The Center’s National Security and New Media Conference brought together some of the the most experienced and provocative voices in journalism to address several problems in mainstream media reporting on national security topics, with an emphasis on the recent presidential election.

The first panel, Beyond Bias: The Mainstream Media, asked what happens to a nation when the mainstream media overwhelmingly become the propagandists for the Left? Featured panelists:

• Richard Miniter: Columnist, Forbes Magazine and New York Times best-selling author and investigative journalis;
• Bill Gertz: Senior Editor, Washington Free Beacon, Columnist, Washington Times and Best-selling author of six books on national security; and
• Andrew McCarthy: Columnist, National Review Online and PJMedia, Executive Director, Philadelphia David Horowitz Freedom Centerand Former chief prosecutor in the 1993 WTC bombing

FRED GRANDY: We were constitutionally supposedly guaranteed a free press, but never a fair one. And too often, those two words seem to go hand in hand. And unfortunately, fairness, when it is translated into legislative initiatives can usually be the kind of equalizing forces that you’ve seen in communist countries such as if you remember the Fairness Doctrine which was designed to insure equal time to both parties whether you wanted it or not. But this first panel that we have this morning is entitled “Beyond Bias: The Mainstream Media”. That is, of course, the media, the conventional, the establishment media that most of us rely on, perhaps to a lesser and lesser degree and before I represent – I introduce our panelists – and I want to give them the optimum amount of time, but I just wanted to give a couple of examples, which I’m sure are real and immediate to all of you who have just been through this last election cycle, as to what we are actually dealing with right now in terms of volume if not value.

You all remember during the campaign president Obama uttered the line, “you didn’t build that” when he was talking about small businesses in America. What you may not know is that ABC, CBS, and NBC did not report that story for four days after it happened. And it was only through the Romney campaign’s use of that that it became a story. Now, contrast that with the Mother Jones release of the secret recording of the Romney fundraiser in which he said to a bunch of his donors that forty-seven percent of Americans don’t pay taxes. The networks produces a sum total of forty-two stories on that particular event, which amounted to about ninety minutes of coverage. By contrast, the media effectively suppressed the entire Benghazi story until after election day. The news did break online that the White House knew within twenty-four hours that the attack was indeed an act of terrorism and not something that was inspired by that so-called anti-Muslim video. But ABC waited two days and CBS and NBC held off for three before even that story became part of the mainstream reporting.

And just finally, in the last week of the campaign, roughly November 30- or October 30, excuse me – to November 6, almost forty percent of Mitt Romney’s campaign strategy, the coverage thereof, was negative. As opposed to about twenty percent for Barack Obama’s. So just in terms of the volume of news coverage and the slanting thereof, you can see that the – obviously, nobody can expect a really fair press these days. Having said that, let me turn this over to our distinguished group of panelists and we’re lucky to have them. From my far right, I want to introduce Rich Miniter who is a columnist for Forbes Magazine. He’s a New York Times bestselling author and investigative journalist. His most recent book, Leading From Behind, you can find that here for purchase. Next to him, Bill Gertz, senior editor of the Washington Free Beacon, a columnist for the Washington Times, you probably have seen his inside the rim column for many years. We use him on Secure Freedom Radio regularly. He is the bestselling author of six books on national security, the most recent one is the Fear Factor. Is that – Failure Factory. It’s a very long title, but you can also get it out here as well. And of course, Andrew McCarthy, who many of you already know. Columnist for the National Review Online, PJ Media. He is now the executive director of the Philadelphia David Horowitz Freedom Center. And of course, the former chief prosecutor in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. His latest book, Arab Spring: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy, is about to come out in hardback, is that correct?  Paperback. But it has been available online and you can order a copy as well. So on that note, let me begin by introducing to you Andrew McCarthy. We’ll have all of them say whatever remarks they want and then we will open it up for questions. Andy?

ANDREW McCARTHY: Thank you so much, Fred. It’s a great delight to be here. I love this event. It’s an annual event. I think it’s about the fourth or fifth one I’ve been back for and it’s always been just tremendous and I salute Frank and the Center for Security Policy on another successful year amid national unsuccess, unfortunately. I just want to – I don’t want to tarry long on this, but I want to pose three questions to you that I would suggest, today being December 11, it’s been three months since four Americans were killed in the atrocity that occurred in Benghazi. Which was known to be a terrorist attack within the first hours if not the first minutes that it was underway. Three questions. Number one, who told president Obama that Americans were under siege in a terrorist attack? Number two, when did president Obama learn this during the seven and a half hour siege? And number three, what did he do about it? That is, what orders did he give to protect Americans who were under siege? Now in the three months since this atrocity occurred, we’ve had either a complete cone of silence put over it, a fraudulent attempt to convince Americans that the cause was a cockamamie video that about eleven people saw till president Obama and Secretary Clinton became its two biggest publicists on the planet.And then, a considered effort to distract people’s attention by, you know, such earth shattering matters as what did Ambassador Rice know and when did she know it? The salacious details involving General Petraeus, General Allen’s curious email habits. These are the things that seem to have gotten the press’s attention. But yet, we cannot get an answer on the three basic questions I asked. Who told the president, when did he learn about it during a seven and a half hour siege during which Americans were under attack and the United States had military assets within an hour that could have responded to protect the people who were under the siege. And what orders did the president give? And I would suggest to you that if there were a Republican administration in power, those three questions would be on the front of every American’s mind just like what did the president know and when did the president know it were on the front of every American’s minds in 1973 and 1974. In his really tremendous book, The President, The Pope, And the Prime Minister, John O’Sullivan has this great vignette in there about how the protests had begun in Poland in the late 70s. And there was a very successful protest by the Solidarity movement and the first thing that the pope asked when he learned about it was – was the press there? And what he told his adviser was, because if the media wasn’t there, it didn’t happen. And I think that that is the thing that we’re wrestling with even amid an era of new media. I think we have seen a new phenomenon in the last fifteen to twenty years where the new media can shoot down a fraudulent story, but you can’t get on the map and you can’t force impact on a story that demands to be covered. If that isn’t done by the establishment media, it simply doesn’t get covered and it simply doesn’t happen.

