September 6,2005
When it comes to managing political crises (as opposed to national
ones), the Bush White House has earned a reputation as masters of
damage control. And rightly so -- let’s see you get reelected after Abu
Ghraib, the "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US" memo, no WMD, no bin
Laden (dead or alive), and "Mission (Most Definitely Not) Accomplished".
Well, according to the New York Times,
Rove, Bartlett and the damage control boys are at it again, rolling out
a plan to hang the post-Katrina debacle around the necks of Louisiana
state and local officials… and, in the process, erase the image of a
crassly incompetent administration too busy vacationing to worry about
the dying in New Orleans.
Hence, today’s
Presidential Visit, Take Two. Can’t you just see Rove yelling "Cut!",
hopping out of his director’s chair, pulling Bush aside, and whispering
in his ear: "Okay, Mr. President, this isn’t "Armageddon" meets "The
Wedding Crashers". So this time 86 the stories about how you used to party in New Orleans, and, for heaven's sake, do not focus on the suffering of Trent Lott.
And no more hugging only freshly-showered black people who look like
Halle Berry -- this time you gotta get a little closer to the
living-in-their-own-feces crowd. Alright…. action!"
Look, as much as
I despise the way they go about it, I get it: trying to save face by
deflecting blame and sliming your enemies may be ugly but it’s straight
out of the Rove playbook and has proven highly effective.
What I don’t understand is why the media continue to be star players on the Bush damage control team.
Take the way that both the Washington Post and Newsweek
obediently, and ineptly, passed on -- and thus gave credence to -- the
Bush party line that Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco’s hesitancy to
declare a state of emergency had prevented the feds from responding to
the crisis more rapidly.
The Post, citing an anonymous "senior Bush official",
reported on Sunday that, as of Saturday, Sept. 3, Blanco "still had not
declared a state of emergency"… when, in fact, the declaration had been made
on Friday, August 26 -- over 2 days BEFORE Katrina made landfall in
Louisiana. This claim was so demonstrably false that the paper was
forced to issue a correction just hours after the original story appeared.
So here are a couple of questions: 1) Had everyone in the WaPo
fact checking department gone out of town for the Labor Day weekend? I
mean, c’mon, the announcement of a state of emergency isn’t exactly the
kind of thing government officials tend to keep a secret. 2) Why were
the Post reporters so willing to blindly accept the words of
an administration official who obviously had a partisan agenda -- and
to grant this official anonymity?
Weren’t they familiar with the Post’s policy on using anonymous sources, which states:
"Sources often insist that we agree not to name them in the newspaper
before they agree to talk with us. We must be reluctant to grant their
wish. When we use an unnamed source, we are asking our readers to take
an extra step to trust the credibility of the information we are
providing. We must be certain in our own minds that the benefit to
readers is worth the cost in credibility. …Nevertheless, granting
anonymity to a source should not be done casually or automatically."
Here it was clearly done both casually and automatically.
The Post’s
policy continues: "We prefer at least two sources for factual
information in Post stories that depends on confidential informants,
and those sources should be independent of each other." Oops. They
could have saved themselves a lot of grief if the second source they
never got for this story had been a staffer for Gov. Blanco… or, if the
price of a phone call was too much, the state of Louisiana website
where the truth about the state of emergency declaration was a click away [pdf].
Especially since the Post
instructs its reporters: "When sources have axes to grind, we should
let our readers know what their interest is" and "We do not promise
sources that we will refrain from additional reporting or efforts to
verify the information they may give us". You mean like checking to see
if the line of bull they are feeding you is, y’know, a line of bull?
If anything, Newsweek’s effort to assist the Bush damage control effort was even more egregious. While claiming
that "Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Barbineaux Blanco seemed uncertain and
sluggish, hesitant to declare martial law or a state of emergency,
which would have opened the door to more Pentagon help" the magazine
didn’t even bother to cite a "senior Bush official", choosing instead
to report Blanco’s alleged failings as fact. Wonder where they got that
"fact"? You think it might have been from the same "senior Bush
official" that snookered the Post? Josh Marshall wonders…
The unquestioning
regurgitation of administration spin through the use of anonymous
sources is the fault line of modern American journalism. You’d think
that after all we’ve seen -- from the horrific reporting on WMD to Judy
Miller and Plamegate (to say nothing of all the endless navel-gazing
media panel discussions analyzing the issue) -- these guys would
finally get a clue and stop making the Journalism 101 mistake of
granting anonymity to administration sources using them to smear their
opponents.
The Washington Post
corrected its article. Now it should take the next step and reveal who
the source of that provably false chunk of slime was. And Newsweek should do the same.
It’s time for the
media to get back to doing their job and stop being the principal
weapon in Team Bush’s damage control arsenal.
Copyright 2005 Huffington Postp>
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