Coverage of Dubai Ports World Deal; Mosque Bombing Raises Questions About Civil War in Iraq
HOWARD KURTZ, HOST (voice over): Turbulent waters. How did the Bush administration's deal with an Arab company to manage six American ports become such a huge story? And are news outlets joining with posturing politicians to pump it up? The mosque attack. Are journalists finally waking up to a civil war in Iraq? Back to the Gulf. CNN's Anderson Cooper uncovering the aftermath of Katrina and dealing with his own tidal wave of publicity. Plus, holding journalists accountable for their indifference during the Holocaust. And "The Donald" versus Martha: trash talk by two TV tycoons.</s>KURTZ: Welcome to RELIABLE SOURCES, where today we turn our critical lens on the president, the press and the ports. I'm Howard Kurtz. That controversial deal between the Bush administration and the United Arab Emirates company to run a half-dozen American ports in such cities as New York, Miami and New Orleans was actually made more than a week ago, but the media were totally focused on the Dick Cheney hunting accident. When news outlets did catch up with the news, it sparked such a huge reaction that President Bush sought out reporters on Air Force One and later headed for the cameras to defend the deal. When the pundits weighed in, a striking number of conservatives, but not all, were on the anti-Bush side, along with the liberals.</s>LOU DOBBS, HOST, "LOU DOBBS TONIGHT": This is a failure of leadership. This is not a failure of midlevel bureaucrats, period.</s>WILLIAM BENNETT, HOST, "MORNING IN AMERICA": I don't think this is the way to go because we're at war with radical Islam.</s>BILL O'REILLY, FOX NEWS: There's no reason to fire the Arab company except that they are Arabs. Isn't that racism? Can America afford to send that message to the world?</s>KURTZ: Joining me now here in Washington, Gloria Borger, national political correspondent for CBS News and a columnist for "U.S. News and World Report"; John Roberts, CNN senior national correspondent; and Frank Sesno, CNN special correspondent and professor of Public Policy and Communication at George Mason University. Gloria Borger, was this a story, this port story, that the press just dived into, or did the politicians knock you over on the way to the cameras to denounce the deal?</s>GLORIA BORGER, CBS NEWS: I think we were kind of asleep at the switch at the beginning of this. As you were saying, we were too busy covering a hunting accident in Texas. And I think when this story came out, Chuck Schumer of New York, one of the first politicians to sort of bring it to our attention, we were as surprised as the president of the United States was and as certain members of Congress were. And they were all upset about it, those members of Congress. We live at the bottom of the food chain, Howie. When they're upset, we cover it.</s>KURTZ: John Roberts, do journalists have a special affection for controversies where Republicans take on Bush, as opposed to just the usual Democrats versus the White House?</s>JOHN ROBERTS, CNN SR. NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Oh, yes, anything that's not the normal, you know, Democrats and Republicans going at each other is a really interesting story. What's really surprising about this, though, I mean, talking about the press being focused on other things, this deal first became public back in October of last year, and everybody ignored it. Unlike the deal where the Chinese oil company that was trying to take over Unocal, and that suddenly, you know, blew up in the press long before it ever got to anything like the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, everybody was kind of just ignoring this. And it wasn't until Schumer came out and then some other Republicans came out and said, hey, wait a minute, what about this, that everybody woke up and paid attention.</s>KURTZ: So, if this is such a huge deal and a potential threat to national security and all of that, what explains the slow reaction time? It can't just have been the Cheney hunting accident. Was it the fact that there were -- we had to wait for the political fireworks to get into the substance of it?</s>FRANK SESNO, CNN SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT: I think it's waiting for the political fireworks. I also, frankly, think it's a little bit of homeland security fatigue. I think there's so much of this stuff out there, and some of it -- so much of it, to some, feels like crying wolf or feels like it's the kind of Orwellian never-ending war, that it's sometimes very difficult to get people to focus on this. But it is the fact, as Gloria said -- I wouldn't exactly say we're at the bottom of the food chain, because we can make plenty of noise and kill plenty of people along the way. But the fact is, we don't make the news. The press doesn't make the news. And it's the responsibility of the political establishment to yell and scream.</s>KURTZ: Well, of course the press does make the news when it wants to because...</s>SESNO: When it wants to, but not always.</s>KURTZ: ... you know, Dick Cheney accidentally shoots a hunting companion and what might have been a one or two-day story was a week- long frenzy. That's making news.</s>SESNO: We didn't make that up, OK? I mean, it did happen.</s>BORGER: But Howie...</s>ROBERTS: But wait a minute. Hang on. Hang on. Think about what you just said. The vice president of the United States shot somebody while on a hunting trip.</s>KURTZ: It's a story.</s>ROBERTS: Shouldn't that be a week-long story?</s>KURTZ: The White House didn't think so.</s>ROBERTS: Particularly since...</s>KURTZ: There were critics out there who thought...