Freedom of expression 'hard thing to contain'
Part of Our World
Dan Rather

Last week, your reporter wrote in this space about the Chinese government's policy of allowing its news media to report with surprising candor on the catastrophic earthquake there - and wondered what the long-term repercussions would be. When grieving parents began to ask increasingly pointed and enraged questions about the many schools that had collapsed in the quake zone, the powers that be in Beijing apparently began to wonder much the same; the topic of shoddy school construction became a target for censorship, even as the government promised accountability.

The Chinese government may find that freedom of expression is a hard thing to contain, once unleashed. Or it could look to the United States and see that even a press with constitutionally guaranteed freedoms can be tamed.

In the run-up to the Iraq War, the American news media were "complicit enablers" in the Bush administration's "carefully orchestrated campaign to shape and manipulate sources of public approval." The way the White House waged this "propaganda" campaign "almost guaranteed that the use of force would become the only feasible option," leading to a war that "was not necessary."

Hard words, but hardly surprising. What is surprising, however, is their source - the quotes above come from the memoir "What Happened," written by none other than President Bush's former White House press secretary Scott McClellan.

The president's supporters and detractors alike have called McClellan's book self-serving, which is another way of saying that it is a political memoir. One is reminded of the even more bitter fury that greeted the publication of "In Retrospect," by Robert S. McNamara, the secretary of defense who presided over the Vietnam War. And one can imagine those who posed their questions to McClellan in the White House briefing room grumbling to themselves that, in calling the White House press corps "complicit" in the deceptions he alleges, McClellan is engaging in a classic game of "blame the victim."

But to view it this way would be fatally and solipsistically wrong, because the victims in this case and all others where a free press fails to do its job are not the members of the news media but the public they are charged to serve. While the Bush administration was "selling the war," as McClellan puts it, many of us in the American working press abdicated our responsibility to act as surrogates for the intended buyer, the American public. We did not ask enough questions, we did not ask the tough questions, and we did not ask the all-important follow-up questions. I do not except myself from this criticism.

The ongoing war in Iraq and the toll it has exacted stand as searing lessons for the press and the public. And they are lessons that cannot be learned and absorbed quickly enough. In recent days, The Jerusalem Post and the Asia Times both have carried reports claiming that the Bush administration is planning military strikes aimed at Iran's nuclear capability. The administration has denied these reports, and experts on U.S. foreign policy have also shed doubt on the likelihood of such actions. But they come at a time when the International Atomic Energy Agency is expressing "serious concern" about Iran's suspected development of nuclear weapons. The IAEA, remember, is the same United Nations organization that said that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction.

There is much to assess in the nuclear standoff with Iran, and one fervently hopes that the American public will have accurate information with which to do this. As this drama unfolds, McClellan's memoir reminds us that our elected leaders will sometimes deceive us, and that a free press that does not try to ferret out the truth is not worthy of the name.

Dan Rather, a native of Wharton, was Managing Editor of the CBS Evening News for 24 years. This column appears by arrangement with King Features Syndicate.