alternative hippopotamus

I just saw this little snippet from Bush's radio address of today on TPM:

The existence of this secret program was revealed in media reports after being improperly provided to news organizations. As a result, our enemies have learned information they should not have, and the unauthorized disclosure of this effort damages our national security and puts our citizens at risk.

I had a sneaking suspicion we'd hear something along these lines, when I read this Byron York bit from yesterday:

One obvious issue raised by today's New York Times story is that there appears to have been another leak of classified information that might affect national security. As observers of the Patrick Fitzgerald CIA leak investigation know, our national security agencies take such leaks very seriously; indeed, not long ago a CIA source told National Review that the agency had referred the "secret prisons" story from the Washington Post to the Justice Department for investigation as a possible leak of classified information. Now, it seems likely that the National Security Agency will refer the New York Times story to the Justice Department as well, but the NSA, true to its reputation, isn't saying. "We have no information to provide," an NSA spokesman told National Review Online. "We do not discuss actual or alleged operational issues." It also remains to be seen whether Democrats, as particularly strong supporters of the Fitzgerald investigation, will call for a probe into the New York Times leak.

In lieu of decontructing the fallacy the York/Bush argument, I'd like to point out this as a textbook example of how the rightie blogosphere works. I know I pound on this fairly often, but it's an important distinction between the two halves of the blogosphere. The right-half, notably NRO, Malkin, and Powerline rehearse, repeat, and recycle Rove's talking points. They're an extension of the radical right-wing borg that includes Fox, Regnery, and Rush Limbaugh. Now, even PBS is controlled by right-wing activists, and the minions from NRO will frequently make guest appearances there.

The left, meanwhile, is trying to develop a grass-roots network to challenge the "Republican" Noise Machine, to steal David Brock's expression. The quotes are there around "Republican" because it's not fair to paint the party as a whole that way. We're really talking about a coalition of the Uber Nationalists (Freepers), Dominionists (Fundies), and Neocons (Neocons).

The larger issue is that this entity we call The Media, who at one time was responsible for objectively reporting on the news, is now subverting the process by creating the news.
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When I was reviewing John Harris's reporting during the 2004 presidential campaign I noted a variety of Republican talking points that Bush would use in his stump speech that Harris would pass on sans fact-checking. For instance:

"See, I thought we were going to find stockpiles," Bush acknowledged at a voter forum in Beaverton, Ore. "So did everybody else, you know. . . . We haven't found them yet, I recognize that."

But he insisted that Congress acted on the same intelligence he did in giving bipartisan approval to an Iraq war resolution, and that "the world is better off because Saddam Hussein sits in a prison cell."

I knew that Congress hadn't seen the same intelligence that the White House had seen. It was frustrating at the time, because serious political editors like Harris were repeating the talking point without asking: "Might the president be pulling our leg?"

Senator Feinstein asked the Congressional Research Service to look into the question. And, of course they verified that Congress did not have the same intelligence the White House did. The White House also had access to raw intelligence. As we know now, some of that raw intelligence, parts that were used in presidential speeches that were debunked, came from torturing detainees.

Why these limits on Congressional access? (from the report)

In not providing Congress routine access to source identities, executive branch officials cite the need to protect against "leaks" or unauthorized disclosure of information that the Intelligence Community generally considers to be the most sensitive in its possession.

Anyone read that graph to Karl Rove or Scooter Libby?
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So, I read the Harris "Live" thread with bated breath, wondering if he'd answer my question which was "What's Jeff Gannon really like?" Long story short, he skipped right over that one.

Here's what I think is going on with Harris: through a combination of being worked over by the Bushies and fear that what happened to Dan Rather will happen to him, he has unwittingly diluted critique of Commander Bunnypants. And it's certainly true that the Washington Post goes after the Bushies as well as any US paper does. If you listen to the BBC, however, you're reminded of how administration-friendly our press has become.

Brad Delong notes a fine bit of fact-checking from the Post's Peter Baker. Right on. That's how things should be. Now, compare that to Harris's tepid reporting and lack of fact-checking on Bush's 2004 campaign. One of these things is not like the other.

In the online discussion thread Harris keeps bringing the issue back to a narrow issue: should Froomkin's column be called White House Briefing or Dan Froomkin's Cooking with Walnuts?

