Covering the battle inside the Beltway
YOU get the overall impression of a lot of guys in ties -- some of them Bush administration officials, some of them journalists and some lawyers -- in the four-part "Frontline" series "News War: Secrets, Sources & Spin," beginning tonight on PBS.
That everybody appears, in close-up, to belong to the same 9 o'clock dinner reservation is a controlling metaphor for what emerges, in the first hour, anyway, as a Washington potboiler among various corridors of power. None of which served the public as the Bush administration readied the nation for war with tales of Saddam Hussein's nefarious plans for another 9/11, using the institutions of the mainstream press as a mouthpiece. The "Frontline" series is what newspapers call a "special project" (or at least those few newspapers still staffed to conduct them, or willing to devote the real estate). A special project is supposed to sprawl, re-creating the tick-tock of a seminal event or subject by way of teasing out the larger implications for the culture.
On "News War," that subject is the harassed and reputation-scarred Fourth Estate. In subsequent weeks, it will delve into what sounds more quotidian -- Wall Street's encroachment on the newspaper industry (focusing on the internal tussle between Tribune Co. and top editors at the Los Angeles Times) amid other talked-over points: the good-bad influence of the blogosphere and the devolution of broadcast news as seen through ABC's exiling of Ted Koppel.
If things go according to plan, you should feel a little sick by March 27, the air date for Part 4. Part 1 begins at the beginning, which is to say the run-up to war in Iraq and the Bush administration's concomitant distaste for reporters (because they always want to know stuff).
This is "Frontline," so no surprise that we're dropped like a lobster into a boiling conspiracy -- the Bushies using hallowed news operations like the New York Times to promote bogus intelligence on Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, thus creating what Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, calls "an echo effect."
The lead reporter on "News War" is "Frontline's" Lowell Bergman, and he's sneaky marvelous. Bergman's take-down of big tobacco when he was a producer for "60 Minutes" was made into a great whistle-blower caper, Michael Mann's "The Insider," with Al Pacino in the Bergman role.
