More On Bush’s Videoconference with the Troops
Craig helpfully provided the following link in the comments to my earlier item on Bush’s scripted Q&A session with the troops in Iraq. It’s a brief account of the event from Sgt Ron Long, one of the participants: Speaking with President Bush.
Coming from the media’s perspective, Dan Froomkin’s Washington Post weblog links to lots of interesting detail: Caught on tape.
For the record, I don’t consider it at all surprising that either the military generally or Sgt Long in particular is gung-ho about Bush’s leadership and the mission in Iraq. That is, after all, one of the direct aims of military recruitment and training: to produce a fighting force willing to enthusiastically carry out the orders of its leadership, even when those orders include things like dying.
Besides all the intense, sustained conditioning that military members are exposed to to help them perform such actions, there’s also the influence of basic human nature, which causes us to avoid cognitive dissonance. We tend to justify to ourselves those things we have chosen to do, especially things that involve extreme sacrifice, rather than face the possibility that we might have been wrong.
It really isn’t a soldier’s job to question the larger justifiication of Bush’s military policies. In fact, it is pretty much the soldier’s job not to question those policies.
Yes, I know there are limits to how far a soldier is supposed to go; and things like setting dogs on prisoners or breaking their legs during beatings certainly rises to that level in theory, if not always in practice.
But the thing that the media coverage is focusing on here isn’t really whether the soldiers were sincere or not (though Scott McClellan did try to take that tack for a while during his press briefing). That’s a strawman.
What the media is focusing on is the way the wheels came off this particular piece of attempted image-crafting. Because the feed included the 45-minute prep session that preceded the actual Q&A, we could see how the president’s specific questions, and the soldiers’ specific responses, were carefully rehearsed and tweaked. This is important, because it completely changes the meaning of the event.
Unlike the Internet, which is an incredible tool for drilling down into as much detail on a topic as one could possibly want, making it very difficult to use top-down control to promote a particular false-to-fact perception, TV is all about doing just that. TV is the ultimate technology for using top-of-the-pyramid manipulation to send carefully crafted images that resonate in a particular emotional way and create a perception in viewers that they would not have experienced if they saw more of what was actually going on.
The Bush team is famous for crafting effective TV visuals, and the degree of preparation they engage in is legendary. That’s why it was so surprising to see them screw this up so badly. The main message of this event was supposed to be: Look at how well things are going in Iraq. Look how much the troops support the president. Look at how Bush is working to stay in touch with the reality of what’s happening on the ground. But the story that actually ended up being told was: Look how carefully the people on the ground were rehearsed to make sure viewers (and Bush) were not exposed to uncomfortable realities. And when McClellan tried to deny that that had happened, it was like throwing gasoline on a fire.
I realize that this was no different than dozens or hundreds of other photo ops. The only thing that was different in this case was how we saw Professor Marvel frantically working levers behind the curtain, rather than seeing only the Great and Powerful Oz we were supposed to see. But what’s different is interesting, especially when it reveals an underlying truth. So the media led with that. That’s their job, just like it’s Sgt. Ron Long’s job to think that what they are doing in this case is reprehensible.
I don’t think Long is insincere when he says that. I don’t think he’s insincere when he says that he supports Bush, and that things are going great in Iraq.
I just think he’s wrong.
October 15th, 2005 at 7:18 pm
It appears that we have a choice of who to believe – those who have actually been there, or those who have not.
Your paragraph beginning with “Unlike the Internet” pretty much sums up TV news coverage for the past several decades, whether it be Dan Rather’s false saga, “The Wall Within,” or the daily/hourly doses of gloom and doom from Iraq.
Internet blogs are merely opportunities to state biased opinions, usually based on carefully selected “facts” and quotations from like-thinking people. In short, bias is expected on blog sites, but should not be expected or condoned from TV and print media.
October 15th, 2005 at 9:10 pm
The key here, I think, is that it ISN’T true that “the soldiers specific responses were rehearsed and tweaked”. Unless you count “rehearsed” as a soldier knowing the content of a question that will be directed to him so he can formulate an appropriate answer in his own head.
What was seen is an unintended type of “full access” look at how PR events are set up and packaged in a textbook 101 fashion. The same way any other Administration would prepare for it in this age of hi-tech communications. This type of prep work; to make a managed scene seem fairly “natural”, is how these “image professionals” make their livings.
One incident that some people have drawn analogies to, in terms of managing a certain image or feel to an event, is Clinton’s walk on the beach at Normandy when it was made to look like he is taking some informal time out to reflection on what happened 50 years ago. He walked along and came upon some stones and made a small cross with them in the sand. A “heart-sting” moment in which the press was brought in specifically to witness it, and the stones themselves were alleged to have been placed there ahead of time by staff members, for just such a “spur of the moment” symbolic action.
So our views of various activities, especially in the political world, have been carefully crafted for quite some time now, by people paid to make subtle yet powerful impressions on the public.
So we have witnessed a “nuts and bolts” example of how that works, yet I’ve seen no indication of the answers in this Q & A being manufactured themselves.
