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DOROTHY RABINOWITZ'S MEDIA LOG (from WSJ, Opinion Journal)

Baghdad in an Alternate Universe
There's little reality in the coverage of Bush's Iraq trip.

Tuesday, December 2, 2003 12:01 a.m. EST

Bulletin: The president's surprise Thanksgiving visit to U.S. troops in Iraq isn't going to change the outcome of the war!

That keen analysis, delivered by any number of instant commentators in the hours after the news of the visit broke, must have come as something of a surprise to U.S. audiences paying attention--even those accustomed both to the steady flow of irrelevancies and to the solemn warnings about assumptions it would have occurred to no one to make that we can always depend on hearing on occasions of this kind. Just how many people watching that Thanksgiving mess-hall scene would have been struck by the thought that this would--aha!--change the outcome of the war, most of us know. The answer is of course no one--no one in his right mind.

But the reality of the audience and the condition of their minds is a matter wholly foreign to the concerns of most of the correspondents--a truth most Americans have long understood and accepted. Somewhere along the way, they realized that occasions like this (short on dark aspects and close to a purely moving event) pose a problem in that universe inhabited by a good part of the press--a place where journalists toil and compete, disconnected from the realities governing the rest of the world.
There were, generally speaking, two kinds of reporting on this event, so imbued with emotion. One type offered the occasion as it had unfolded and let the facts and pictures--the footage capturing the roars of joy from the weary troops when they spied their commander in chief, there with them so unexpectedly--tell the story.

For an exemplar of the other sort we had the commentary of CNN's Walter Rodgers, a sturdy on-the-scene journalist for the most part, though on this occasion he was not among the reporters at that mess hall. Minutes after the news broke, his report focused on one central point: He didn't want to be a spoiler, he let it be known, but it was clear that, whether deliberately "or unconsciously," the president's trip had been timed as a way of upstaging Sen. Hillary Clinton's visit to the region the next day. Mr. Rodgers delivered this point several times more, his tone suggesting bountiful gratitude for the powers that had led him to unearth this insight--Thanksgiving comes but once a year.

To someone imbibing the ethers of the aforementioned hothouse journalistic world, it must have seemed perfectly reasonable to conclude--however bizarre the proposition sounded to anyone out there in the real world--that all the months of secret planning that had gone into this venture had been undertaken for the sole purpose of deflecting attention from Mrs. Clinton's trip. Not only reasonable but important enough to repeat several times. And it offered plenty of inoculation against any charge that this veteran reporter had failed to cut through the joyful nature of this story to discern its dark underside.

Departing from the subject of the president's unconscious, Mr. Rodgers turned to historical parallels to announce that Lyndon Johnson had gone to Vietnam--and that that trip hadn't changed the outcome of the war.

The next day, we were to hear from Tom Rosenstiel, the head of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, an institution that could only in times like ours be regarded as a light unto the press. Well known for emissions of the highest purity as regards press standards, Mr. Rosenstiel told the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz that the secrecy of the trip was "just not kosher," that reporters are in the business of telling the truth and that they couldn't decide it was OK to lie sometimes because it serves a "higher truth or good."

Fortunately, those involved in making security arrangements to Iraq--a war zone--failed to consult Mr. Rosenstiel and colleagues to determine whether they passed proper journalistic standards. We can scarcely imagine how distressed the latter must be at all the U.S. journalists who have kept the secrets of troop movements to themselves in wartime--much less what they would have said about all the Allied leaders' efforts to mislead the world about the target of the D-Day invasion.
Most of the press, it should be said, understood perfectly well that there were good reasons the security requirements for the president's trip were what they were and said so--which fact did not diminish Mr. Rosenstiel's apparently profound distress. Feelings whose source may perhaps best be explained by another of his charges--that the unexpected nature of the president's visit made it a big story and that, by going along with the secrecy, reporters had "helped Bush politically."

The ethers in that special world of journalists, and particularly in the case of the Project for Excellence and its head--who seems to have been imbibing a particularly potent kind--appear to be taking their toll. Nothing, though, that a case-hardened public couldn't take in stride.