What did Bush know? Let’s ask, ‘What’s he doing now?’

Just as generals are often accused of fighting the last war, so journalists often cover the last scandal. Thus, the airwaves and the print press have been filled in recent weeks with the Sept. 11 equivalent of the Watergate mantra -- “What did he know and when did he know it?”

Thirty years ago those words were applied -- repeatedly -- to President Nixon and the Watergate break-in and coverup; this time inquiring journalistic minds want to know just what President Bush knew about a possible Al Qaeda attack on the United States -- and how far before Sept. 11, 2001, he knew it.

These are eminently reasonable questions. If the administration ignored, minimized or neglected legitimate warnings about the likelihood that Al Qaeda was planning to strike the U.S. -- no matter how imprecise those warnings were as to where, when and how -- then the Bush team failed in its most vital responsibility: safeguarding the lives of American citizens.

But in Watergate, the coverup was, in effect, the endgame -- the crime was ultimately far worse than the break-in itself. With 9/11, whatever the Bush administration may have known and/or left undone before Sept. 11 -- as horrific as the results of that inaction were -- doesn’t seem to me as important now, today, as what it might be/should be doing to prevent another deadly terrorist attack here.

Failure to anticipate and prevent another -- dare I say -- even worse attack than 9/11 (nuclear? chemical? biological?) would make Nixon’s Watergate coverup seem like a minor presidential slip-up. But there’s been relatively little probing coverage of these preparations -- or the inadequacy thereof -- recently, especially when compared with the acres of newspaper and magazine space and hours of television time devoted to parsing the Aug. 6, 2001, President’s Daily Brief and every word related to it (and to other possible warnings, hints and clues).

Just look at the headlines that have dominated the front pages of major newspapers:

* “9/11 Panel Points to Missed Chances”

* “Ex-aide: Bush ignored terror threat”

* “Memo Cited Fears of Attacks in U.S.”

* “9/11 Files Show Warnings Were Urgent and Persistent”

One reason these stories have been given far bigger play than coverage of preparations against future attacks is that ever since Watergate, journalists, especially those in Washington, have been operating in a “gotcha” mode. The president -- any president -- says something, and then facts begin to emerge that suggest he may not have been telling the truth (or at least not the whole truth), and reporters are ready to pounce.

In an election year, with the out-of-power party understandably geared up to exploit any possible administration flaw, and the media eager to record every incremental step in this exploitation, such coverage is inevitable.

Mix in an “I told-them-so” insider-as-whistle-blower -- in this case, Richard Clarke, the former White House counter-terrorism official -- and you have exactly the sort of high-level, high-visibility conflict that makes for a big story.

Watching the grass grow

Preparation to prevent future attacks is, in contrast, “a much trickier story to report,” says Mark Whitaker, the editor of Newsweek. “We’ve done a fair amount of coverage on whether communications between the FBI and CIA have improved, but it’s still unclear how much better off we are today, and there are no dramatic headlines to report, as there are with the commission.

“Looking at these changes, even if they’re very important and very real, is sort of like watching grass grow,” Whitaker says. “Over time, grass growing is an important story. At any given moment, though, it’s not necessarily the most exciting story.”

True enough. Still, one would like to know just how much fertilizer the Bush administration is spreading around (and where) on this particular lawn.

For all the great enterprise reporting often done on a variety of subjects at the best newspapers -- investigative stories that reporters conceive and complete on their own initiative by connecting the dots that may not be apparent to most -- journalism is still largely the chronicling of the day’s events.

Some cynics would even say journalists are more stenographers than muckrakers, hastily scribbling down and transcribing bare-bones accounts of whatever happens in various public forums every day. And the forum of the day -- the week, the month -- is the 9/11 commission.

With daily testimony by key administration officials -- and frequent television appearances by commission members -- reporters have found themselves in the happy position of animals at feeding time in the local zoo. No hunting (or heavy lifting) necessary -- just lean back and open your mouth (or, in the case of the journalists, your eyes, ears and laptops).

“We in the press turn everything into a story, and the 9/11 commission is a story, with characters, built-in drama, all those wonderful, narrative elements that guarantee it very full coverage,” says Nicholas Lehman, dean of the graduate school of journalism at Columbia University.

This is not to say there hasn’t been some good reporting on the commission hearings, the Clarke book and the role of the CIA, the FBI and the Bush administration in the weeks and months leading up to Sept. 11. But there certainly hasn’t been a lot of good journalism of late on whatever the administration is doing (or not) to prevent another attack.

“What has been done since 9/11 has deterred and maybe actually foiled some attempts at sabotage and terrorism, but that kind of thing is difficult to report,” says Paul Steiger, managing editor of the Wall Street Journal. “The agencies involved would like to crow about it but can’t, because that would put at risk their sources and methods and increase their vulnerability. So you’re left with covering the dullest sort of things -- bureaucratic organization.”

Like a few other news organizations, Steiger says the Journal has recently created a homeland security beat to address one aspect of that problem -- a step that Lehman thinks more in the media should take. “Coverage of the structure and actual performance of the Office of Homeland Security in particular is one of the great unreported stories in Washington,” he says.

Less media obsession

One reason for such neglect is that “the media tend not to do a very good job of covering the bureaucracy,” Lehman contends. “Virtually all government agencies ... are under-covered.”

On March 30, for example, a congressional subcommittee held a hearing at which it was disclosed that the Bush administration had rejected an Internal Revenue Service request that the number of criminal financial investigators trying to analyze and disrupt the money flow to Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations be increased from 160 to 240.

That seems a fairly significant story. But the only media coverage I could find in a Nexus search on the hearing was one story inside the Business section of the New York Times, a two-sentence reference to the decision in a second New York Times story 12 days later, a paragraph on Page 68 of U.S. News & World Report and one sentence each buried in stories in the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Sun-Times.

Other aspects of anti-terrorist preparations have been given similarly short shrift of late. As appalled as I am by the obvious lapses in intelligence coordination and response in the months leading up to 9/11, I think we’d all be better served by a little less media obsession with “What did he know and when did he know it?” before 9/11 and a lot more coverage of “What is he doing and how is he doing it?” in terms of preventing future attacks.

David Shaw can be reached at david.shaw@latimes.com. To read his previous “Media Matters” columns, please go to latimes.com/shaw-media.