October 15th, 2005 at 9:13 pm
Well, we have a choice of people “who have actually been there” to believe. I’m just pointing out that the military types generally, and certainly the military types selected for pre-fab question and answer sessions with Bush in particular, are predictably going to have only one set of opinions, regardless of what the truth is.
I didn’t get into it in this posting, but the flip side to my slamming TV as the perfect vehicle for monied elites to use to push a false reality is (obviously) that the Internet’s dumb-in-the-middle design and the presence of network-effects-exploiting tools like Google and Technorati and Wikipedia makes it very hard for those monied elites to push lies on the Internet. The flow of information on the net isn’t centrally controlled; by design the net is dumb in the middle, and the intelligence lies on the periphery, in our forefingers hovering over our mouse buttons.
Because individuals have so much more control over what information they will consume on the Internet (at least compared to television), it’s very, very hard for someone to lie to you via the net. (Well, it’s much harder than it is with TV.) But there’s a dangerous flip-side: It’s hard for others to lie to you, but it’s absurdly easy to lie to yourself. That is, you can use the net primarily as a tool to reinforce your own biases, inhabiting a happy little cocoon where you are surrounded by comforting myths about how nasty the other side is, and all criticisms made by the other side are easily knocked down by spending a few minutes’ visiting the trusted voices of like-minded partisans in the blogosphere.
As much as I’d like to think that lefties are better about not falling into this trap than righties, once you get out to the extreme the self-delusion of true believers is more or less equivalent. Lately I’ve been finding the more-certain commenters on Daily Kos to be pretty much as annoying as their equivalents on Powerline.
You, TeacherVet, are probably the most-annoying to me personally of the commenters here, but J.A.Y.S.O.N. likes to tell me that Rise Against is every bit as annoying, in his own way. In my calmer moments I’m grateful to both of you for coming here and taking the time to offer your views, but the truth is that I mostly ignore both of you at this point, because I’ve decided that my own quest for truth will be better served by seeking out people who aren’t convinced that they already know the answer to every question.
October 15th, 2005 at 9:21 pm
I dunno, Craig. I think you’re kind of splitting hairs. As I said, I don’t doubt that the soldiers were sincere in what they said. They were also coached on the specifics of their answers. Between your version of what happened, and my version, I don’t think there’s really much of a difference. The only difference is in what significance we choose to assign to it.
I hadn’t heard about Clinton’s cross-on-the-beach story, but it certainly sounds like his M.O. And yeah, all politicians successful enough to rise to a national level are doing this sort of thing to some degree. I think there’s evidence that Bush takes it farther than anyone has before in this country; where someone like Clinton had other qualifications in addition to his facility with media manipulation to put on his presidential resume, I think Bush’s qualifications pretty much begin and end with that one item. Which makes it all the more interesting when he stumbles at it, as he’s been doing lately. We’ve got, what:
* the Katrina response
* the Miers nomination
* this silly screw up with the Iraq-soldier Q&A
Some people have been connecting the recent Bush screw-ups with the fact that Karl Rove has been busy trying not to go to jail. I think they may be on to something.
October 15th, 2005 at 10:13 pm
Maybe you can enlighten me, but I just haven’t seen where the soliders were given, or were coached on, what their specific answers would be.
I’ve only seen how they were basically assigned questions covering certain content areas, and were given direction on who to pass the microphone to and “taking a breath” before responding, and so on.
I still say there is a big difference between “here is what we want you to say” and “here is the topic area of your question”.
October 16th, 2005 at 8:38 am
Perhaps you’re right, but without having actually watched the 45 minutes of pre-event video feed myself, I think there’s evidence that those who did watch it (in the evil liberal Bush-hating media, it must be admitted) interpreted it differently than you.
Here are some relevant quotes taken from the Froomkin piece I linked to in the main item above:
Brian Williams:
“The problem was, before the event was broadcast live on cable TV, the satellite picture from Iraq was being beamed back to television newsrooms here in the U.S. It showed a full-blown rehearsal of the president’s questions, in advance, along with the soldiers’ answers and coaching from the administration.
“While we should quickly point out this was hardly the first staged political event we have covered — and we’ve seen a lot of them in the past — today’s encounter was billed as spontaneous. Instead, it appeared to follow a script.”
Shepard Smith:
“One commander tells Fox it was scripted and rehearsed — the troops were told what to say to the president and how to say it. And that, says another senior officer today, is outrageous.”
Carl Cameron:
“First, the White House and the Pentagon claimed it was not rehearsed. But for 45 minutes before the event, the hand-picked soldiers practiced their answers with the Pentagon official from D.C. who, in her own words, drilled them on the president’s likely questions and their, quote, scripted responses.”
On the other side, your interpretation is the one being pushed by the Pentagon. From a Jim VandeHei article:
“After a day of White House damage control, Pentagon spokesman Lawrence T. Di Rita put out a statement last night apologizing for ‘any perception that [the soldiers] were told what to say’ at the event. ‘It is not the case,’ he said. Di Rita said technological challenges prompted government officials to advise the soldiers what questions they would be asked ‘solely to help the troops feel at ease during an obviously unique experience.’ He said the soldiers decided who would answer.”
