Bush and the Press. Seems to me Ross is on the money again.
Now there’s a difference, it’s true, between the coverage of Iraq and the coverage of Bush himself, and maybe there’s an argument to be made that even where the national press acquitted itself honorably in its treatment of discrete foreign-policy issues, it failed to adequately expose the incompetence at work in the highest reaches of this Administration until it was far too late. But here again, I think the picture is more complicated than DeLong suggests. Was it really only in “the last year or so” that the D.C. press corps began writing majo negative stories about Bush’s management style? Then what was the Times, for instance, doing running Ron Suskind’s famous “faith-based Presidency” piece back in October of ’04? Obviously, this is just a single example, and you’d have to spend a month on Lexis to get a more rigorous sense of whether DeLong’s impression, or mine, is closer to the truth. But I think DeLong, like many on the left, is letting the sins of Judy Miller – and the fact that there are enough bad journalists in the world to provide constant fodder for his oh why oh why drumbeat – stand in for the conduct of the entire press corps since 2001.