We should be ashamed of CNN and the New York Times

Many example from recent Clake coverage by the Daily Howler.

...To state the obvious, Blitzer knew that this presentation was fake, designed to mislead Wolf’s viewers. Even if Blitzer wasn’t prepared to deal with this clowning at the time it occurred, didn’t he have an obligation to explain the facts at some later point? But this is a major problem facing the press as this White House spreads strings of fake, phony stories. Did Kerry “vote for higher taxes 350 times?” Everyone knows that this claim is pure crap. But very few members of the press have had the courage to deal with this problem.

How dumb is this White House willing to be? And just how far will journalists go to accomodate the Bush camp’s stupid stories? On Tuesday, we presented an example from David Sanger’s laughable piece in the New York Times (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 3/30/04). The White House wanted you to think that Clarke’s book was packed with mistakes. So a White House aide listed problems with Clarke’s first chapter—and Sanger obediently typed them on up. The first example that Sanger provided? At one point, Clarke quotes the aide, Franklin Miller, saying this: “What can I do?” But Miller said that didn’t sound right—more likely, he would have said: “How can I help?” And yes, this actually went in the Times, the first item in a long story which ran with a photo of Clarke. (Sanger included six examples in all.)

You’ll note that Clarke isn’t quoted here; Sanger helpfully paraphrases (he “describes the Situation Room as sparsely populated”). Of course, most of Sanger’s readers didn’t have Clarke’s book. But we do. Here’s what Clarke writes:

CLARKE (page 10): The White House compound was empty now except for the group with Cheney in the Easy Wing bomb shelter and the team with me in the West Wing Situation Room: Roger [Cressey], Lisa [Gordon-Hagerty] and Paul [Kurtz] from my counterterrorist staff, Frank Miller and Marine Colonel Tom Greenwood and a half dozen Situation Room staff.
So let’s count the people in the room:
Richard Clarke
Roger Cressey
Lisa Gordon-Hagerty
Paul Kurtz
Frank Miller
Tom Greenwood
A half dozen staffers

Those familiar with life on the planet will note that this adds up to a dozen! Tell us again why American citizens should tolerate people like Sanger.

Of course, when Clarke’s book appeared, so did the propaganda; White House slugs fed nonsense to scribes, and scribes ran to type the scripts up. All these scripts were designed to suggest that Dick Clarke has just made this sh*t up. Eric Alterman comments aptly on the oddness of this “Richard Clarke food-fight:”

ALTERMAN: [T[he ferocity of the argument is odd. Clarke is not really revealing anything we did not already know. So far, I’ve not heard anything—absent insidery detail—that I did not include in my chapter on the subject in The Book on Bush, including for instance, the fact that Cheney’s alleged commission on terrorism never once met. This is not news. I read it in The Washington Post, I believe, which is why I knew it.
Indeed, many disputed points in Clarke’s book have been supported in other venues (as Kakutani notes in today’s review). In particular, many of Clarke’s “controversial” points are supported by Bob Woodward’s Bush at War.

Woodward’s book quite clearly supports a number of Clarke’s “controversial” statements. Let’s cite four examples:

Before September 11 occurred, was Bush detached from the War on Terror?
When Clarke returned to the White House on September 12, did he really find Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz trying “to take advantage of this national tragedy to promote their agenda about Iraq?”
Did Rumsfeld really say that “there were no decent targets for bombing in Afghanistan and that we should consider bombing Iraq, which, he said, had better targets?”
Was Bush “testily” hoping to connect Iraq to 9/11?

All these points caused consternation when Clarke’s deeply-troubling book appeared. Indeed, eager “journalists” manned battle stations, hoping to win free bottles of White House perfume by suggesting that Clarke was just making sh*t up. But all four statements are strongly supported by passages in Woodward’s Bush at War. Powdered lackeys just luvved Bush at War—but it supports much of what Clarke has said.