I sees this as spinning to some degree. The discussion started with Ombudsman Howell saying:

Political reporters at The Post don't like WPNI columnist Dan Froomkin's "White House Briefing," which is highly opinionated and liberal. They're afraid that some readers think that Froomkin is a Post White House reporter.

Froomkin's column is not "highly opinionated and liberal". It's what we call "reality based." He does that thing that they call... what is it... fact-checking. He spanks Bush's little bottom with the daily act of mendacity that White House briefings have become, and rubs George's nose in the mess he's made.

Meanwhile, Harris suggests a conservative blogger for "balance." I can see it now: While my colleague Froomkin believes that recent polls show that Bush is unpopular, such talk is pure naysing, and undermines our mission in Iraq. Good God, now I'm starting to sound like David Brooks.

Anyway, what I'm saying is that the narrow focus Harris tries to create in the thread doesn't gibe entirely with history. The issue is bigger than that. It's a pervasive notion that criticising the Executive branch is inheritantly "liberal and opinionated."
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This has to be one of my favorite games here at the Alternative Hippopotamus. The way it works is: we look at a quote, and try to guess whether the author is pandering or paranoid. If you answer correctly, you get a cookie.

Here we go. No peeking:

For some people, environmentalism is collectivism in drag. Such people use environmental causes and rhetoric not to change the political climate for the purpose of environmental improvement. Rather, for them, changing the society's politics is the end, and environmental policies are mere means to that end.

The unending argument in political philosophy concerns constantly adjusting society's balance between freedom and equality. The primary goal of collectivism -- of socialism in Europe and contemporary liberalism in America -- is to enlarge governmental supervision of individuals' lives. This is done in the name of equality.

People are to be conscripted into one large cohort, everyone equal (although not equal in status or power to the governing class) in their status as wards of a self-aggrandizing government. Government says the constant enlargement of its supervising power is necessary for the equitable or efficient allocation of scarce resources.

Therefore, one of the collectivists' tactics is to produce scarcities, particularly of what makes modern society modern -- the energy requisite for social dynamism and individual autonomy. Hence collectivists use environmentalism to advance a collectivizing energy policy. Focusing on one energy source at a time, they stress the environmental hazards of finding, developing, transporting, manufacturing or using oil, natural gas, coal or nuclear power.

Paranoid or Pandering? The answer is, since the author is George Will, years of fealty to various rightwing causes make his paranoia indistinguishable from his pandering. So, if you bothered to answer the question at all, you got it right. Give yourself a cookie.

Oh, and by the way, George, (yes, I know you're reading this) the reason that folks like me oppose drilling in the Arctic Refuge is because destroying the entire coastal region of a wildlife reserve so some thug can drive his SUV at 85 mph is just plain wrong. And by folks like me I mean the majority of Americans.
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August 15, 2004 Washington Post:

The failure to find the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was one place where Bush on the stump flips the discussion from his vulnerability, a war rationale that has not been borne out by evidence, to Kerry's -- a trail of votes and statements that in Bush's telling reveal the challenger's indecisiveness.

"See, I thought we were going to find stockpiles," Bush acknowledged at a voter forum in Beaverton, Ore. "So did everybody else, you know. . . . We haven't found them yet, I recognize that."

But he insisted that Congress acted on the same intelligence he did in giving bipartisan approval to an Iraq war resolution, and that "the world is better off because Saddam Hussein sits in a prison cell."

July 15, 2005 White House Briefing (a publication entirely unrelated to the Washington Post):

John King showed that clip on CNN. "If it were anyone else, Karl Rove might have advised the president to keep his distance from a political lightning rod like himself. But today in the midst of the CIA leak investigation, Mr. Bush and his uberstrategist stood and walked shoulder to shoulder," King said.

He asked John Harris, political editor of The Washington Post: "What do you make of the pictures today?"

Harris replied: "Well, I think they say everything. That clearly that was what the message they want to say. Look, forget about it if you're going to chase Rove out of town in this frenzy. It's not going to happen. And I take that at face value. I don't think Rove is going anywhere."

There's a few things I'm starting to notice about Harris's style:

• He luvz Republican talking points.
• He doesn't luv fact-checking Republicans. Like the bit about Congress having the same information as Bush.
• He is remarkably uncritical of the Bush administration.

