State Department's Rubin Criticizes the Press

The man in charge of publicly defending the United States' actions abroad defended himself against the U.S. press corps last night in a lecture at the Kennedy School of Government.

James P. Rubin, chief spokesperson for the U.S. State Department, explained that there is a rift between the government and the press.

This rift, said Rubin, who is assistant secretary of state for public affairs, often results in negative characterizations of U.S. foreign policy.

"As a foreign policy spokesman, I spend most of my time playing defense," Rubin said.

Noting that it was the 10-year anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Rubin said media-government relations have deteriorated since the end of the Cold War.

"There is a genuinely adversarial relationship between the government and the media," Rubin said of the current state of affairs. "There is a notion among the press that those in the government are either incompetent or corrupt."

Though Rubin acknowledged that journalists provide crucial information to the public, he complained that many prefer reporting bad news and uncovering government mistakes to offering optimistic analyses.

Rubin cited the NATO campaign in Kosovo, which he said the press insisted would be a failure.

He said the operation was a success, though, because it fulfilled the State Department's three principle goals: the expulsion of Serb forces from Kosovo, the installation of NATO forces in the region and the return of Kosovar refugees to their homeland.

Rubin also blamed the 24-hour news cycle for the antagonism between media and government. Reporters now require government responses before officials have time to analyze events, he said.

But Jonathan Mirsky, a fellow at the Shorenstein Center and a former East Asia editor for the London Times sitting in the audience, disagreed with Rubin, saying reporters' cynicism came from their negative experiences with official sources.

It "began in the Vietnamese war because we [reporters] felt the government was lying to us," Mirsky said during the question and answer period.

Rubin responded that the government is now much more open and truthful with the press than it was at the time of Vietnam.

"The premise that government spokesmen lie is an old notion," Rubin said. "You should not assign to the current situation the experiences you had in the past."

Another audience member raised the concern that many Americans now prefer isolationism to foreign involvement.

Rubin said State Department officials are trying to combat this attitude by speaking throughout the country to make the public aware about the effect of foreign affairs on American interests.

This is an area, he said, in which greater cooperation between the press and the government is needed.

Rubin also fielded questions about America's mistaken bombing of the Chinese embassy in Kosovo and a supposed chemical weapons factory in Khartoum.

In an interview after the speech, Rubin said such issues tend to elicit passion from an audience. What people seem to enjoy most, he said, is pointing out to him where the government has gone wrong.

As far as his own relationship with the press, Rubin assured the audience that he would never knowingly lie to reporters.

The lecture was co-sponsored by the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy and the Belfer Center for Science and International Relations.