In my book, Spring Fever, that Fred was good enough to mention, I talk about the first free election in the Arab world. In this whole era of spring fever. Or the Arab Spring. And you would think given the blood and treasure that has been expended by the United States this might have been something that the media was interested in covering. Right after Mubarak fell in Egypt, they had the first free election on the matter of constitutional amendments. And that sounds a little bit abstruse, but just to sort of get down to brass tacks about what it was about, the Muslim Brotherhood wanted quick elections in Egypt. Because they realized, number one, that they had the numbers to prevail. And number two, that they had the organization that was unmatched by any other faction in the country. And therefore, if they had quick elections, they would very likely take over parliament, perhaps even take over the presidency. And more important than anything else, control the writing of the new Egyptian constitution. Because what the Brotherhood has first, last, and always been about is the implementation of shariah law toward the goal of Islamizing societies, including, very much, Egyptian society. That’s what, many of us argued, they were about from the beginning. The secular democratic factions, such as they are in Egypt, understood this and also understood what people in America reading the press didn’t understand. Which is that they were weak. And that they needed time to build organizations and institutions if they were ever going to have a chance to compete with the Muslim Brotherhood. So they were pushing for elections to be put off to the future after the writing of the new constitution in the hope that they would be able to impact the substance of the constitution before the elections took place and that it would be a more, as they say, consensus document. A document that represented all of the different factions of Egyptian society, not just the Islamists. So what the first free election in Egypt was about was essentially the scheduling of these elections. The Muslim Brotherhood said, no, no, no. We don’t need a new constitution to have elections. We just need five or six amendments to the old constitution and then we can go forward. The other faction said, no, no, no. We need to have the new constitution first. So that was what the election was about. And it was fought out as elections are fought out in Egyptian in very sectarian terms. If you were for the Brotherhood’s position, you were for Islam. And if you were for the position of the secular democrats to postpone elections until a new constitution could be written, you were an enemy of Islam.

So I argue in the book – and I believe events are currently bearing this out, that here you had the perfect test of the West’s Arab Spring narrative. You know, was the Arab Spring, really, a spontaneous eruption of democracy because people have a craving for freedom? Or is it the ascendency of Islamic supremacism? In the event, they had the election in early 2011. The Islamic supremacists won by the count of seventy-eight percent to twenty-two percent. Four to one. And that four to one margin has bared out in every single thing that has happened since. The parliamentary elections in which the Islamists won four to one and therefore got a hammer lock on the constituent assembly that’s drafting the constitution. Ultimately, they won the presidential election even though Mohammad Morsi was virtually unknown and was kind of pushed in about three weeks before the finish. And now everything we’re seeing now. A shariah constitution that’s been produced by a constituent assembly that was dominated by the Islamist factions. All this seems to be a great surprise to us. And yet all of this was obvious from the very beginning of the revolution. And all anyone needed to understand in order to predict what was going to happen was what happened in that very first election. And yet the very first election, if you go back and try to find stories about it in the American press, they almost don’t exist. And the reason they don’t exist, obviously, is because they smash the myth of the Arab Spring. That unfortunately this media and this political class is totally invested in. No matter how, day after day, the myth gets exploded. So my point for this morning and I think my co-panelists are a lot more competent to speak to the media overall than I am – I just want to address it in this particular, but the point is that the phenomena that we are witnessing are really not hard to understand. Certainly in the national security area they are not hard to understand. But we do need the press to witness them. A functioning free society cannot exist and it cannot protect itself without a properly functioning media. And I think that’s a large part of the problem we have today. Thanks very much.

FRED GRANDY: Thank you, Andy. Next, I want to call up Bill Gertz. And if you are looking for the definition of a completely impartial reporting, you might consider this which I found in Bill’s biography. The head of the Russian foreign intelligence service referred to him as a tool of the CIA after he wrote an article exposing Russian intelligence operations in the Balkans. And a senior CIA official was so outraged at his article exposing a CIA analysis of China that he threatened to fire a cruise missile at him at his desk at the Washington Times. I don’t know how you can get more unbiased than that. But suffice it to say, Bill Gertz knows what he’s talking about. Bill?

