Bush Stenographers Discredit Journalism

“Journalism isn’t stenography, as Maureen Dowd recently reminded Judy Miller,” writes the Columbia Journalism Review Daily.

“[P]ointing out the nuances of a carefully worded political speech should be one of the hallmarks of the craft. So far today, that hasn’t been the case,” CJR Daily continues.

So what’s CJR‘s beef?

“The White House is again taking the fight to the enemy — in this case, critics of the war in Iraq and those who still want to know what was up with all that faulty intelligence,” writes CJR.

“One part of [President Bush’s Veterans Day speech] directly tackled questions over the intelligence used as justification for the invasion of Iraq,” notes CJR, “and one quote in particular has shown up in most press reports about the speech.”

“The New York Times,” CJR continues, “ran the president’s quote in full in its early report”:

   “BUSH SPEAKING: ‘Some Democrats and antiwar critics are now claiming we manipulated the intelligence and misled the American people about why we went to war … These critics are fully aware that a bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community’s judgments related to Iraq’s weapons programs.’“

“[N]either the Times nor any of the major media outlets we looked at managed to pick up on his sleight of hand,” claims CJR.

“Fact is,” CJR continues, “as Harry Reid’s ‘Rule 21’ gambit pointed out last week, the initial Senate investigation only looked at how the intelligence community handled the information it collected — and, as of yet, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has not investigated exactly what intelligence went to the president, whether all of it was taken into account and what the vetting process was at the executive branch.” (Read all at CJR Daily)

We need more journalism like today’s talking points on Bush’s Veterans Day speech from the Center for American Progress: “President Bush Rewrites History.”

We need more editors like Greg Mitchell of Editor & Publisher who writes in today’s “It’s Your War Now“:

“The nation’s newspapers helped President Bush sell the war in Iraq. Now, three years and more than 2000 lost American lives later, their editorial pages refuse to advocate a major change in direction, even with 60% of the public urging the beginning of a pullout.”

(Via Howie in Seattle and The Smirking Chimp.)

Our #1 Rule … as if you needed a reminder … is that, despite some increase in media criticism of Bush’s administration, we can’t let up for a minute in scrutinizing, dissecting, and noisily bitching about media reports — and, perhaps most disappointingly, we can’t count on the media to get the story right until at least two to three years have lapsed and, sigh, tens of thousands have died. (See my Nov. 1 story, “Media’s Complicity in Leak Cover-Up.”)

Media Matters also derides the media’s failure to note “recent prewar intel revelations” in its coverage of national security adviser Stephen Hadley press conference last week … and Pre$$titutes takes MSNBC’s Norah O’Donnell [PHOTO ABOVE RIGHT] to task … continued below:

A November 11 Post article, a November 11 Times article, and the November 10 edition of CNN’s Lou Dobbs Tonight all focused on Hadley’s response to the Democrats’ efforts:

HADLEY: I point out that some of the critics today believed themselves in 2002 that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. They stated that belief, and they voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq because they believed Saddam Hussein posed a dangerous threat to the American people.

The Post devoted an entire article to Hadley’s remarks; the article also included coverage of the Democratic response. The Times noted Hadley’s defense at the end of an article on President Bush’s current efforts to “to shore up his credibility and cast his critics as hypocrites.” Dobbs gave only a brief report … But despite the Post and the Times‘ recent coverage of the declassified DIA report — and despite the fact that Hadley was deputy national security adviser at the time that report was disseminated — none of these news outlets mentioned the report.

That Hadley had directly addressed the matter of dissenting opinions compounded the severity of these news outlets’ failure to note the DIA report. In response to a question regarding what lessons he had learned from the handling of Iraqi intelligence, Hadley suggested that the president may not have received an adequate assessment of the intelligence community’s divided opinions …:

HADLEY: Obviously, what comes into the Oval Office, again, is an effort to provide a consensus judgment. But I think one of the things we’ve all learned from that is that it is important, also, to be clear about dissenting opinions and make sure that dissenting opinions also are given visibility; that we need more competitive analysis and to have products that come to the president. This is one view; this is another view. … And you’re beginning to see that happen in terms of how intelligence is coming to the president.

Moreover, the Post quoted Hadley as stating that the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) was “clear in terms of weapons of mass destruction”:

Hadley yesterday offered no direct critique of the prewar intelligence and instead said that at the time it was compelling evidence that also convinced the Clinton administration and other governments.

“The intelligence was clear in terms of the weapons of mass destruction,” Hadley said, citing a National Intelligence Estimate provided to Bush. “The case that was brought to him, in terms of the NIE, and parts of which have been made public, was a very strong case.”

But the Post failed to mention that the NIE “key judgments” had included a lengthy dissent on behalf of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) regarding the claim that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program. Further, the Post‘s characterization of the NIE as simply “provided to Bush” ignored the fact that the document was produced only after Democratic members of the Senate Intelligence Committee requested it in September 2002. In fact, the White House reportedly objected to the production of such an assessment at the time. An article in the September 22, 2003, edition of The New Republic described how the then-chairman … Sen. Bob Graham (D-FL), and Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-IL) pushed for the NIE after reviewing a classified CIA assessment of the Iraqi threat that reportedly took “the most aggressive view of all available information”:

Stunned by what they read, Graham, Durbin and others … intensified their demands for [then-director of central intelligence George J.] Tenet to produce an NIE on the Iraq threat. It was not a request that Tenet could easily fulfill. “The White House didn’t want it,” says a source with direct knowledge of the effort. “They wanted to draw their own analytical conclusions.”

Read all at Media Matters.

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For those of you too young to remember, the great comedic actress Ann Sothern starred in a 1950s sitcom called “Private Secretary.”

Special thanks to MSNBC for providing the photo of its White House reporter Norah O’Donnell who faithfully takes in and regurgitates major White House talking points — even going so far, recently, to call Harry Reid’s Rule 21 action a “bungled PR” move.

From Pre$$titutes: