I have never seen Katie Couric do the news and I never saw her do the Today show. I know what she looks like and I know a lot of people don’t care for her and don’t think she is a serious journalist. I don’t have an opinion about that. I do sympathize with her difficulties in covering the Iraq war, though. The following comes from Howard Kurtz’s big piece on war coverage.
Katie Couric had always felt uncomfortable with the war, and that sometimes showed in the way she framed the story. When Bush had been marshaling support for the invasion, she felt, the country seemed to be swept up in a patriotic furor and a palpable sense of fear. There was a rush to war, no question about it. The CBS anchor could never quite figure out how Iraq had become Public Enemy No. 1, how the United States had wound up making many of the same mistakes as in Vietnam. She was happy, like most people, when the war initially seemed to be going well. Nobody wanted to see all these young kids getting killed. But the frenzied march to war had been bolstered by a reluctance to question the administration after 9/11.
She had firsthand experience with what she considered the chilling effect on the media. Two months before the 2004 election, when she was still at NBC’s “Today” show, Couric had asked Condoleezza Rice whether she agreed with Vice President Cheney’s declaration that the country would be at greater risk for terrorist attacks if John Kerry won the White House. Rice sidestepped the question, saying that any president had to fight aggressively against terrorism.
Couric interrupted and asked the question again. Would a Kerry victory put America at greater risk? Rice ducked again, saying that the issue should not be personalized.
Soon afterward, Couric got an e-mail from Robert Wright, the NBC president. He was forwarding a note from an Atlanta woman who complained that Couric had been too confrontational with Rice.
What was the message here? Couric felt that Wright must be telling her to back off. She wrote him a note, saying that she tried to be persistent and elicit good answers in all her interviews, regardless of the political views of her guests. If Wright had a problem with that, she would like to discuss it with him personally. Wright wrote back that such protest letters usually came in batches, but that he had passed along this one because it seemed different.
Couric felt there was a subtle, insidious pressure to toe the party line, and you bucked that at your peril. She wanted to believe that her NBC colleagues were partners in the search for truth, and no longer felt that was the case. She knew that the corporate management viewed her as an out-and-out liberal. When she ran into Jack Welch, the General Electric chairman, he would sometimes say that they had never seen eye to eye politically. If you weren’t rah rah rah for the Bush administration, and the war, you were considered unpatriotic, even treasonous.
As Hannah Arendt pointed out, evil can be quite banal. No one ever told Couric to tone it down. Not exactly, anyway. Rather, the execs sent her subtle messages. The boss says he doesn’t see eye to eye with you. Another boss sends you some hate mail…then he disavows any meaning behind it. The message is nonetheless conveyed.
It is in this way that the horrible mistake of Iraq has gone on and on and on, without the press really ever being able to tell the truth about what is happening there. It isn’t just the administration and their echo machine. It’s right-wing media executives that actually wanted John Kerry to lose. They have a new champion in Hillary Clinton, and the GOP seems to have lost all ability to raise money from corporate America. But for years this war has gone on without honest coverage.
The result?
Doing terrible things in an organized and systematic way rests on “normalization.” This is the process whereby ugly, degrading, murderous, and unspeakable acts become routine and are accepted as “the way things are done.” There is usually a division of labor in doing and rationalizing the unthinkable, with the direct brutalizing and killing done by one set of individuals; others keeping the machinery of death (sanitation, food supply) in order; still others producing the implements of killing, or working on improving technology (a better crematory gas, a longer burning and more adhesive napalm, bomb fragments that penetrate flesh in hard-to-trace patterns). It is the function of defense intellectuals and other experts, and the mainstream media, to normalize the unthinkable for the general public.
The torture memos, Abu Ghraib, white phosphorus attacks on Falluja, the Downing Street Minutes, extraordinary rendition, warrantless surveillance, the repeal of habeas corpus, over a half a million dead Iraqis…these things become just ‘the way things are done’. The media may cover these things but they don’t stop and insist that they stop. They worry that reporting on them will hurt the war effort…as if the war effort were anything but a horrible crime. The very decency and good intentions of so many that make the war effort go, argues against the evil that the totality of the effort represents.
Bush didn’t mean to get over a half a million people killed.
But he did. He did get over a half a million people killed. It may have been banal, but it is nonetheless one of the greatest evils ever perpetrated by this nation.
And this is why Nancy Pelosi needs to put impeachment back on the table. Failure to address what we have done is not acceptable. There will be a reckoning. And we need to get on the right side of history.