BILL GERTZ: Thanks. I also – I said to the CIA at the time, I said, please don’t have the targeters who blew up the Chinese embassy in Belgrade do the targeting on that cruise missile strike on my desk. I want to speak fairly briefly on just a few, three topics of media bias. And I think that to start out with, I would say first, well, how do you measure media bias. Well, I think it really requires a clear understanding of the role of the press. I think really that’s been my career. I’m a conservative. But I understand and I’ve been battling liberal news media bias for forty years. I can remember being associated with Reed Irvine’s Accuracy In Media. Some of you may remember. And Reed kind of set the path for really taking on liberal media bias, especially at the New York Times and the Washington Post and I think that’s really the core of the issue is the elite senior media establishments. And clearly those two institutions at the top of the list is the New York Times. And but, you know, in the broader philosophical approach, basically – and I didn’t believe this when I started in the news business in the early 80s, but I believe that the news media plays a crucial role in our US national security and international affairs. And by that, it’s this idea of providing a check on government. The founding fathers were genius and they were very skeptical to say the least of power. They created three branches of government and then they went one step further and they created a free press. And it’s been that free press that has to provide even one more level of a check on government.

And I see some really difficult trends now. I see government is really out of control and I see them going after the press in the form of, you know, kind of an anti-leak hysteria. I remember running into John McCain in the green room at FOX one time and there was a panel – I think it was the Iraq weapons of mass destruction panel and they wanted to put restrictions on the press and it was McCain’s view, he said, to the panel, he said, look, do we really want to stop all leaks? He said, half the stuff that we learn comes from the press first. So there’s this understanding of the role of the press. Now the problem of bias is that – and I think it began kind of really to gain momentum, in my view, and I’ve been in Washington a long time, but during the Clinton Administration, there was a clear media bias in favor of the Clinton Administration. And at the Washington Times at the time we really were able to exploit that because we were able to pick up stories that no other news publications were interested in covering. They may have covered things like missile defense, like other things, you know, in a perfunctory way, but they really left open the field to us at the Washington Times and my colleague Rowan Scarborough and I, we just used to marvel at the various things that were done. And we said, you couldn’t make this stuff up and we would have a great ability to get those stories. And to counter media bias really is to present the truth. And in the news business, that really requires sources. And of course getting sources of information is a challenge. It’s really a challenge. But once you can do that, you can present the clear truth and facts that will counter-act the biased media. So the three things that I want to touch on briefly and then we’ll, you know, we can discuss them further when we get to questions and more, but I wanted to look at Benghazi coverage. I wanted to look at Superstorm Sandy coverage. And then, of course, the election coverage.

And I’ll start briefly with the election. And it’s clear, I mean, I guess the only way I can say it is, to me, it was just so obvious that there was a narrative within the establishment media led by the New York Times that Obama had to be protected from conservatives. And this is kind of the – this is coming from what I call the anti-anti-communist element in our society. Where the left is so against anti-communism that they now have made it kind of an ideology and this has led to really kind of an anti-conservative movement. We talked about this earlier over coffee. Really, it’s like conservatives are, it’s like open season. You know, in our society, you can’t criticize any groups, but conservatives, religious people, it’s just open season. You can say whatever horrendous thing you want to say. You can demonize this group and no one seems to worry about the issue of diversity when it comes to political diversity. But it’s, I mean, just to sum up the election coverage, it was one constant attack on Romney and it was one gigantic puff piece for Obama. And I think that that was, you know, that’s the way to sum that up. Now, Superstorm Sandy. We had the president who went there a few days before the election. You know, I talked to an aid to Don Rumsfeld and he said that Rumsfeld believed that up until that point that Romney was going to win the election but that after the storm that was a pivotal moment upon which whatever undecided voters there were, they would somehow turn to Obama. And I think that’s clearly what happened in a lot of ways. But look at the coverage of Superstorm Sandy. You know, compare that to what happened in Katrina. When Katrina devastated New Orleans, everyone blamed the Bush Administration for its lack of response. The same thing has happened in New York and New Jersey with this storm. And there hasn’t been a response. My outlet, the Free Beacon, has published numerous stories showing that FEMA has trailers and equipment, but can’t get them in there because of bureaucratic red tape. Yet you won’t read about that in the New York Times. You won’t read criticism of FEMA. And yet it was just the opposite, there was this non-stop horrendous coverage of the Bush Administration for its failure over Katrina. Last is Benghazi and this is really my specialty. I do national security affairs and I’ve covered this story from the very first beginning points. And to me it was simply amazing to look at what was happening to this attack that occurred on September 11. And kind of the initial response was when Governor Romney came out and criticized this as a foreign policy failure, who got attacked?

