When the Press Fails: Political Power and the News Media from Iraq to Katrina
By W. Lance Bennett, Regina G. Lawrence, and Steven Livingston
University of Chicago Press
263 pages, $22.50

When has the American press ever prevented a war when the government wanted to have one? You must reach back more than a century for a good example—the puncturing of the dangerous Venezuelan crisis of 1895 by Joseph Pulitzer’s World (which then turned around and led the cheering for the Spanish-American War). The record has been mostly one of aiding and abetting the war-makers, or at best of muted resistance.

In When the Press Fails, three political scientists deal with the latest, possibly most egregious example, the inability of the press to debunk the fabricated rationales for war in Iraq. The authors wrestle at length with a perplexity—that a press constitutionally commissioned to serve as the government’s watchdog becomes instead its conduit. They hypothesize that what we have is less a free press than a “semi-independent” press, one that by itself cannot oppose government but can act effectively in league with other opposition political forces or out of the reach of spin. They point to cases when the press has performed well enough—most notably in such extraordinary situations as the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe, which moved faster than government spinners.

This is a vigorously researched book, showing how crises, such as the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, flare up and are swiftly extinguished: “torture” is diluted to “abuse,” to “mistreatment”; culpability is segregated to a few bad apples. And yet, despite what the authors term press failures in such situations, in the long run what has happened with Iraq is very similar to what eventually happened in Vietnam. It took a damnably long time, but by 2006 American public...

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