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Washington Post Turns Over Front Page to Bush PR Department
by Chris Edelson The Washington Post has a front page article today (hat tip to Joe Sudbay of America Blog) that might as well have been ghost-written by a charter member of the Bush legacy team. This piece is stenography, not journalism. The piece, entitled “Two Advisers Reflect on Eight Years With Bush”, is made up largely of unchallenged statements by Bush advisers Josh Bolten and Steven Hadley. The Post writer, Michael Abramowitz, simply provides Bolten and Hadley a forum in which they can present their own self-serving and, more to the point, Bush-serving, defenses of the president. Someone reading this piece who knew nothing else of the Bush years (for instance, someone reading the piece in 10 or 20 years) would have no real idea why Bush was so deeply unpopular. The piece does not include any dissenting point of view–no quotes from anyone who disagrees with Bolten and Hadley’s view that Bush is a “good decision-maker” who was simply misundestood by a public who failed to appreciate this smart, engaged, humane leader. Here’s one specific example (there are more than I can fully cover in this post) of what’s wrong with the Washington Post piece. First, Abramowitz includes this quote from Bolten: “everyone who has actual personal exposure to the president, almost everybody, appreciates what a good leader he is, how smart he is and especially, how humane he is.” Abramowitz simply includes this quote, without comment, quibble, or further observation. A real piece of journalism would have at least noted that this statement is simply, and objectively, not correct (or, at the very least, it is “disputed” in the parlance of balanced journalism that allows the Bush administration to insist black is white without being called a liar). Here is a short list of some people with “actual personal exposure” to Bush who don’t think he’s the best thing since sliced bread: former counterterrorism adviser Richard Clarke, who charges Bush with ignoring warnings about terrorism before 9/11,former Bush Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, who wrote a book that is highly critical of the president, Lawrence Wilkerson, an aide to Colin Powell who recently called Bush a “Sarah Palin-like president“, Powell himself, who doesn’t see Bush as the good decision-maker described by Hadley and Bolten, the former #2 official in Bush’s Office of Faith Based Iniatitives, David Kuo, who says the president failed to follow through on promises to help the poor. And here’s perhaps the most glaring omission. How could a piece on two members of Bush’s “Texas mafia” (a dumb term, I’m just quoting the Post on this one) fail to note that one former member of this group, Scott McClellan, one-time press secretary to the president, wrote a memoir that made something of a splash in which he said the president “convinced himself to believe what suits his needs at the moment” and engaged in “self-deception” to advance political goals? If this is how the supposedly liberal Washington Post covers the Bush apologists, what can we expect from others? Of course, as Al Franken has noted, some years ago (in his “Lying Liars” book), the real problem here doesn’t involve questions of liberal v. conservative media. This is simply an example of shoddy journalism, stenography masquerading as journalism and placed prominently on the front page of a major newspaper.
Chris Edelson is a lawyer in Washington, D.C. who writes frequently about current political and legal issues. His writing has previously been published in The Philadelphia Inquirer, Metroland (Albany, NY) and at commondreams.org.
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