The elite media attacked Romney for highlighting this failure as if somehow he was wrong and irresponsible to do that and he was absolutely correct and he was correct without even knowing the facts as we are subsequently to learn about all of the failures, the requests for greater security, the failure to respond, the cover up. There were so many different levels. And then finally, after the election, first of all, the administration put out a directive that this issue will not be discussed  by their friends in the media. And I have to say the Obama administration and I talked about the Clinton Administration, the Obama administration has been very effective in controlling the media through favors. And the way they do that is they give out information to their favorite media outlets and they don’t just not provide information to those they consider unfriendly media, they put out false and bad information. So it’s almost a disinformation, much more active than it was during the Clinton Administration. Very difficult for news media to deal with. But that’s the situation. They put out this word, you cannot talk about Benghazi. Guess who violated that? David Petraeus. He came out maybe a few days before the election and issued a CIA timeline of events on Benghazi. And this went against the administration’s directive not to speak at all. And the way they did that was announced this was under investigation and thus because it’s under investigation, we can’t really talk about it. That’s been their line and the Secretary of State is expected this week, possibly Friday, maybe next week, will talk about it when they release their report. But in the past, the news media would have been all over this story one hundred percent. There would have been calls for special committees. There would have been calls for special prosecutors to look into criminal malfeasance and negligence. But there was none of that. Because the media has aligned itself with the Obama administration. So that left it to other media to really pick up the ball and try to report the story.

And, you know, I did one piece on this – and I’ll finish up with this – just about the issue of politicization of intelligence. This is what happened in the case of the CIA talking points. Now, the New York Times ran a story on their front page not too long ago where the entire piece was an attempt to downplay the fact that the CIA put out false information about the Benghazi attack. And the information they put out was that this was the result of a spontaneous demonstration against the anti-Muslim video. When, in fact, from the very earliest stages, they understood there was an al-Qaeda component. And that was this group, Ansar al-Shariah. This is an al-Qaeda linked group. There have been numerous intelligence reports and people came to me – and this is where, this is where you’re really dependent on your sources, they came to me and they said, this is false. We’re angry about it. This information has been covered up. The reason it has been covered up is because it goes against the president’s statement at the Democratic National Convention that al-Qaeda is, quote, on the path to defeat. Here, two week – a week and a half after that speech, al-Qaeda attacked our diplomatic compound in Benghazi, killed four Americans, including the ambassador. And so this ran counter to that and it was because of that that this issue was politicized. Now, in the aftermath, the administration has claimed that the CIA was totally to blame and the CIA has basically acquiesced in that coverup. They have claimed that this – they were involved. When in fact they were following the narrative of the Obama administration. And this was set by John Brennan. And in a piece I did recently, I talked to Douglas Feith, former undersecretary of defense for policy, and he said that it’s not just an issue of politicization of intelligence, it’s the entire bureaucracy has become politicized to the idea that you cannot mention Islam in any context related to terrorism. Therefore, terrorism has become violent extremism. And then you end up with the absurdity of calling the Ft. Hood shooting workplace violence. And it’s just unbelievable to me. But the other strain of that is this whole idea of what Jeane Kirkpatrick, many years ago, called the Blame America First syndrome. In the Obama administration, we have had the epitome of the Blame America First ideology. That is, whenever something happens, the immediate reaction is not to look at the bad guys and the motivation of the bad guys, in this case, Islamic terrorists, it’s to look at what the United States did to provoke the bad guys. And that has become the ideology of the administration and it’s, basically, its followers in the press. I want to close here with a quote from a piece that was done by Matthew Continetti which I think really sums up the whole issue of media bias and it’s just a very brief quote. He wrote a column, what he called “Obama’s Army”. When he was referring to the liberal left media in support of him. He said, the fact that the media line is so mutable that the tone and emphasis of their coverage is merely a function of Obama’s relative position reveals the extent to which the press has become a withering and slightly deformed appendage of the center left. This is not a matter of vetting the president’s biography and past associations four years into his term. Which the media never did in the past, back in 2008 or since. It is a matter of covering Obama’s official record right now as the global economy stagnates, Washington deadlocks, Europe teeters, Islamists take power in the Middle East, Iran grows emboldened, Afghanistan falls apart, and China and Russia fester. It is about suggesting, if only hinting, that Obama and not George W. Bush, ATMs, or an idiot in California, might at least be somewhat responsible for what is happening in the world. We have a real problem and the solution, again, is to get the truth out. Get the facts and report them as aggressively as possible. Thanks.