</s>ROBERTS: ... particularly since it was the owner of the property who was the first one to announce it to the press, as opposed to the White House doing it.</s>SESNO: But there was a -- there was a feeding frenzy on that. I mean, that went overboard. And that's why I would say...</s>BORGER: I think this says something about the port -- the port issue.</s>SESNO: I was just going to say, it's not a feeding frenzy on the ports.</s>BORGER: But on the port issue, it's sort of an eye into Washington about the way decisions get made in Washington, which is sometimes by small bureaucratic committees. Sometimes these decision do not get fed up that food chain, and, in fact, we got caught flat- footed, and the president got caught flat-footed.</s>KURTZ: Yes, Let me read something from your CBS colleague, Dick Meyer, writing on CBSNEWS.com. I'll toss this to you, John Roberts. "Never have I seen a bogus story explode so far and so fast... 90 percent of that story is false. The United Arab Emirates is not an Axis of Evil kind of place, it will not own U.S. ports, it will not control security at U.S. ports and there is nothing new about foreigners owning U.S. ports."</s>ROBERTS: That is the case that the Bush administration is going to try to make, and that is the case that the company is going to try to make. And it may well be that there is absolutely nothing untoward in terms of national security with this deal, but what everybody has been operating on here is perception, the fact that two of the 9/11 hijackers came from the United Arab Emirates, the fact that they were one of only three countries, I believe, to recognize the Taliban, the fact that money destined for al Qaeda has been laundered through the United Arab Emirates and it served as a transshipment point for the AQ Khan network. People in Congress, Republicans among them, looked at that and said, wait a second here, why didn't we hear about this? And that's probably the biggest problem with this whole deal is why these bureaucrats made this decision in a vacuum and what does that say about the way that this administration operates, that they collectively had the political acumen of a rock and didn't think to say to anybody, wait a second, we've got this deal here, it's post- 9/11, it's the United Arab Emirates. Perception is a lot of what's going on here.</s>SESNO: It leads to a central paradox, to a central contradiction in this administration. You can't be a little bit at war. Either you're at war or you're not at war. We've been told for years and years we're at war. If are you're at war, then you look at who is handling the ports, who is handling the goods, who is flying the flags, and who's got access.</s>KURTZ: But let me bring...</s>BORGER: And that's why -- and that's why they're changing the process now, because they realize that you have to.</s>ROBERTS: And let me just raise one little point here just before you move on, is that we talked with a fellow who used to work at the National security Council in the Clinton administration. And they said whenever they got together in these committees, they used to say to each other, "Will this pass the CNN test?" How will it look in the public? They are not saying that anymore.</s>KURTZ: Let me bring you back to the coverage by asking this question. Is television, in particular, oversimplifying this story? Because the charge, Arabs controlling our ports, it's great, it's a sound bite. But the explanation, it used to be a British company, it was sold to the UAE company, and the rules don't allow them to deal with security, it's complicated. It's nuance.</s>SESNO: Yes, I think television can and does oversimplify this story and lots of stories like this. If you look in the papers today, in fact, "The Washington Post" has this wonderful spread where it tracks all the different steps in shipping something, and the hands that it passes through, and who owns what, and what they actually do, and what the longshoremen, you know, are doing and who they answer to. It's much harder to do that on television. It's much easier on television. And it's not about the press, by the way, certainly not exclusively. Congressman Windbag stands up there and says, I'm going to thump my podium and make a sound bite point. That doesn't have context or complexity in it either.</s>BORGER: But in this particular case it wasn't just Congressman Windbag. We have Congressman Windbags all the time. It was the chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, Senator Susan Collins. It was a lot of people saying no surprises post-9/11. There should be a no surprises rule.</s>KURTZ: Republicans, as well as Democrats. I want to turn now to what's been a very bloody week in Iraq. We had the bombing of a Shiite mosque in Samarra which led to violence on both sides. Let's take a look at how the broadcast networks handled the explosion of violence earlier this week.</s>BRIAN WILLIAMS, NBC NEWS: The worst fear is that Iraq is sliding towards civil war.</s>ELIZABETH VARGAS, ABC NEWS: One of the great fears of the American mission in Iraq has always been the prospect of civil war. Tonight those fears are particularly real.</s>BOB SCHIEFFER, CBS NEWS: Some are saying Iraq has been plunged into civil war.</s>KURTZ: Were people in the media, some of them, at least, too quick to use that term, "civil war"?</s>BORGER: I actually don't think so. I think this is a turning point, if ever there were any over in Iraq. And when a religious symbol, Howie, is blown up, I -- and you have to impose a curfew, I don't think that "civil war" is really too strong a word at this point.