NPR has four minutes of the rehearsal audio at:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4957379
I just listened to it, and it doesn’t include any examples of the Pentagon woman (Allison Barber, deputy assistant to the secretary of defense) correcting or suggesting soldiers’ responses; it seems to be the last part where she’s mostly just, as you say, doing a final going-over with them on the sequence of which questions Bush is going to ask, and who will be delivering the (previously rehearsed) answers for those questions.
Here’s an extended quote from the Oct 13 press briefing, with reporters talking to Scott McClellan about a gaggle held earlier that day (transcript of that not available, as far as I’m aware):
[begin quote]
Q Scott, why did the administration feel it was necessary to coach the soldiers that the President talked to this morning in Iraq?
MR. McCLELLAN: I’m sorry, I don’t know what you’re suggesting.
Q Well, they discussed the questions ahead of time. They were told exactly what the President would ask, and they were coached, in terms of who would answer what question, and how they would pass the microphone.
MR. McCLELLAN: I’m sorry, are you suggesting that what our troops were saying was not sincere, or what they said was not their own thoughts?
Q Nothing at all. I’m just asking why it was necessary to coach them.
MR. McCLELLAN: Well, in terms of the event earlier today, the event was set up to highlight an important milestone in Iraq’s history, and to give the President an opportunity to, once again, express our appreciation for all that our troops are doing when it comes to defending freedom, and their courage and their sacrifice. And this is a satellite feed, as you are aware, and there are always technological challenges involved when you’re talking with troops on a satellite feed like this. And I think that we worked very closely with the Department of Defense to coordinate this event. And I think all they were doing was talking to the troops and letting them know what to expect.
Q But we asked you specifically this morning if there would be any screening of questions or if they were being told in any way what they should say or do, and you indicated no.
MR. McCLELLAN: I don’t think that’s what the question was earlier today. I think the question earlier today was asking if they could ask whatever they want, and I said, of course, the President was — and you saw —
Q And I asked if they were pre-screened.
MR. McCLELLAN: You saw earlier today the President was trying to engage in a back-and-forth with the troops. And I think it was very powerful what Lieutenant Murphy was saying at the end of that conversation, when he was talking about what was going on in January, how the American troops and coalition forces were in the lead when it came to providing security for the upcoming election, an election where more than eight million Iraqis showed up and voted. It was a great success.
And he talked about how this time, when we had the preparations for the upcoming referendum this Saturday, you have Iraqi forces that are in the lead, and the Iraqi forces are the ones that are doing the planning and preparing and taking the lead to provide for their own security as they get ready to cast their ballots again.
Q But I also asked this morning, were they being told by their commanders what to say or what to do, and you indicated, no. Was there any prescreening of —
MR. McCLELLAN: I’m not aware of any such — any such activities that were being undertaken. We coordinated closely with the Department of Defense. You can ask if there was any additional things that they did. But we work very closely with them to coordinate these events, and the troops can ask the President whatever they want. They’ve always been welcome to do that.
[end quote]
Having worked as an editor in the past, I’m not claiming to be shocked (shocked!) that Bush’s advance people went over the soldiers’ responses beforehand, and suggested tweaks and improvements in both style and substance. That’s how things like this work. I realize that.
And again, I’m not suggesting that the soldiers were anything other than sincere in what they said. They and the Bush team were very much working together here, trying to sell the story that things are going better in Iraq than the media has been reporting. That they collaborated on how best to convey that is clear. If you want to fixate on the claim that soldiers’ responses were scripted by someone other than themselves, and say that claim is incorrect and so the media interpretation of the event is wrong, and that there’s a big difference between that reality and the way it’s being talked about, feel free to go there.
But as I said above, I think you’re splitting hairs. To me, this event ends up underlining how hard the Bush team works to put a happy face on a war that has been a disaster. I think a lot of people watching that rehearsal would form the same opinion. I don’t think they’d be mistaken in doing so. Beyond that, sure, I’ll stipulate that the soldiers were willing participants, and were (mostly) writing their own responses to the pre-screened questions. But at the most fundamental level, this event clearly wasn’t the spirited give-and-take that the Bush people billed it as. And given the smoking-gun evidence of that in the form of the 45-minute rehearsal tape, I think the media is justified in pointing that out.
October 18th, 2005 at 12:36 pm
Most of my friends who served in Iraq tended to be pretty pissed about it. Most of them were reservists, and simply didn’t expect to get called up. Of those, the recurring theme was not only no expectation of being called up, but further, they believed that the justification was bogus.
I did have one friend who said that he had a really fun time in Iraq. He was ashamed to say it at first, but he went on to explain how learning a completely alien culture was very rewarding to him, and largely enjoyed the company of the Iraqis that he met. Further, it further served to increase his belief that as humans, we’re all pretty much the same.
The point is; any statement that our men and women serving in Iraq feel one way or the other is largely bullshit, speculative, and tends to only serve personal interests. The people serving over there are people like the rest of us, and they will ultimately have their own politics and opinions.