FRED GRANDY: Thank you, Bill. Before I ask our last panelist, Rich Miniter, to come forward, I just wanted to say a word about his most recent book, Leading From Behind, which I mentioned earlier. It is an examination of president Obama’s six key foreign policy decisions and although it is being well reviewed and very popular, one place it is not popular, evidently, is the White House. Which has already issued three separate responses to charges made in the book including that Valerie Jarrett’s influence led to the bin Laden raid being canceled three times. So I think it’s fair to say that Rich is not going to be invited to any iftar dinners at the White House but we’re glad to have him here, Rich Miniter.RICH MINITER: Everybody talks about media bias. But no one does anything about it. It’s kind of like the weather, you know. But we got to start by being honest. Why is the media so biased? It’s not just simply that they all happen to think – or so many of them happen to think the same way. What we’ve been doing about it is ineffective. And the way the media is presently structured drives this outcome. So you’re overcoming a structure. So let’s first start talking about the structure. The media is like a snowball. Teeter-tottering on two chopsticks. Virtually everything you read, see on TV, radio, read on the web, comes from one of two sources. Those are the chopsticks, right. One is a handful of wire services. Associated Press, AFP, you know, a handful of very small wire services. On a major story, all wire copy might come from three or four people. And by the way, those three or four people all know each other. On some stories, those people are married to each other. Literally. On other stories, especially foreign stories, those three or four people are actually the same person. They share correspondence in places like Istanbul and Cairo and so on. So it’s coming from a very small perspective. From the wire services. One person. Now there’s a handful of newspapers, that’s the other chopstick, that determine the coverage. There’s the New York Times, there’s the Washington Post, to a certain extent, there’s the New York Post, there’s the Wall Street Journal, and then depending on the type of story, there’s either the Los Angeles Times or a sub-specialist paper that’s focused in that area. So you can have a great story in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and it’s not going to have any impact. It’s not going to matter. Those handful of papers determine what network news decides is a story. That’s what other newspapers decide is a story. They say, well, this is leading in the New York Times. It must be important. And yes, I’ve been in newsrooms working as a reporter, working as an editor elsewhere, where people literally say that. Why? Very simple. It’s not that they think the New York Times is a perfect newspaper, although frankly many of them do. It’s that they all want to work at the New York Times.

Ultimately, that’s the dream job of journalism for many, many of these people. They would all like to be on the staff of the New York Times. So there’s an incredible desire to ape and to follow the New York Times. To show you how powerful this influence is, let’s go back in time a little bit. Let’s go to 2003, the very beginning of the Iraq War. If you think carefully about it, what did you notice about the coverage of the Iraq War in its first year? It was largely factual and it was largely positive. Did you ever wonder why? Because the big name diplomatic reporters, foreign reporters, they did not want to be embedded with the US military. They didn’t want to be the stooges of the military. They – many of them said this in print, they weren’t going to be controlled by the US government. They were going to be independent. They were going to stay behind in Kuwait. Well, at this point, you know, the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and so on, didn’t want to be left out. They wanted to have coverage of, you know, the fourth I.Ds, invasion of Baghdad, that kind of thing. So they asked for volunteers. From the newsroom. And so who did they get? For the most part, they got people who had almost no foreign reporting experience at all. Where you had people who covered fire departments, where you had people who covered police departments, city desk people. People who’d never get a glorious foreign assignment at all, let alone a glorious one, like covering a major development in war. But these reporters were used to talking to cops and firemen. Who, by the way, are largely similar to US soldiers, especially people who serve in the reserves. They can relate to them. They didn’t go to Harvard, but neither did the people that they were covering. For the most part. And what did these reporters do? They did what you think reporters naturally would do, which is to say, they listened, they asked questions, and they reported what they saw and heard. If you look at the early coverage of the Iraq War, you’ll see that this – the accounts are highly factual. The reporter is not trying to make a point at all. Here’s just – here’s what happened. Here’s my piece of the puzzle.

But by 2000 – sorry, yes, by 2004, that coverage begins to shift. We’re now moving into a presidential election year. And the major fighting is over. And that’s the other reason they didn’t want to be – the big name reporters did not want to be associated with accompanying US armored divisions as they went north, is that it’s actually dangerous. They want to be war correspondents, but  being shot at is not part of what they were interested in. They wanted to rhetorically shoot at our political leadership, they didn’t want to be shot at themselves by our political enemies. And the number of embeds drops between ’03 and ’04 from more than four hundred to seven. Seven people. And those seven people counts reporters from The Stars and Stripes and from military.com and so on. And a few wire services. So now who’s back covering the Iraq War? Well, the so called experts. The guys who thought it was a little dangerous to go to Baghdad or Bakuba [PH] or Carbola [PH] or whatever. They came with a whole preset collection of ideas. Now who did they hire to translate for them? Well, the very same people that Saddam Hussein had approved in earlier days. Their fixers. The people who arrange interviews for them, who translate for them, had, before the fall of Saddam, been approved by Saddam Hussein. And these fixers stayed in place for years. So as those foreign correspondents, you know, were generating those stories about the Iraq War, they were relying on people who had been approved by Saddam Hussein to tell them who to interview. So we lots of stories about the evils of the Shiites, we saw lots of stories about the failure of America’s project. And, you know, when this came up, I said to a senior member of the Defense Department, if you want better media coverage, why don’t you just give green cards to all of the translators and fixers currently employed by the media? They’ll have to hire new ones. And since Saddam Hussein is no longer around, chances are, those fixers wouldn’t be approved by him. And this got a laugh, but nobody did anything, of course. So it’s the people. It’s a handful of publications. The reason why I took you back in time to the Iraq War, it’s the people. When you change the people, you change the coverage. Night and day. And from 2004 onward we see this unrelenting criticism of the handling of the war. And the war is presented as a disaster. Even though in reality, it was a disaster for the enemy. Now, we’ll get to Benghazi and those things in a moment. The conservative response has been ineffective. It has basically – the conservative response has been three things. One, examples of bias. Just to complain about what the media is missing.

