Fireside chats for Bush

MR. RUSSERT: Should the president go before the American people with a map of Iraq and say, "Let me explain to you what is going on in the war. This area's secure. This area is difficult. This area we had captured but now the terrorists have gotten it back"? Take people through it in a very honest, straightforward way, a status report, an update.

SEN. WARNER: Tim, I'm old enough. I served in the last year of World War II in the Navy. Franklin D. Roosevelt did just exactly that. In his fireside talks, he talked with the people, he did just that. I think it would be to Bush's advantage. It would bring him closer to the people, dispel some of this concern that understandably our people have about the loss of life and limb, the enormous cost of this war to the American public, and we've got to stay firm for the next six months. It is a critical period, as Joe and I agree, in this Iraqi situation to restore full sovereignty in that country and that enables them to have their own armed forces to maintain their sovereignty.

~ Meet the Press

I've thought for a long time that the President hasn't done enough to promote the war, but my first thought on hearing Russert's proposal was: Isn't this what the press is supposed to be doing?

Since the US took control of Iraq, one of the best things I've seen on the ongoing battle against the insurgency was this flash presentation on operations in Anbar and Ninawa in August and September.* I'd be hard-pressed to point to an MSM story that outlines any battle with the clarity this does. The same goes for covering the bigger picture. Glancing at the headlines, one doesn't get the sense of where the war is going. There's no overarching narrative--unless of course it's the narrative that the war is going badly. But even that story is told piecemeal.

Instead the MSM relies on car-bomb-of-the-day reporting, the "if it bleeds, it leads" strategy. To continue with journalistic cliches, this strikes me as a dog-bites-man kind of story: After all, one expects a certain amount of bleeding in a war zone. Certainly the car bombs are part of the story, but they're not the whole story. One gets the sense, reading this coverage, that coalition forces are just sort of milling around waiting for the next IED to take them out.

It wasn't always this way. An online collection of UK newspapers during World War II details some of the articles that ran during that time period:

Hundreds of thousands of photographs and maps - making the war more intelligible and reducing it to a human scale. There were even diagrams illustrating the impregnability of the Maginot Line.

Detailed accounts of the latest developments whether on the home front or the battlefield. Germany's territorial ambitions in Poland and the Balkans are analysed, as are Japanese incursions in China.

Insightful articles by leading writers and politicians, such as Leon Trotsky asserting that "Stalin is afraid of Hitler" (writing in The Daily Express) and David Walker's first hand reports for The Daily Mirror from across Europe right up to the outbreak of war.

Newspaper coverage was bolstered by newsreels, which were shown weekly to around 80 million people per week, and radio, which broadcast the Fireside Chats of FDR. Roosevelt did, indeed, refer to maps on occasion. At the same time, there was an expectation that the people were following the war on the news and that there were details about the overall stategy that could not be reported on.

I wish Bush would begin giving his own version of the Fireside Chats. His pushback against Democratic naysayers on the war is already having a positive impact; updating the public on the progress of the war would surely have a positive result. Too bad the media isn't living up to their end of the bargain.

* Bill Roggio continues to cover the war at ThreatsWatch.