The Father of Lies

Such a classy blog, and an erudite audience: one of the commenters above actually used the word “plinth”.

And Lyin’ Joe Wilson isn’t merely an Arabist, he’s on the Saudi payroll (via his fellowship at the Middle East Institute). All those former and soon-to-be former diplomats looking for a retainer to augment their gov’t pensions.

And…and…when the outing of his wife occurred, his website at the MEI (link no longer available, alas) mentioned her under her maiden (operational) name. So much for clandestine cover.

–furious.

You obviously have the timeline and relevant facts down. I did, too, and for the same reason as you: being able to gather my own information from scores of sources and judge for myself what the real story was.

We aren’t alone.

I do not disagree with your proposition that the WH response to Wilson could have indeed been much more effective than it was. I have toyed with the idea that one factor we often overlook when judging the administration’s response to the media is just how apolitical most of the national security members of the cabinet really are; they have real jobs to do and their focus is on getting them done. Wilson’s thrown bomb was clearly a political act, and was in fact refutable on its face given the data available. Maybe the breakdown ocurred because nobody was designated to swing that particular bat.

We spent the entire Clinton administration witnessing the elevation of political ass-covering as the primary mission of the offices and agencies of the executive branch. In the slipstream of that operation, the rest of Washington dug in and resolved to be unnoticed at best, not actively targetted by dint of controversy or agenda at worst. Media functions in the environment it creates, and it seems that what began with Watergate has matured into something beyond ugly.

Real people working on real problems can devote their energy to dealing with the challenges before them, or they can slice off a chunk of finite time for packaging and spinning to cover their backsides in case things aren’t perfect. If you blundered in a manner that caused a Rasmussen hiccup affecting the Clinton White House, you were GONE. I don’t think that the Bush administration has played that game much, if at all; if memory serves me, almost all the departed cabinet or staff members who’ve been moved out thus far were moved out for failing to perform or failing to embrace policy. That’s a personal impression and I don’t know if it stands up to rigorous analysis.

I contend we picked up a very bad habit (as consumers of information) and haven’t been able to shake it.

I have stated before that MSM has written a pile of checks that they cannot cover. The call on the debt can take a multitude of forms: success in Iraq/Afghanistan, a booming economy with no inflation/unemployment spikes, anything resembling a landslide win and mandate for Bush…not to mention events like the current Wilson embarassment. I do not yet feel as John Moore does, that the beast is dead but the message hasn’t made it to the hindbrain…

…but they have surely chosen a side and tied their efforts and fortune to it. They see their world as stories and somehow miss the fact that what they really deal with is life and death and history. For decades, whenever the chips were called in they just printed up more money and came back to the table, ready to play another hand. They thought that it was in their power to say “The End” whenever it was convenient, and got used to just printing another story the next day.

That state of affairs no longer applies.

TmjUtah, I can’t agree on most of your point re WH PR strategery. I do agree that the Bush WH approach to media — which few may recall pre-9/11 was consciously “we don’t have to be the lead news item every day” — was refreshing and proper. But that’s not what’s at issue here, really.

The day the Joe Wilson op-ed came out, a friend and I (both with foreign policy backgrounds) talked on the phone and both assumed that the WH would quickly and savagely pulverize the non-story. There were several uranium sources in Africa, Wilson had only had limited exposure to the intel picture concerning one of them, and the nuclear weapons assessment on Iraq involved a lot more than just yellowcake procurement. In short, his op-ed was preposterously overstated and lacking in documentation — in the old days it wouldn’t have made it past the asst. op-ed editor’s desk without being nixed for lack of sourcing on such audacious charges.

The WH’s proper response was pretty simple. A call to 10 Downing to get SIS’s assurances they stood by the Africa assessment, and also to ask whether said assessment relied in any way on the famous documents (though it was already clear from timing that the answer was no). A call to Langley to find out what Wilson reported, what CIA thought of it, whether he had had any access to the British report or its sourcing, or whether there had been any other developments affecting the Africa question.

