New York Magazine - April 21, 2003
The Media Life Michael Wolff
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Still, no matter how jaded these reporters were, when the lights went on, they knew their roles. They had producers and an audience. The show must go on. If everybody here seemed privately to accept that the process of reporting war was a crock, publicly they accepted the war as a coherent event that they had some mastery overthey had inside sources, they had the general's ear. They were war reporters.
But I wasn't a war reporter. I didn't have to observe wartime proprietyor cool. I was free to ask publicly (on international television, at that) the question everyone was asking of each other: "I mean no disrespect . . . but what is the value proposition? . . .Why are we here? Why should we stay? What's the value of what we're learning at this million-dollar press center?"
It was the question to sour the dinner party. It was also, because I used the words value proposition, a condescending and annoying questiona provocation.
Still, I meant it literally: Other than the pretense of a news conference - the news conference as backdrop and dateline - what did we get for having come all this way? What information could we get here that we could not have gotten in Washington or New York, what access to what essential person was being proffered? And why was everything so bloodless?
My question was met with a sudden, disruptive, even slightly anarchic round of applause - not dissimilar to the whoops when a kid drops a tray in the school cafeteriaand I knew I was in a little trouble.
The question, it turned out, spoke powerfully to people who think this whole thing (not just the news conference but, in some sense, the entire war) is phony, a setup, a fabrication, in which just about everything is in service to unseen purposes and agendas (hence my popularity in Turkey, France, Canada, Italy, and at The Nation magazine, as well as among the reporters in the Doha press pool). But it seemed to speak even more dramatically to people who think the whole thing is real, pure, linear, uncomplicated, elemental (lots of, if not all, Americans). For the former, I'd addressed something like the existential issue of our own purposelessness, but for the latter, I seem to have, heretically, raised the very issue of meaning itself.
And seriously compounding matters, there was the rude applause.
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But as it happens, incredibly, there are many people who believe that these news briefings - getting surprisingly high ratings - are real. That when people in uniform speak, they speak the truth. Really. Truly. (Although in one instance, after showing especially hammy videos of Iraqi citizens receiving humanitarian aid, even General Brooks had to insist, "This is true. Really. It's not coerced.")
What is most surprising about this to me is not so much that there are a lot of people who would mistake a news conference for an actual, transparent, official giving of information but that the Pentagon would be media-savvy enough to understand this. (Certainly, though, they were smart enough to come up with the embed thing - wherein reporters became soldiers and invaders and liberators.) And what's most pathetic was that we reporters could have been dumb enough not to understand that this whole million-dollar business, the plasma screens and such, was not for us but directed over our heads toward the American audience - and not just the American audience but the core Bush American audience.
When I challenged General Brooks, I was unaware of what I was challenging.
I only became aware of what i'd done when the Rush Limbaugh thing happened.
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My question, then, was a challenge to a broad range of certainties. I was suggesting the whole operation was bogusso I was challenging reality itself. Then I was challenging the ultimate authority - a general in war. This was practically insubordination. And in my bringing up the issue of rank, it must have seemed that, displeased with the service, I was in some sense asking to see the manager.
So, the Rush thing. First it was CNN that replayed my questionthe CNN view was, more or less, the liberal-media view: a certain hand-wringing about whether the media was being used. Then it was Fox, with its extreme, love-it-or-leave-it approach to the war, that took me apart: I was clearly a potential traitor.
And then it was Rush.
To his audience of 20 million - pro-war, military-minded, Bush-centered, media-hating, lily-white - Rush laid me out.
I wasn't only a reporter, but one from New York Magazine. "New York" resonated. It combined with "media," and suddenly, in Rush's hands, I was as elitist and as pampered (fortunately, nobody mentioned the Ritz) and as dismissive of the concerns of real Americans as, well, Rush's 20 million assume the media to be. Whereas Rush, that noted foot soldier, represented the military heartland. What's more, according to Rush, that great defender of the rights of African-Americans, I was a racist. Duh. A white liberal challenging a black general. It's a binary world.
And Rush gave out my e-mail address.
Almost immediately, 3,000 e-mails, full of righteous fury, started to come.
Which all, in some way, helps explain why we are in Iraq.
Now, when you suddenly get 3,000 e-mails excoriating you and your fealty, you can begin to think that the media may in fact be a hostile, negative, unloved, and unwanted presence. (My Al-Jazeera colleagues, singled out for showing bloody pictures during war, certainly felt this, too.) But of course, the opposite is truewe are, even Al-Jazeera, a vital, mostly cooperative, part of the war effort. So when, in response to my question, General Brooks said that I was here of my own volition and if it wasn't satisfactory to me, I should go home, this was far from a statement of policy.
You can't have a taping without a studio audience. We were the pretext for the showand for delivering the message.
So the last thing the Pentagon wanted was for the media to go home. In fact, CENTCOM refused to confirm or deny what everyone could see for himself: that chairs were being removed from the briefing every day (in one day alone, sixteen chairs were removed), so that, as numbers dwindled, empty seats would not be shown to the world. This was a serious problem. What if you gave a war and the media didn't come?
Clearly marked as the rabble-rouser of the get-out-of-Doha movement, I was approached by some enforcer types. The first was a version of a Graham Greene character. He represented the White House, he said. Wasn't of the military. Although, he said, he was embedded here ("sleeping with a lot of flatulent officers," he said). He was incredibly conspiratorial. Smooth but creepy: "If you had to write the memo about media relations, what would be your bullet points . . . ?"
The next person to buttonhole me was the CENTCOM ber-civilian, a thirtyish Republican operative (part of his job seemed to be to seed the press pool with specific questions that CENTCOM wanted asked during the briefings, telling reporters, for instance, that CENTCOM wouldn't show the video of Private Lynch being rescued, because it would be seen as "the United States spiking the ball in the end zone," unless reporters asked for proof that the rescue was successful). He was more Full Metal Jacket in his approach (although he was a civilian, he was, inexplicably, in uniformmaking him, I suppose, a sort of paramilitary figure): "I have a brother who is in a Hummer at the front, so don't talk to me about too much fucking air-conditioning." And: "A lot of people don't like you." And then: "Don't fuck with things you don't understand." And, too: "This is fucking war, asshole." And finally: "No more questions for you."
I had been warned.
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