The press takes a powder
The other day, I posted a piece in which Andrew Sullivan exposed the efforts of the Washington Post's Walter Pincus to bury and then downplay the Defense Department's memo documenting links between Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden. Now, Jack Shafer of Slate weighs in on the same issue:
"A classified memo by a top Pentagon official written at Senate committee request and containing information about scores of intelligence reports might spell news to you or me—whether you believe Saddam and Osama were collaborating or not. But except for exposure at other Murdoch media outlets (Fox News Channel, the Australian, the New York Post) and the conservative Washington Times, the story got no positive bounce. Time and Newsweek could have easily commented on some aspect of the story, which the Drudge Report promoted with a link on Saturday. But except for a dismissive one-paragraph mention in the Sunday Washington Post by Walter Pincus and a dismissive follow-up by Pincus in today's (Tuesday's) Post pegged to the news that the Justice Department will investigate the leak, the mainstream press has largely ignored Hayes' piece."
Shafer generously suggests that there are several possible explanations for the mainstream media's failure to report on the memo, but seems to favor the obvious one -- "the press' propensity to half-close its lids, lick its paws, and contemplate its hairballs when confronted with events or revelations that contradict its prejudices."
Shafer also finds the Defense Department's claim that the memo has been misinterpreted to be "a bit of red herring." According to Shafer, the Weekly Standard story by Stephen Hayes about the memo "works assiduously (until its final paragraph, at least) not to oversell the memo. Hayes' ample quotations to the memo preserve much of the qualifying language that fudges any absolute case for the Saddam-Osama connection." Keep in mind that Shafer remains agnostic about the existence of such a connection. His point is simply that Hayes' piece contributes significantly to the debate, and should have been reported as such.
Meanwhile, Hayes himself has responded, persuasively in my view, to the suggestion that his piece was inaccurate.
