of breaking down of this control?
Israel: In my judgment at least, the Judith Miller case is different. I’m not at all clear of all the pieces going on in her case. It feels to me a little bit different than the Matt Cooper case in which there was a clear, or there appears to have been a clear link to Karl Rove. And the complications around the Judith Miller case are not at all evident to me and I don’t think they will be until the prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald finishes his work.
What concerns me is that it appears that millions of people were misled as a function of that kind of reporting, the use of Ahmed Chalabi as a source; the selection of that source by the Bush White House helped to mislead millions of people, and so I find that ironic at best to see Judith Miller in the position she is in now.
Smith: Well her editor at the New York Times, Bill Keller is also confused about what charges might be brought against her. Which kinds of leaves the discussion of what the New York Times did or did not print with other reporters. And you know they did print stories about the Plame affair, and outed her, helped the story along, expanded on it.
In a way it almost seems like we are dealing with issues of larger responsibilities. All of the members of the mainstream press interviewed Ahmed Chalabi. He was not just Judith Miller’s source. And yet many people blame her for just the fact of his rise in prominence as a spokesperson for Iraq under the new U.S.-led government.
Israel: The New York Times bears a special responsibility in our culture for it’s being traditionally the best of the best. It now has substantial competition as we know but nevertheless the national security reporters for the New York Times tend to be specially attended to as a consequence of what the Times has been historically.
So again, I think the Times and Judith Miller bear special responsibility around this war and I think the Times last summer began to acknowledge that point in the semi apology it rendered to its readers in noting that it too had been had by the Bush White House in the run up to this war.
Smith: So where we are with this sort of Machiavellian person that you know well enough to call friend, but also well enough to adequately describe in this very ambivalent way? We are talking about a time in history when everything seems to be coming undone and yet there is hyper control of information about what’s going on. So that we get really finely sanitized glossy descriptions narrowing the issues down into terms of “values”. That, of course, we’ve seen in both Tony Blair and George Bush lately as they talk about this horrible tragedy that hit London on the 7th of July.
But what we think about that, do you see larger pictures at work with the media that might be discussed as the Valerie Plame affair is more analyzed? I’m talking about not only the role of the press but also the way someone like Karl Rove has impacted it in the larger ways. You talk about his disdain for reporters, for example. Have reporters just become objects to be manipulated from the highest offices in the land?
Israel: I would argue that this question goes back much longer than might be apparent. One can see the transition, for example, in the work of Walter Lippmann perhaps the greatest journalist in the 20th Century.
After WWI, Lippmann, concerned about the vulnerability of the news, and it’s importance in attempting to help people prepare, said that the task of liberty falls under three basic heads, and the first he regarded as protection of sources of the news. In other words he felt if people could get adequate news, if they could rely on the news that came at them, the chances of being a self governing people were pretty good.
Only two years later in his book called “Public Opinion” Lippmann was turned around 180 degrees and said that as a consequence of public relations, as a consequence of political communication, the opportunity for people to be informed has been sacked, and that the power of persuasion would change every political calculation.
This, in short, is a very old story. It dates from at least that part of the 20th Century. We have seen in this latest incident the refinement of those methods, to a degree Lippmann wouldn’t recognize.
There is a line from Macbeth in which Macbeth himself says, “Nothing is but what is not.” If you let those words sink in for just a moment you begin to get the feeling not only of what Macbeth faced with the three witches and the war he was facing, but the kind of problem that Lippmann was fingering after WWI and the kind of problem that always whips up around war.
Journalism faces a similar problem, as people in the war business do. It’s that question of the fog of war. The problem in journalism and in politics is the same. How to determine truth from falsehood? How to split out the misleading tactic from the reality on the ground?
I would argue that it’s only a consequence of that sorting out process that we in the public go through, in sifting intelligence, that we achieve a capacity to self govern. But the object of this kind of political communication is to mislead to an end result that the misleader desires, and that’s the issue that’s at stake here now.
Smith: I want to ask you finally to talk about what you wrote specifically here, and I’ll read it. You said that little has changed since Bush left Texas with Karl Rove. “All roads still lead to Rove.”
Then you say, “When former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson challenged President Bush’s embrace of the British notion that Saddam Hussein sought to import uranium from Niger to produce nuclear weapons, retaliation by Rove was never in doubt. While it is reporters Matthew Cooper of Time and Judith Miller of The New York Times who now face jail time, the retaliation came through Rove-uber-outlet Robert Novak, who blew the cover of Wilson’s wife, CIA operative Valerie Plame.” Just talk about your description of Rove.
Israel: Karl is a very capable person. I grew to know and love him as a consequence of a personal event that happened to a mutual friend of ours in which he and I found ourselves scrambling to try to help that person out in the death of his wife. So I learned at one level what a kind person Karl can be.
In the process of teaching with him I also learned that he was the best political operative I’d seen in 25 years of looking. No one is cannier than Karl at using the press, whether through charm or larger forces. I have great respect for his ability to do so. But I think it must be absolutely clear that there is a truncheon being used here. A truncheon being used on the public, sometimes it’s subtle, sometimes it’s not.
In this instance by the use of journalists, and journalism, and the First Amendment, it looked subtle when in fact it was not at all. And part of the duty of journalists and the duty of a prosecutor in an instance like this is to get to the pattern of behavior that is being used to mislead.
Smith: Bill Israel chairs the Information Technology Task Force at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and researches media and power, reporting and online journalism.
Smith: Bill Israel thank you so much for talking about this very controversial man.
Israel: A pleasure.