A few days ago Gallup released a poll showing Congressional approval ratings at an all-time low of 24%. The media ate it up and flooded the zone with stories about the collapse of support for Democrats and their legislative agenda. They juxtaposed this message with another poll showing that the President’s approval had also hit new lows, but those results were almost always immediately diluted with the Congressional polling results. It will be interesting to see how the media treats this new poll from Gallup:

Only 29% of Americans Say U.S. Is Winning War on Terrorism.

It should come as no surprise that the American people are fed up with the war in Iraq. All the polling confirms that this war is profoundly unpopular. But this poll approaches the question from a unique angle that is not merely an indication of support or opposition, but a judgment as to whether our efforts are, or can be, successful.

Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid was pilloried a few weeks ago for saying:

“I believe myself that the secretary of state, secretary of defense and – you have to make your own decisions as to what the president knows – (know) this war is lost and the surge is not accomplishing anything as indicated by the extreme violence in Iraq yesterday.”

Apparently, only 71% of the country agrees with him. Is that enough for the press to follow up on the story and provide this context? Is it enough for the press to balance the Congressional approval stories they hyped earlier this week? Will the media give equal treatment to this expression of the people’s will that they gave to previous reports that reflected poorly on liberals?

Don’t hold your breath. I have yet to see a single report in any of the Conventional Media outlets of this new poll. Despite the significance of its findings, the mainstream press has not deemed it worthy of coverage. Amongst these findings is the fact that only a slight majority of Republicans (53%) believe we are winning in Iraq, so it’s not even a matter of partisanship. But the press, and the pundits that populate it, will continue to portray anti-war politicians, activists, and citizens as fringe elements of society in direct contradiction of the facts (see Media Matters’ report, “The Progressive Majority: Why a Conservative America Is a Myth”).

What’s it going to take for the media to present this type of information fairly? There’s is only one solution – profound reform and a rollback of consolidation.

I was going to write a piece on Bill Dedman’s “investigation” for MSNBC of donations to politicians or political organizations, but journalism professor Chris Day did it for me. Thanks, Chris.

The MSNBC article failed on so many journalistic grounds. It rested heavily on the notion that there was an overweighting of donations by liberal or progressive reporters as compared to conservatives. But Chris puts the matter into perspective:

• Dedman’s report violates one of the first rules about working with numbers in journalism: PROVIDE CONTEXT […] Dedman notes that there are approximately 100,000 newsroom employees nationwide. By my calculations, then, the number of donors comes to 0.1% In other words, the headline could have been: 99.9% of U.S. journalists do not donate to politicians.
• A lot of the people he “exposes” in this piece are ridiculously peripheral to the coverage of partisan politics – gardening editors, rock critics and the like.
• Dedman decided to exclude “executives” from his investigation, without offering a convincing rationale. Where are Roger Ailes? Rupert Murdoch?
• Dedman reports that of the 144 donors, 125 gave to Democrats, while “only” 17 gave to Republicans. (Two, like Exxon, gave to both parties.) But, I notice that most of the donations to Democrats are in chicken-shit amounts like $200 or $250, while one of the Republican donors gave $90,000. I suspect that the totals given to the two parties are not that far off.

This is the kind of in-depth analysis that Dedman should have employed. Unfortunately, his version was released into the media wild and has been picked up by many other news organizations and even pretenders like Bill O’Reilly who led with the inflammatory and false conclusion that liberals outnumber conservatives in the press by 9 to 1. It really doesn’t help to supply liars like O’Reilly with pseudo-news items like this.

The Washington Post’s Assistant Managing Editor, Bob Woodward, participated in an online chat yesterday. The very first question challenged him to answer for the failures of the media leading up to the war in Iraq.

Rancho Mirage, Calif.: “In light of Watergate, why did the ‘investigative’ branch of the press miss so badly on the Bush-Cheney spin machine to justify Iraq? Was the lesson of Watergate wasted, or was the press serving the country well?”

I like the “lesson of Watergate” angle, although Woodward ignores it. He does issue a curious apology that rests on how difficult it would have been to actually do his job.

Bob Woodward: “I think the press and I in particular should have been more aggressive in looking at the run-up to the Iraq war, and specifically the alleged intelligence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction stockpiles. To answer the WMD question before the March 2003 invasion would have been a monumental task, but one that we should have undertaken more systematically.”

This is not the first mea culpa from Woodward. As I reported in November of 2006, Woodward (and other media luminaries) confessed to not having done enough to expose the weakness of the Bush administration’s case for war.

“We did our job but we didn’t do enough, and I blame myself mightily for not pushing harder. We should have warned readers we had information that the basis for this was shakier [than widely believed].”

There is, however, a striking contradiction in these statements. Yesterday Woodward said that the WMD question could not have been answered without undertaking a “monumental task.” But last November he said that he did, in fact, have information that the WMD argument was “shaky,” he just chose not to report it.

Obviously both of those statements cannot be true. I’d have to favor the November variant because there was plenty of evidence that the WMD story was a well-known sham (see UNMOVIC and Curveball).

It’s too bad that Woodward and so many of his colleagues were not honest with us in 2003, and only have hollow apologies for us in 2007.