“Rally Round the Flag”: Will the Press Have Trump’s Back if He Starts a War?
Photo by John Moore
There is a long list of reasons why Donald Trump might start a war. Even conservative writers in outlets like The American Conservative and The Wall Street Journal call him “rash,” while he seems to either have a poor grasp on America’s strategic relationships or to re-write them on the fly. He has suggested that the time for talking with North Korea might be ending. He seems particularly fond of adoration, and after launching cruise missiles into Syria was rewarded by prominent voices calling him presidential, or “led by his heart.”
And while the president doesn’t have a reputation for being tactical, he doesn’t need to be Napoleon to realize that starting a war might “take off” the “great pressure” on him these days. Maybe it’ll even turn out better than firing that “nut job Comey.”
In such a scenario—say a war of choice with Iran alongside our Orb-Allies in Saudi Arabia—how might influential news outlets perform? Would The New York Times and The Washington Post stop breathing down Trump’s neck? Would probing reporters disappear from MSNBC and CNN only to be replaced by waving flag graphics?
One way to handicap Trump’s chances of leading the press by the nose is to look at the last time this happened in 2002-2003. On the 10-year anniversary of the Iraq War, consider how the press reviews its own conduct from that time: from “not good enough,” to “we were duped like everyone else,” to “the media’s greatest failure in modern times.”
Back then, memos circulated among managers encouraging patriotism on air, critical figures like Phil Donahue were fired because, as an internal email at his company stated, he was a “difficult public face for NBC in a time of war,” and pieces looking closely at the White House’s evidence were often relegated to section A17.
Prominent news organizations were outplayed and journalists felt outmatched. “It was an amazingly executed, brilliantly executed plan,” reflected Donahue in 2014. The Bush team treated their war drive like a product campaign, its release coordinated as if across a corporate structure. There were slick slogans about smoking guns and mushroom clouds. A lie tactically “leaked” to Judy Miller one day was published the next day and then cited as evidence by Dick Cheney hours later. “The field,” wrote Paul Farhi of The Washington Post, “was tilted.”
Very soon, the White House made it clear that it would get its war—Congress had delegated its war authority to the Executive Branch and the White House had already ordered many tens of thousands of troops to Kuwait by the first weeks of 2003. MSNBC and NBC Nightly News affixed banners reading “Countdown: Iraq” on their screens to emphasize the inevitability of the war. “We were going to war,” said the former executive editor of The Washington Post on the war’s 10-year anniversary. That couldn’t have encouraged editors and journalists to martyr themselves for a lost cause.
A key part of the White House’s campaign was to put respected figures before reporters to promote it. Retired or current military personnel and government officials flooded the airwaves, accounting for two-thirds of all sources interviewed or named in early spring 2003. They were overwhelmingly pro-war and received vastly more time than critical voices. The most important voice was probably Colin Powell, whose presentation before the U.N. of “acts and conclusions based on solid intelligence” is now infamous.
Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan remembers. She was unnerved by the response of a lot of people in the TV news industry after Trump’s strikes on Syria this spring, reacting with a column the next day subtitled, “Are we really doing this again?” She wrote that “a lack of proper skepticism…is something that we’ve seen many times before as the American news media watches an administration step to the brink of war. Most notoriously, perhaps, that was true in the run-up to the Iraq invasion in 2003.”
When I asked her whether the Trump White House might outplay today’s press in event of a repeat, she said, “I don’t get the sense that we’ve learned very much and that’s a prospect that worries me. I have great confidence in the judgment of Post editor Marty Baron but—across the board—we might be in real trouble, maybe worse than in 2003.”
Walter Pincus, then at The Washington Post, was one of those reporters who kept investigating and publishing on the flimsiness of White House evidence in 2002-2003. I asked him about grounds for optimism or pessimism today. Some reporters will have learned from the hard lesson of 2002-2003, and some will not, he said. He’s confident that some will have the backbone needed to dig hard, but complicating it all are the stresses amid an industry made of owners, publishers, news managers, and reporters. “Each element acts in its own world with different rules, approaches and even ethics,” he says. For another thing, reporters will need to find channels of good information. “I was lucky to have sources within the intelligence community, the Pentagon, and the U.N. investigating group that kept informing me about the questionable nature of the claims that Saddam Hussein had, or was pursuing, nuclear or biological weapons.”