Second thing conservatives have done is, fine, we’ll start our own publication. We’ll start our own website. And that’s useful in its way. But because it’s not part of those two chopsticks, it doesn’t influence the media. What happens is a great story appears, you know, on the Mark Levin radio show or Breitbart.com or Pajamas Media, what have you, and everybody in this room talks about it. And other people talk about it. But the assignment editors who decide what stories get covered don’t even read it. They don’t know it exists. So they certainly don’t put a reporter on it. And when a reporter is enterprising and does read a story in one of these places and brings it to his editor, and I’ve heard these conversations, what they say is, one, I haven’t heard of that. Secondly, who’s the source? Oh, Breitbart.com or National Review? Oh, well, that’s just one of those conservative outlets. We can’t follow them. That’s what they say. We can’t follow them. So while the influence of starting your own media outlet is useful, it’s marginal. Because one story in the New York Times like the scratch before the microphone that expands to fill the whole room drives all radio, TV, and a lot of print, both magazines and newspapers. It drives the coverage. Now the other conservative response has been to write op-eds. And conservatives are absolute masters at opinion articles. You know, I used to work at the Wall Street Journal editorial page. Which I think is probably the finest home of op-eds in the English language, certainly. But op-eds are reactions to news stories and events. They don’t start conversations. They add to them. Media bias will continue to be an enormous problem until we’re able to get to the place where we can start conversations. Conversations are started with reporting. With verifiably, provably true new ideas, on the ground coverage. And somehow let – that is able to promote them broadly enough to have a big impact. If you look at some of the coverage of, let’s get to Benghazi now, of Benghazi, on the right side of the political spectrum, and you sift through it, you find that there is a lot of new information sprinkled hither – you know, throughout. Marbling it if you will.

But there is no story written from someone on our side of things. From Benghazi. That goes through and gives a factual narrative that is based on talking to dozens or hundreds of people who are directly involved. Because conservative organizations, National Review to pick one, simply don’t – or Washington Times, where I also used to work, don’t have the budgets for that. To match that is an enormous investment. And so what you see on the right side of the fence very few investigative reports. Very few attempts to start the conversation. So if we’re going to change things, we first got to change our approach. You can go back to the Nixon years and read beautifully written complaints about media bias. We’ve been complaining about media bias for forty years. If we don’t start to do something besides complain, our grandchildren will be complaining about media bias and still accomplishing nothing. One of the great things about political defeats is they’re learning processes. That’s where you evaluate what has worked and what hasn’t. We’ve got to do something more than complain. Or we’re going to get a lot more defeats. Like the one we saw a month ago. It’s time to start thinking about what to change. Where media bias is continuing to drive the discussion. We’ll continue to suffer its slings and arrows. And why does it matter? Because when the general public doesn’t have a good grasp – remember, the media is the intelligence service for ordinary people – when the average person doesn’t have a good understanding of what happened, they don’t make decisions based on that information. They make other decisions. If you were to leave this club right now and walk down the street and randomly ask people have you ever heard of Benghazi? Does anyone want to bet me that only one out of twenty people have the faintest idea what you’re talking about? The other side doesn’t win by having better arguments. The other side wins by simply not allowing certain ideas to be widely known. Certain events, certain things, to be widely known. And that will continue to stifle our democracy and defeat any attempt for meaningful change until we start by changing. That’s where I think we should go next.

FRED GRANDY: All right, we have some time for questions. I couldn’t help thinking of something when Rich was speaking, I used to work for a radio station in Washington that was part of the ABC chain and they owned a series of radio stations around the country, one in Washington, one here in New York, one in Chicago. And going back to his point about only a handful of people really decide what the news is and a lot of what we think is the news is not their ideas in the newsroom reminded me of a story. At the outset of the 2010 elections, there is a morning show in Chicago at WLS that was covering some Tea Party events that were just getting underway in Chicago. And they interviewed Charlie Gibson, who was then the anchor of the ABC Evening News because being part of the ABC family, he was easy to get. And they asked him, Charlie, what do you think of this Tea Party movement? And his response was, what is the Tea Party movement? He had no idea until he heard it from a couple of local talk radio hosts. So obviously there are gates through which the news must pass. Now, I don’t know, do we have microphones? Oh, yes, we do.  We have microphones on either side. So  Sure. So I’d be glad to open this up for questions right now if you have them. Let’s start with this gentleman right here.QUESTION: I remember well a talk that Seth Lipsky gave, many of you know him, and he let out with a line, he said, the newspaper reflects the point of view of the owner. And what I took it to mean is that the owner hires the assignment editors and really they determine what goes into the news. But today, something like ninety, ninety-five percent of all the news is owned by a small number of companies and they are at risk to the government for licenses and what not. I want you to talk to the threat of coercion renewing, not renewing, issuing licenses from the government. And also, I’d like you to talk to the issue of the effect of the withholding of financing for merger and acquisition activities which also drives these major corporations. And today, as I’m sure you may realize, the financial sector is pretty much in control not only here in the United States but all over the world of what gets into the news. Thank you.