Armed with the responses (which in the British case would have yielded the answers that they stood by the assessment and it was made without any reference to the forged documents), and with a copy of the SOTU as-delivered with the Sixteen Words underlined in yellow, the press secretary should have gone to the press room and said:

“An opinion piece today made serious charges against the administration. These charges are completely unfounded, and the author, Amb. Wilson, is simply in no position to offer an informed view of the matter — much less to accuse the President of misleading the nation and the world.

“First, the SOTU made no reference to Niger (holds up speech). The reference was to Africa, and there are several uranium sources in Africa besides Niger.

“Second, Amb. Wilson has not had access to all intelligence on Iraqi uranium procurement — not even close.

“Third, even the findings from Wilson’s mission, contrary to his op-ed, were deemed to strengthen the case made by British intelligence.

“Fourth, the British stand by their assessment.

“Fifth, the British further point out that their conclusions took no account of any forged documents, which weren’t even in the hands of allied intelligence agencies when the British assessment was made.

We think Amb. Wilson should read the SOTU a little more closely, and review the limits of his information, before making irresponsible and offensive charges.”

I could be wrong, but I fail to see how this response, which was completely valid and could have been easily pulled together, would not have been vastly preferrable to Rice and Tenet pointing fingers at each other, which was about the extent of the WH reaction. Major malfunction by the WH, at many levels.

I guess I should have said “ideological competition.”

It’s ironic that the free market brings about a leftist monopoly.

I don’t think the irresponsibility will cost much until there are good alternatives. I no longer get my local rag (Arizona Repulsive) because it turned left and overly feminist, and I don’t need it with the internet.

Younger folks today almost have internet jacks into their brains. They are going to have a much greater choice about where their news comes from.

Furthermore, as high speed internet gets even faster, TV and cable start loosing their appeal. Imagine a device that you could hang on the wall, and play high definition video from the internet through. Imagine you also have a smaller one that you can carry around. Then add in the ability of normal people to feed that video into the network. Now add in blogs or logical derivations from blogs, and you have:

1) Raw news from many sources

2) News analyses from many sources (blogs)

3) Entertainment from the same technology.

4) Various levels of commercialization of this, in varying mixes, from totally open to strongly branded.

I see no reason why something like this might become very big. Two prescient books come to mind: Jahn Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar has the ubiquity of the net, decades before the cyberpunk authors, and Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card, with (if I remember correctly) the eqivalent of bloggers exerting major influence.

Put another way, those MSM bastards are dead. They just haven’t fallen over yet.

I agree with you that a healthy dose of competition would improve the situation dramatically, but I have two caveats: (1) The economics of the media industry are such that most cities don’t have the market to support more than one major newspaper; and (2) All of the competition in the world will not do the least amount of good if media outlets do not pay a price for being irresponsible. For example, the LAT gets a lot of competition from other sources of news (e.g., the internet, television, radio), but it’s not clear that its irresponsibility has actually cost it anything.

The members of the fourth estate have not been the “guardians of the public interest” in a long, long time. When they arrogated this role to themselves is when they started their decline.

Ultimately, the problem is fed by a lack of diversity. Group-think is the order of the day. Want a Pulitzer? Don’t upset the comfy apple-cart. Want your story to get good placement? Don’t write from the wrong attitude.

In the past (and still in many other countries), there is diversity of the press, with the ideological biases well known. In the US, most cities have one major daily, maybe a “free press” of some sort that is reflexively left, and that’s it.

The network TV people all live in the same town and go to the same parties and think the same way.

Add to that the arrogance of their pride in calling, and the arrogance of being insiders, and you have a group that knows that it is the elite which should form public opinion because only it knows what is happening and important. Again, with group-think, they all think the same way.

The result: spoon-fed pap, carefully flavored with ABB sauce, and devoid of any grains of disturbing truths.