Will the Media Let Bush Lose?

By Sam ParrySeptember 16, 2003
The U.S. news media may soon face a dilemma: Can pundits keep calling George W. Bush "the popular war-time president" – a favorite stock phrase – if his poll numbers sink much further? For two years, the phrase has been a media cliché for Bush often delivered with a pleasing smile from an agreeable talking head. Or it’s used like a club against some critic who is out of step with the American people.
ABC's World News Tonight used the phrase to describe Bush both when Howard Dean announced his Democratic candidacy in June and when John Kerry announced his in September. To a degree, the "popular war-time president" repetition has created a self-fulfilling reality, especially when reinforced by generally fawning news coverage, laudatory books like "The Right Man," an action-figure doll in a flight suit, and even a hero-worshipful Sept. 11 docu-drama (which put brave words into Bush’s mouth though he spent most of that awful day sitting frozen in a Florida classroom or fleeing to Louisiana and Nebraska).
Similarly, the U.S. news media has framed next year’s election around the repeated question, "Is Bush Unbeatable?" – again suggesting that Bush is next to invincible. But the latest polls suggest that Bush’s voter support is fading fast in the face of job losses, a worsening deficit and continuing violence in Iraq.
Though the poll results have varied in their details, the overall trend lines are ominous for Bush and his political advisers. The declines have tracked with the continuing death toll in Iraq more than four months after Bush donned the flight suit, landed on the USS Abraham Lincoln >>>cont
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