Response to Ellen Mickiewicz's review of When the Press Fails: Political Power and the News Media from Iraq to Katrina

Extract

Ellen Mickiewicz has done an excellent job of presenting the key elements of our argument and empirical analysis about why the mainstream press proved incapable of independent news framing at critical junctures in the Iraq War. She then raises a series of excellent broader questions: What about the responsibility of government institutions to hold those in power accountable? What about the independent force of public opinion? Were earlier administrations as able to spin the press as successfully as the Bush administration? Each of these questions might well fuel a book. I can only address them briefly in this response.