Bush Not Unhappy About Decline of Old Media

For the last couple of days Drudge has been headlining excerpts from Bill Sammon's new book Strategery, and today's installment deals with the mainstream press and their declining credibility and market share. Needless to say, the president is not terribly unhappy with that:

President Bush, for the first time, is hailing the rise of the alternative media and the decline of the mainstream media, which he now says “conspired” to harm him with forged documents.

“I find it interesting that the old way of gathering the news is slowly but surely losing market share,” Bush said in an exclusive interview for the new book STRATEGERY. “It’s interesting to watch these media conglomerates try to deal with the realities of a new kind of world.”

[STRATEGERY was ranked #5 on AMAZON.COM's sales chart early Tuesday morning.]

For example, journalist Dan Rather left the anchor chair at CBS News after Internet reporters revealed he had used forged documents to criticize Bush’s military record in September 2004. The forgeries, which Bush now calls a conspiracy, ended up helping his reelection campaign, he acknowledged in the Oval Office interview.

“It looks like somebody conspired to float false documents,” the president tells author Bill Sammon. “And I was amazed about it. I just couldn’t believe that would be happening [and] then it would become the basis of a fairly substantial series of news stories.”

He added: “Then there was a backlash to it. I mean, a lot of people were angry that this could have happened. A lot of Americans are fair people and they viewed this as patently unfair. So in a funny way, I guess it inured to our benefit, when it was all said and done.”

Karl Rove, also a major player in this book, had some things to say about Dan Rather that will surely stir up the media hornets again:

Although Memogate was initially expected to harm the president, it ended up backfiring spectacularly on the press.

“The guy that it hurt most was Dan Rather and the executives at CBS,” White House strategist Karl Rove said in an interview for STRATEGERY. “It further disgraced a network which is third in ratings and, if you look at the demographics of their consumers, it’s like 70 percent Democrat.”

Rove said Rather’s eagerness to broadcast obviously forged documents proves he is “no serious reporter.” As for Rather’s insistence, to this day, that the documents are real, Rove said: “That’s really bias.”
[...]
Rove said Rather and his producer, Mary Mapes, were gunning for the president and trying to help his challenger, Sen. John Kerry, by broadcasting the forged documents in the heat of the presidential campaign.

“From her body language and his body language, their enthusiasm for this story was in large measure fed by the belief that they were playing a constructive and perhaps determinative role in the presidential campaign,” Rove said of Mapes and Rather.

“They made a decision in this instance – I think quite prematurely and quite unfairly – to pursue a story that attacked the president,” he added. “And I thought it was, to me, one of the most incredible examples of how fundamentally unfair it was.”

Rove expressed astonishment that CBS ignored the warnings of document experts hired by the network to authenticate the National Guard memos.

“It goes back to the failure of the mainstream media, in this instance, to honor their own experts,” he said.

Although Rove is not bemoaning the fate of the mainstream media, he is somewhat wary of the blogosphere due to its ability to stir up rumors and personal attacks:

Still, Rove cautioned that the Internet’s political potential has a darker side.

“There is so much ugliness and viciousness and fundamental untruths that the blogosphere transmits,” he lamented. “It also is a vehicle for ugly rumors, for scurrilous personal attacks, an avenue for the creation of urban legends which are deeply corrosive of the political system and of people’s faith in it.”

That is true. There are some sites out there that are just unbelievably vicious, and the conspiracy theory bunch has a new scandal every day. You have to be very discerning in what you read and believe.

It's going to be interesting to read this book, but I can't help but wonder how the book might be different if it was written today. The president has had a rough few months, and his "strategery" has failed him more often than not lately.