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Jim Boyd, deputy editorial page editor at the Star-Tribune in Minneapolis: (E&P)

I have a very difficult time believing I deserve this award, but I am grateful for it. The last three years have been difficult. The pushback for our aggressive views has been intense. Radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt organized a campaign to get people to drop subscriptions; we lost about 200, and it scared my superiors. Bloggers like Powerline harassed us continuously. A senator who shall go unnamed (hint: he's no fan of Kofi Annan) had breakfast with our publisher and warned him that we were beginning to be associated with the loony left and that I had an angry agenda.

Well, you folks are not the loony left. So thank you for honoring me; it will help.

John Harris, Political Editor for the Washington Post (PressThink via firedoglake):

Q: Have officials from the White House complained to you or to Post political reporters about Froomkin’s column?

John Harris: They have never complained in a formal way to me, but I have heard from Republicans in informal ways making clear they think his work is tendentious and unfair. I do not have to agree with them in every instance that it is tendentious and unfair for me to be concerned about making clear who Dan is and who he is not regarding his relationship with the newsroom.

Remember folks, whatever you do, don't frighten our leaders.
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Over at the DCDL site I go over the story so far with Dan Froomkin, Howell, and Harris.

It's not a trivial story. Harris is advocating for a less visible role for White House criticism. You can parse it how you like, but that's what it boils down to. While it's true that his comments shouldn't be confused with Ombudsman Howell's tin-eared remarks, he hasn't exactly distanced himself from them either.

Jay Rosen at Pressthink has published interviews with Harris and Froomkin. I want to spend a little more time looking at the interview, but I thought this exchange was telling:

Q: You also said, “I perceive a good bit of his commentary on the news as coming through a liberal prism—or at least not trying very hard to avoid such perceptions.” But you don’t give any examples or links to past columns, and Deborah Howell, who also made this point, doesn’t give any examples, so it’s hard for readers to judge what these observations are based on. Could you help me out here? What issues does WHB tend to view through a liberal prism? Can you point to columns that you had in mind? You also say that it may be true that Froomkin would do the column the same way if Kerry had won the ‘04 election; but if that’s so, doesn’t that undercut the notion of a liberal prism?

John Harris: How Dan would be writing about a Kerry administration is obviously an imponderable. Does Dan present a liberal worldview? Not always, but cumulatively I think a great many people would say yes—enough that I don’t want them thinking he works for the news side of the Post.

Without agreeing with the views of this conservative blogger who took on Froomkin, I would say his argument does not seem far-fetched to me.

Shorter Harris: I don't want to agree with RNC blogger Ruffini, but I'll post a link to him that's close to my own viewpoint. Yes, I know there's a famous quote about TV never having gone broke by underestimating the intelligence of its viewers (paraphrasing Twain, I believe), but is that what Harris thinks of the Washington Post's readership?
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Gale Norton at the Heritage Foundation (WaPo via Carpetbagger Report):

"ANWR would supply every drop of petroleum for Florida for 29 years," she told a friendly audience at the Heritage Foundation yesterday, "New York for 34 years, Illinois for 43 years, California for 16 years or New Hampshire for 315 years."

So how many years would ANWR's oil keep the whole country fueled up?

Norton balked at the question. "When you look at it for the whole country, you really get somewhat of a deceiving picture," the secretary answered. She said that's "not the way this operates," and said the question "assumes that unless a source of energy is going to meet all of America's needs then it's not worth looking at."

No, when you use statistics to lie, that's when you get a deceiving picture.
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Time's Mike Allen from yesterday's Meet the Press (try not to vomit):

But what you hear is, you talk to Republicans at Christmas parties, they think he still has the makings of Reagan. There's still great promise in this administration. But nobody sees a clear plan to achieving that promise. A lot of friends of the president thought he's going to be one of the greats. They thought it was a given that he was going to be a Roosevelt, a Lincoln. Now, they're not sure. They think he still has it in him. If you talk to his friends, the president has not changed. They talk about a sort of Zen- like quality that he has, that folks came up from Midland. They thought they were going to have to buck him up for Christmas. He was fine. He was reading military history, taking comfort in what happened to other commanders in chief who were underestimated in their time.

I read things like that and expressions like "surreal fawning", or "shameless pandering" or "gag me" come to mind. That's the kind of critique we would get from our Washington press core without Froomkin's example.

Interesting that part of that excerpt ended up in Froomkin's column today. You don't suppose he was making a point or anything, do you?
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Turns out I wasn't the only one irked by Howell's ombudsman column.

