Mainstream media culpability.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: Comment - Column

An amazing thing happened on Anderson Cooper's CNN program on May 28. He was rehashing the Scott McClellan story when CNN's Jessica Yellin began to make a startling confession of her own, which to my mind was just as newsworthy as McClellan's.

Here's what she said:

"The press corps was under enormous pressure from corporate executives, frankly, to make sure that this was a war presented in a way that was consistent with the patriotic fever in the nation and the President's high approval ratings," she said.

She added: "The higher the President's approval ratings, the more pressure I had from news executives--and I wasn't at this network at the time--to put on positive stories about the President." Anderson Cooper seemed surprised at this, and asked a follow-up. Yellin answered: "They would turn down stories that were more critical, and try to put on pieces that were more positive."

The next day she wrote on her CNN blog that she was referring to her time at MSNBC. She tried to backpedal a little, but she didn't deny it all.

"No senior corporate leadership ever asked me to take out a line in a script or rewrite an anchor intro," she wrote. "I did not mean to leave the impression that corporate executives were interfering in my daily work; my interaction was with senior producers. What was clear to me is that many people running the broadcasts wanted coverage that was consistent with the patriotic fever in the country at the time. It was clear to me they wanted their coverage to reflect the mood of the country."

MSNBC had made that clear to Phil Donahue, as well, when it canceled his show in the lead-up to the Iraq War. One internal memo said Donahue's show presented a "difficult public face for NBC in a time of war. ... He seems to delight in presenting guests who are anti-war, anti-Bush, and skeptical of the Administration's motives." This was not good, the memo said, at a time when "our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity." Now McClellan, of all people, rises to reproach this kind of media performance, acting like some improbable journalism professor.

"We in the Bush Administration had no difficulty in getting our messages out to the American people," McClellan writes in What Happened." Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception . "If anything, the national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House and to the Administration in regard to the most important decision facing the nation...