E-Mail This Article to a Friend Dawn of the dead, continued

NUMBERS DON’T LIE

Bush’s 39 percent approval rating in the Gallup Poll is not particularly earth-shattering — his father and Nixon bottomed out with approval ratings in the 20s, and every president other than John Kennedy and Dwight Eisenhower plunged into the 30s at some point in their presidencies, according to Newport. But these are the lowest numbers of Bush’s presidency to date, and they mark a precipitous drop from the 80s and 70s he enjoyed from 9/11 through the first half of 2002. (His approval numbers were as high as 60 percent as late as the beginning of 2004.)

Everywhere you look, the citizens are registering their displeasure with the president’s performance and the nation’s direction. A new Pew Research Center survey shows that by a 65 percent to 29 percent tally, Americans are dissatisfied with the direction of the country while Bush’s own job-approval rating has fallen to 38 percent. A new NBC/Wall Street Journal survey not only has Bush’s approval rating down to 39 percent, but also reveals that only 28 percent of the respondents think the country is headed in the right direction. A new Fox News poll just reinforces the already-clear verdict and reflects Bush’s fading fortunes: in that poll, only 40 percent of Americans approve of the way Bush is handling his duties in that survey.

The bad poll numbers are particularly problematic for Bush because as Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) director Tom Rosenstiel points out, the political press corps is fearless and confident when it comes to reporting hard indicators of declining political fortunes. "The one thing that the press feels it can safely interpret, that it really has an expertise about, is strategy and polling," he says. "There’s more media out there than there is news. So a declining poll number is repeated endlessly in the 24-hour news cycle."

Rosenstiel and others note that Bush has endured periods of tough press before. A PEJ study of media coverage of the closing weeks of the 2004 presidential race — a period dominated by debates widely viewed as won by John Kerry — found that more than half the stories about Bush were negative in tone compared with only a quarter of the stories featuring Kerry.

The Center for Media and Public Affairs surveyed coverage of Bush on the nightly network newscasts during the first 100 days of his second term and found that two-thirds of the evaluations of him were negative. Center president S. Robert Lichter says that such findings are "normal" for the onset of a second presidential term.

But if there was one transformative event that many analysts believe turned the media tide decisively against Bush it was the combination of shocking images of poverty and hopelessness in New Orleans after Katrina, the perception of fatal failures by the federal government, and the emotional and aggressive television coverage — in the absence of government relief — that so clearly suited the national mood.

TV journalists from ABC’s Ted Koppel to CNN’s Soledad O’Brien and the Fox News Channel’s Shepard Smith openly challenged the government’s performance and in some cases, lit into administration officials. Bush compounded the damage by telling ABC’s Diane Sawyer that "I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees" and by memorably declaring that soon-to-be deposed FEMA director Michael Brown was doing "a heck of a job."

"It was really Katrina that triggered this because there was genuine outrage," says political analyst Larry Sabato, author of several books on the press and politics. "It opened the floodgates. [The media] saw that the American public was finally willing to listen to criticism of the administration."

Adds Andy Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center: "Katrina served as a catalyst to bring up all this discontent on domestic issues."

FRIENDLY FIRE SERVES THE ENEMY

If Katrina was the spark that ignited the media firestorm, the right-wing revolt over the Miers nomination poured gasoline on those flames. When Weekly Standard editor William Kristol wrote that "George W. Bush’s nomination of White House counsel Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court was at best an error, at worst a disaster" and the National Review called for Miers to withdraw, it was an attack on Bush from the core of his base. And as Lichter notes, that kind of man-bites-dog story is irresistible to the press.

"The thing that really matters that we’ve seen in the past is when the president’s allies desert him," says Lichter, comparing some conservatives’ disgust with Miers to the revulsion some liberals felt toward Clinton when the Lewinsky scandal surfaced. "When reporters go to natural supporters and they provide the criticism, you’re a goner.... Right now it is the shock value. This is actually news."

There may be something else driving journalists’ newfound toughness toward the White House — and that, for want of a better word, is payback. This administration has treated the mainstream media with barely disguised contempt, often maneuvering around it and, at times, plowing straight through it. The president treated his professed lack of interest in reading newspapers as a point of pride. Bush’s 17 solo press conferences during his first term were the fewest of any president of the television era. The administration paid some commentators — like Armstrong Williams — who touted White House priorities. And it created video news releases that featured pretend journalists narrating government-produced reports designed to look like news stories.

All of this, compounded by the media’s failure to subject the White House’s rationale for the Iraq war to full scrutiny, led to widespread complaints that reporters were more comfortable playing the role of lap dog than watchdog.

"I don’t think any longer we have an adversarial press," historian Joan Hoff noted in an interview earlier this year. "They’ve just rolled over. You see the limits of the press with a popular president." Journalists themselves seemed to agree with those sentiments. In a survey taken last year by the Pew Research Center, 55 percent of the national journalists polled said that coverage of the Bush White House had not been critical enough while only eight percent thought it had been too tough. In other words, the profession gave itself a failing grade.

Steve Rendall, a senior analyst at the liberal media-watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, believes the tone of coverage has now shifted from the kind of "palace court journalism" that Bush benefited from earlier in his tenure. "The White House agenda has not changed," he says. "The fact that they’ve had some setbacks lately changed the attitude of the media."

Chuck Todd sees the current media "feeding frenzy" as rooted partly in the sense that they had been manhandled by the White House.

"I think there was the guilt factor that the press screwed up in Iraq," he says. "The press feels like its own credibility has been on the line for a long time."

Mark Jurkowitz can be reached at mjurkowitz[a]phx.com.