FRED GRANDY: Anybody want to start on that?

RICH MINITER: Well, I think there are three things going on here. One, there’s this widely believed myth that the internet is killing the news business. That’s just not true. That’s an excuse for a larger problem. When you look at the consolidation that you’re talking about, the consolidation is driven because the major media, both TV, radio, and major print media, newspapers and so on, is highly – the top fifty, especially – is highly unionized. And one of the things that astonished me when I was at the Washington Times when we were looking at the possibility of having our competing paper, the Washington Post deliver some of the Washington Times inside the DC circulation area, is they had unionized delivery trucks where they were paying the drivers 107,000 dollars a year plus overtime. Now that’s great if you happen to be a member of the union, but it’s killing the business. So a lot of this mergers and acquisitions are not driven because of – there are a bunch of evil minded people sitting in backrooms, looking to control the business. They’re definitely trying to control costs. And this is – because this is a shrinking business, they’re trying to control costs. And I think you’ll probably see a further concentration of the media just simply driven to control costs. And one part of the costs occur that they can control is by – through mergers, shrinking the back office, shrinking the accounting departments. Circulation and so on. I don’t know – I know Seth, I know him well. I like him. I don’t know if ownership really drives editorial coverage to the extent that Seth would argue. And partly is that there are other factors driving editors and managers besides the will of the owner. In most cases, the owner – unless you’re dealing with a very sensitive subject, where, as you suggested, there’s a TV license or a radio license that the company urgently wants, or the company’s looking to expand into say India or China, they become very sensitive to how their coverage of those countries is perceived by those countries’ governments. And so they begin to self-censor. And I’ve seen that in various places that I’ve worked. Where suddenly coverage of a particular topic gets highly censored in order to look out for the corporate interests. But I’ve never seen that happen and I’ve never heard of that happening for domestic politics. That is to say, where the owner says, you know, we really want to help candidate A or we really want to hurt candidate B. And most of those decisions are just pushed further down the chain. The assignment editors who originate a lot of this copy, however, they do have an idea of where they’d like to see things go. They are often highly friendly to the unions that are the ones forcing the business to shrink. They’re also highly frustrated with the management of those papers. Which doesn’t necessarily challenge them editorially. Remember, like any declining business, the quality of the management declines first. So because this is – news is no longer seen as a growth business, the very people who a generation ago would have been in the news business are now in software. So you see the decline in managerial quality, you see unionization driving up costs, and yet the media still has this enormous power. But aside from a handful of stories, it’s the fact that those who decide what gets published all share a certain perspective. And read a small number of publications. And until you change those people or present them with stories that are absolutely bullet proof, that they just can’t make objections to, you’re not going to see a change in the coverage. I don’t think that breaking up media ownership would lead to a change in the business.

BILL GERTZ: Yeah. Let me just comment briefly. I see a problem with the proliferation of kind of left wing funded new media. And one of the new models that’s emerging is the non-profit news model and you see in Pro Publica and The Center for Public Integrity overtly liberal left funders providing a media outlet there. And that’s one of the things that The Washington Free Beacon has emerged to counter-act that with a more conservative oriented – not bias, but in reporting stories that the liberals won’t cover. And so that is a trend. Then you’ve also seen Warren Buffet, I believe, has purchased a number of newspapers and he’s a big supporter of the Democrats. So I see that as definitely – first of all, I do think the news business is in big trouble. The traditional news business. And no one has really solidified the new model. And obviously, we’re going to hear about that in the next panel talking about new media.

FRED GRANDY: How about right here?

QUESTION: I don’t understand the – I was interested in your comments about the Wall Street Journal and the editorial page being superlative. But the coverage of the stories being less so as compared to the New York Times, for instance. And actually, I get both papers and I think it was yesterday, the New York Times covered extensively the riots in Egypt. The Wall Street Journal actually didn’t even have anything on the first page. I don’t understand – I know the Wall Street Journal has a much larger circulation and FOX News has a very, very significant presence, an unremitting lineup of conservative commentators. So I’m trying to put this all together. Also, one comment you said about the Iraq War was – the Iraq War was a disaster for the enemy, but I don’t understand because it seems like Iran benefited. And Iran was the enemy. And what do you ultimately think Obama is trying to achieve with the Muslim Brotherhood and what is the meaning of the – his connections with Muslim Brotherhood figures in the United States, etceteras, those coming from abroad, what is it you think he is trying to achieve in the Middle East?

FRED GRANDY: Who wants to start with that one?