Anyway, I found this comment amusing:

I thought Ombudsmen were appointed to resolve vague issues, not contribute to them?

Removing the title of his invaluable digest "White House Briefing" isn't going to do anything except introduce vagueness about the column's subject.

What would you then call it? "Dan Froomkin's 'Cooking with Walnuts'?"

Later: WaPo National Politics Editor, John Harris, weighs in on Froomkin:

Several of the comments here refer to me, and many others confuse the issues raised by Deborah Howell's column. As the Post's political editor, I'd like to respond, in the interest of being as clear as possible about how we view our own work, and the concerns about "White House Briefing" in the Post newsroom.

The first issue is whether many readers believe Dan's column is written by one of the Washington Post's three White House reporters. It seems to me--based on many, many examples--beyond any doubt that a large share of readers do believe that. No doubt there are some who enjoy the column for precisely this reason. If I worked outside the paper, I might presume myself that a feature titled "White House Briefing" was written by one of the newspaper's White House reporters.

Given that there is such confusion, the question is whether this is a problem. For me it is a problem. I perceive a good bit of his commentary on the news as coming through a liberal prism--or at least not trying very hard to avoid such perceptions. Dan, as I understand his position, says that his commentary is not ideologically based, but he acknowledges it is written with a certain irreverence and adversarial purpose. Dan does not address the main question in his comments. He should. If he were a White House reporter for a major news organization, would it be okay for him to write in the fashion he does? If the answer is yes, we have a legitimate disagreement. If the answer is no, there is not really a debate: washingtonpost.com should change the name of his column to more accurately present the fact that this is Dan Froomkin's take on the news, not the observations of someone who is assigned by the paper to cover the news.

People in the newsroom want to end this confusion. We do not want to spike his column--or at least I don't. It might be the case that he would be writing similarly about John Kerry if he were president. But I guarantee that many people who posted here would not be Froomkin enthusiasts--or be so indifferent to the concerns I raise--in that case.

In his comments, Dan pleads with reporters to stop complaining about him and start doing more to hold the White House accountable. The reporters on the Post's White House and political teams every day push through many obstacles and frustrations to do precisely this kind of accountability reporting--as I'm sure Dan would agree. But these are the very same reporters who are raising objections to "White House Briefing." The confusion Dan's column unintentionally creates about the reporter's role has itself become an obstacle to our work.

John Harris
National Politics Editor

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In the beginning there was the Froomkin. And, it was good. In the night there were the Bushies, but then day followed night, and the light overcame the darkness.

Which pissed off his colleagues, apparently. WaPo Ombudsman Deborah Howell:

Political reporters at The Post don't like WPNI columnist Dan Froomkin's "White House Briefing," which is highly opinionated and liberal. They're afraid that some readers think that Froomkin is a Post White House reporter.

John Harris, national political editor at the print Post, said, "The title invites confusion. It dilutes our only asset -- our credibility" as objective news reporters. Froomkin writes the kind of column "that we would never allow a White House reporter to write. I wish it could be done with a different title and display."

Harris is right; some readers do think Froomkin is a White House reporter. But Froomkin works only for the Web site and is very popular -- and Brady is not going to fool with that, though he is considering changing the column title and supplementing it with a conservative blogger.

Where to start? The reason that Froomkin's White House Briefing exists and takes the form that it does is that you respectable WaPo political reporters are not getting the story out. Out of your belief in false balance you've convinced yourselves that the truth is the arithmetic mean of freerepublic and democratic underground. No, the truth is simply the truth whether it is critical of Bush or not. Or perhaps you believe that the facts themselves have a liberal bias?

Oh, and you know what's really hurting your credibility? Folks like Krauthammer, psychoanalyzing Democrats from his armchair, Steno Sue mixing up Iran and Iraq, or Cizilla's editor adding names of corrupt Democrats to create pseudo-balance.

If you read this, I beg you: post, email, whatever to the WaPo ombudsman.
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The second in a series of at least 2 hippocasts is ready for downloading. This is a little different from two weeks ago. You could even say it borders on journalisming.

There's three discussions: My Dinner with Art Levine, where we discuss the goings-on in Abramoff land, second, the Big Laugh starring Don Rumsfeld, and finally, the alternative gift fair held last Monday night in Dupont Circle.

I hope you check it out. Here.
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