</s>KURTZ: But, you know, Iraq fades in and out of the news. When you have the bombing of a mosque, when you have the death toll like we've had this week, you get a lot of coverage. And then it kind of goes on to the back burner for a while. Do you think three years in that there is a certain amount of Iraq fatigue?</s>ROBERTS: Oh, yes, absolutely. Certainly there is. But, you know, it's on the front burner more often than it's on the back burner. And this is what people have been warning about since months before the actual invasion, that this was a country that was -- has historic divisions that go back more than a thousand years, that has been successfully held together by strong men, kings, dictators, whatever they may be, and very much like the Balkans. You take away that central figure who wields power through...</s>KURTZ: Right.</s>ROBERTS: ... you know, authoritarian and brutal means, and the place is going to start to spin apart.</s>SESNO: I think that there's a problem here, is that the media didn't talk more about civil war, a lot more, a lot more vocally earlier. This is an issue that has been put on the table in the last Gulf war, when Brent Scowcroft and others said we go there, we break it, we own it. And one of the reasons that they've talked about and they've talked about publicly since that they didn't go in is that they saw these centrifugal forces that could pull Iraq apart and destabilize the region.</s>KURTZ: Why you do you think the media shied away from that kind of frank discussion?</s>SESNO: Because this has been framed as part of a 9/11, post-9/11 war on terrorism kind of response because -- and I will tell you, I have been on the blogs, I have been on a lot of the media content Web sites, especially by conservative groups over the last several days, and they see guys like Schieffer and Ed Wong of "The New York Times" and others as sort of doom-and-gloom pessimists who are quick to jump on the civil war bandwagon and have been over time. It's perfectly legitimate.</s>BORGER: But here's the problem as a journalist, because, on the one hand, you had the administration talking about progress in Iraq, that the news media is not showing all the progress.</s>KURTZ: Right, the focus is just on the suicide bombings and the death toll and all the negative sides.</s>BORGER: Right. And democracy is progress, obviously.</s>KURTZ: Right.</s>BORGER: That we focus on the -- on the bad stuff. And then you have a mosque being blown up. And so there's kind of, you know, this -- two sides to this, and the American public says, well, what is the truth here?</s>SESNO: But that's the point.</s>BORGER: And it's very hard to get at what the truth is.</s>SESNO: The point is that the truth, not unlike the port story, is complicated.</s>KURTZ: Right.</s>BORGER: Right.</s>SESNO: There are all these shades of gray. Is part of the story the possibility of civil war? Yes. Is part of the story rebuilding Iraq? Yes. Is part of the story trying to plant democracy? Yes. So you have to do all those things. But you don't shy away from using a nasty term if that's the reality.</s>ROBERTS: But also, if there hasn't been a low-level civil war going on in Iraq for the last two and a half years, what has been going on?</s>KURTZ: Well, what has been going on is an awful lot of people shooting at American troops, but also killing Iraqi civilians. But another thing that happened in Iraq this week is that three journalists for "Al-Arabiya," including a well-known female correspondent named Atwar Bahjat, were kidnapped and killed. In fact, there was even violence at the funeral. And this comes in the wake of Jill Carroll, of the "Christian Science Monitor," still being held y kidnappers after almost two months, Bob Woodruff of ABC seriously wounded by a roadside bomb and in recovery now. Isn't this getting impossible or nearly impossible for journalists to cover?</s>ROBERTS: I haven't been there since the war itself, but I've certainly talked to a lot of my colleagues who are there. It's very, very dangerous for a journalist, an American journalist, a Western journalist, and now it would seem even Arab journalists to be operating in that country. Very much like what happened in the Balkan wars, journalists are becoming targets.</s>KURTZ: And doesn't that contribute to the difficulty, what Frank Sesno was talking about, which is getting these shades of gray when it can be dangerous to leave the Green Zone or even your hotel?</s>BORGER: Right. And I also think it's, in a way, more dangerous to be an embedded journalist because now...</s>KURTZ: As we have seen.</s>BORGER: As we have seen with Bob Woodruff, because if you are embedded with Iraqi troops or American troops, you are a target, and that's much more difficult for you.</s>SESNO: Once upon a time, the journalists were seen by all sides, hostile sides, as the way to get their story out, the way to reach the world. Now they're seen as apparently targets.</s>ROBERTS: But this problem with the embeds, though, I mean, that's gone on since we first started this during the war, because you travel with a military unit, and while they may not be directly targeting you, you become a target by association.</s>KURTZ: Exactly.</s>SESNO: Embeds are good, though. I mean, that's an important thing. It's an important tool.</s>ROBERTS: Oh, absolutely, yes.</s>KURTZ: We need to leave it there. Frank Sesno, Gloria Borger, John Roberts, lately of CBS, now with CNN, thanks very much for joining us. Coming up, the port security flap, violence in Iraq, and some pointed comments from the secretary of defense about the media. Two of the nation's top online commentators weigh in. And later, CNN's Anderson Cooper on the Gulf region six months after Katrina.