RICH MINITER: Well, there’s a lot in that question. Firstly, what I said was a disaster for the enemy, I meant the Iraq War. I meant, day to day as they encountered US forces. The average length of a firefight I think in Iraq was about a minute and ten seconds or something like this. So when – they learn very quickly. It’s why they switched to IEDs, roadside bombs, that kind of thing. That directly engaging US forces was a losing proposition for them. And a quickly losing proposition. That’s what I meant. Strategically, of course, Iran’s influence in Iraq and in the region has only grown. And that is a strategic defeat for the United States. If Obama had not withdrawn US forces from Iraq so rapidly, I think we might be looking at a different strategic situation. Obama’s withdrawal in Iraq is, I think, the biggest strategic mistake the United States has made since George H. W. Bush’s failure to capitalize on the collapse of the Soviet empire. We would be looking at a totally different strategic picture. If we still had major US forces in Iraq. The uprising in Syria would already be over. Thirty thousand people – upwards of thirty thousand people wouldn’t have died. And I think the nature of the Arab Spring would have been different. In a lot of these countries, when we look at the Muslim Brotherhood’s role, I think that’s important to look at, but the other part of that is the role of Iranian intelligence services. And we do know – and there were wikileaks on this, which Petraeus had met with then Mubarak’s head of intelligence in Egypt. I could find it for you if you haven’t seen it yourself, where the Egyptian intelligence is briefing Petraeus, who was then CENTCOM commander, I believe, saying that the Muslim Brotherhood and Iranian intelligence, one Sunni, one Shia, working hand in hand and that Egypt’s government felt so threatened by this that if the Iranians did not stop, this is in the cable, that Egypt would begin financing opposition groups inside Iran. So they saw this connection. Has this connection been widely reported in our media? Of course not. Even though they have the wikileaks documents.

FRED GRANDY: Do you want to say something?

ANDREW McCARTHY: Yeah. In terms of what the Obama administration is trying to accomplish with the Muslim Brotherhood, I think two things need to be understood. The first is, as much as we have consciously avoided understanding the scarier aspects Islamic supremacist ideology – and that’s a problem that goes back more than twenty years – I think also underappreciated is the symmetry between the Islamic supremacists and the leftist view of the world. It’s a really – since we don’t look at their ideology at all, I think it’s something that’s been much underappreciated. I think the Obama administration shares the Islamist narrative of America as a, you know, racist, colonialist, imperialist, etceteras. Not suggesting that the Obama administration is supportive of terrorism, but I do think that their outlook is similar to the Islamist outlook in the sense that it is – it’s very much in favor of the cooperative of centralized government, authoritarian government, in many ways totalitarian government. That shariah is a totalitarian system. And the Obama administration does feel that it can work with these groups because it has a degree of sympathy for their case against the West. So that’s a big part of it. The other thing is there is a – there’s a vision of these Islamist organizations on the left that to the extent they’re a little wild and crazy in their methods, that once they have the responsibilities of governance, that is, once they are in positions of power and have people to answer to, that the responsibilities of governance will somehow tame them. And I always think that that’s kind of a, you know, a theory in search – desperate search of any evidence to prove that it’s true. I think anywhere you look where Islamists have got in power, take Hamas in Gaza, take the Iranians, what we’re now seeing with the Muslim Brotherhood and even what Turkey has done, what the Islamist regime in Turkey has done over the last decade. What you see is the antithesis of government actors being tamed by their responsibilities. And I think that’s just a – I talk about this in the books, it’s just a misread of Islamist culture. You know, in the West, I think we have a certain expectation that government officials have constituents and they feel like it’s representative government and they have to represent the interests of constituents. That’s not an expectation that is dominant in the Middle East. Where Islamic culture is the number one fact on the ground. Where the expectation of Islam is really surrender to the shariah system of Allah that’s fundamental to their belief system. And they’re not constituents who expect their government representatives to act on their behalf. They actually have an expectation about being ruled and dominated that’s foreign to our culture. So, you know, I don’t think that the left’s vision, the Obama vision of the Middle East is an accurate one. But it’s their story and they’re sticking to it.

FRED GRANDY: We have time for one more question.

QUESTION: Mr. Miniter, you suggested that there’s one person that’s in charge of all the information. You talked about the two sticks. Could you tell us who that one person might be? And also, what is your suggestion for a change in course? To change the situation?

RICH MINITER: What I was trying to say is that on some stories, for example, coverage from Kandahar, Afghanistan, the wire services would have one reporter on the scene and share the copy. So in some foreign cases or even some remote stories in the US, the initial coverage will be by a single reporter. And appear in hundreds of newspapers and drive TV and radio coverage. So this whole system, this enormous multi-billion dollar media industry often rests on a handful of people and what attitudes shape their thinking on issues. And it’s incredibly dependent on these small number of people. And if you could magically change who those people are, you’re going to end up getting very different coverage which is the reason why I gave you an example of the Iraq War before and after the ordinary reporters were embedded and the expert reporters came back. And then the use of fixers who determined who they interview, what the stories were and so on. I’ll be happy to talk at another time about what we can do about it. I actually have thought about this quite a bit and have a plan.

FRED GRANDY: We want to keep moving. Our next panel, I think appropriately named To The Rescue: The New Media. Let’s thank our panelists.