Ellen Mickiewicz has done an excellent job of presenting the key elements of our argument and empirical analysis about why the mainstream press proved incapable of independent news framing at critical junctures in the Iraq War. She then raises a series of excellent broader questions: What about the responsibility of government institutions to hold those in power accountable? What about the independent force of public opinion? Were earlier administrations as able to spin the press as successfully as the Bush administration? Each of these questions might well fuel a book. I can only address them briefly in this response:
The responsibility of government institutions. The U.S. government has many provisions for holding those who abuse governing power accountable to law and, sometimes, even to standards of sound judgment. Yet it is clear that politics often comes into play in decisions about whether public officials discipline wayward colleagues. Despite calls for the Obama administration to investigate possible Bush administration violations of laws against torture, the new president has been reluctant to spend time and political capital on such consuming investigations. Self-serving considerations drove the narrow investigative scope set by the Bush administration when the Abu Ghraib scandal first broke in 2004. One might ask where the Democrats were at that point. Once again, political calculations led a then-weakened party to avoid torture as an election year issue against a still-popular president. The main point of our book is that when politics undermines government accountability mechanisms, it also undermines the mainstream press, whose basic operating principle depends on a well-functioning opposition for its own capacity to sustain another side to the story.
What about the independent force of public opinion? It would be nice to think that public opinion might discipline governments in matters as removed from personal experience as foreign policy and distant wars. However, Mickiewicz answers her own question by pointing out that the heuristics used by publics in these matters tend to be provided through official cues repeated often in the media. When the range of official cuing shrinks, as it did in decisive moments in the Iraq War, the press impact on public opinion comes close to a propaganda operation, rather than a mechanism for public deliberation.
Have other administrations received similar deference by the press? The short answer here is yes—in cases when the political opposition was weak or politically sidelined. Recall the battle cry of the new Republican movement after the shattering defeat of 1964: charges that the liberal press was biased toward the Democratic view of things. In a way, the Republicans were right at the time, but only because they were so convincingly out of power that journalists did not have another reference for indexing another side for many national political stories. The Republicans, of course, have continued to score points with this rhetorical line, even when they later dominated the news. The point is that other administrations have been shown undue deference by the mainstream press whenever journalists could not recruit a credible official counterpoint to keep another side of the story going. That is how indexing operates to undermine the independence of the American press.
