Scott McClellan Mocks NYT -- Near 4th Anniversary of Paper's Weak 'Mini-culpa' on the War

In a supreme irony, word leaked out about bombshell revelations in the upcoming Scott McClellan memoir -- including his unexpected charge that the "liberal media" fell for Bush "propaganda" on Iraq -- almost precisely four years from the day from The New York Times offered its famous "mini-culpa" on its role in helping to pave the way for war.

The Times, you remember, reluctantly published a short piece, admitting that a half dozen of its stories in the run-up to the war were fatally flawed, but didn't name any of the guilty scribes and buried the story on Page A10 - about where many of its articles that had raised doubts about Saddam's WMD had ended up.

Now here is McClellan in his book, What Happened, as quoted by Mike Allen of Politico.com, admitting that the Times and other media had been too easily hoodwinked by the White House. He calls them "enablers" in the march to war.

McClellan charges that Bush relied on "propaganda" to sell the war. Allen summarizes: "He says the White House press corps was too easy on the administration during the run-up to the war....McClellan repeatedly embraces the rhetoric of Bush's liberal critics."

In the book, McClellan charges: "If anything, the national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House and to the administration in regard to the most important decision facing the nation during my years in Washington, the choice over whether to go to war in Iraq. The collapse of the administration's rationales for war, which became apparent months after our invasion, should never have come as such a surprise. ... In this case, the 'liberal media' didn't live up to its reputation. If it had, the country would have been better served."

Ouch.

E&P was one of the few "mainstream" publications to repeatedly raise serious questions about the case for war before the invasion. In the months after the attack, we often charged that the Times had been duped and questioned why it refused to come clean. Executive Editor Bill Keller mocked some of the critics (and later stood by Judith Miller through thick and thin).

Finally, on May 26, 2004, the paper ran an editors' note, copping to some of the charges. But the paper tried to shield the guilty parties, and I was first online to identify by name the authors of the six pieces in question, with Miller turning out to be most guilty, and Michael Gordon also having a hand in two stories.

The paper refused to penalize any reporters or editors for their failures. Jack Shafer of Slate memorably called the mea culpa a "mini-culpa."

Perhaps most embarrassing, the paper's reluctant review sparked some other papers that had carried the faulty Times accounts in 2002 and 2003 to run corrections of their own. Many of them placed their own apologies in far more prominent positions than did the Times.

And clearly Keller had been reluctant to own up to the misreporting at all, at least in that time frame. Consider that my assessment of the Times' report, carried the day it appeared, closed with this: "But Executive Editor Bill Keller continues to defend the editors' note, and blamed 'overwrought' critics for overreacting to the Times's WMD coverage. Asked why he finally published the editors' note, Keller (quoted in the Washington Post) replied: 'Mainly because it was a distraction. This buzz about our coverage had become a kind of conventional wisdom, much of it overwrought and misinformed.'

"With his managing editor, Jill Abramson, he penned a memo to staffers explaining that the critique in the paper was 'not an attempt to find a scapegoat or to blame reporters for not knowing then what we know now.'

The problem of course was that certain reporters ignored, or only paid lip service to, evidence that "we know now' - but (as some Knight Ridder reporters showed) was often also available then."

But don't take my word for it. Ask Scott McClellan.

Greg Mitchell's new book is So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits -- and the President -- Failed on Iraq. It features a preface by Bruce Springsteen and a foreword by Joe Galloway. He is editor of Editor & Publisher.

Comments

[Mojane]

Journalism at its best, the Knight-Ridder publishers, were on it from the begginning, digging, questioning everything they heard or read in the lead up to the war, and continued to do the job all decent journalists, their editors and publishers used to do, dig for and find the truth. Unfortunately Knight-Ridder was purchased, and I have no idea what's happened to the integrity of the organization since then. There are still periodicals out there that do the job of good journalism, The New Yorker, Esquire, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, etc., but most people don't get their information from newspapers or magazines anymore, they get it from televised tabloid "news" and magazines... for them, that's the world and all there is to know, and all they want to know. One has to go to blogs anymore, like this one, for any depth in mass communication, but even then, it's preaching to the choir. The folks who'd rather read and watch the tabloids are helping to make political decisions and vote, to boot.

[dotmafia]

Scott McClellan Does A Hans Fritzsche

Hans Fritzsche, Chief of the Nazi Propaganda Ministry's Radio Division.

Nuremberg War Crimes Trial, 1946

"Between these criminals and myself there is only one connection: they merely
misused me in a different way than they misused those who became their physical
victims."

"In really serious questions of policy and the conduct of war I did not commit a single falsification and did not consciously tell a single lie."

"But decisive for such a news machine is not the detail but the final fundamental basis on which propaganda is built. Decisive is the belief in the incorruptibility of the leaders of the State, on which every journalist must rely, and this basis is shaken by what has become known today of mass murders, of senseless atrocities and by the doubt in the honesty of Hitler's protestations for peace."

"I am convinced that Hitler and at least some of his colleagues had deliberately lied to the people, in some important instances, right from the beginning of their political career, and, something that is not so important to history, I personally consider that, on these points, I have been deceived."

"The main guilt of people such as Fritzsche is that they did know the actual state of affairs, but despite this, proceeding according to the criminal intentions of the Hitler Government, intentionally fed the people with lies or, to use an everyday expression, 'threw dust in their eyes.'" ~ Ferdinand Schoerner

[swift goat pet for truth]

Corporate Media does its job. Supports the right wing. Supports corporations. Supports the GOP. Supports McCain.

Focuses on Hillary's laugh, Edwards' haircut, Obama's minister. Dem Delegate counts.

God forbid it ever examine policy or policy proposals. Or the economy.

Social Security is a good example. Did you know that given the historical GDP, Social Security never runs out of money? That is NEVER. By SS's own numbers. Corporate Media will never tell you that.
Go ahead, Google it.

There is no liberal corporate media. Nor was there ever.

[Doofus]

The reporters, many of them, are liberal. The editors and
the owners, not so much. That DOES make a difference.

[ResidentChimp]

Mitchell always forgets the inconvenient truth that the Congress was echoing President Bush's rationale that was based upon intelligence that was available to all the decision makers. He also conveniently forgets to mention that the justification for the war was a set of 17 reasons for attacking Iraq. Dems like to pretend their not complicit in the Wars we're waging, but the fact remains that they signed off on them every step of the way.

[research]

The NYT's is not a liberal paper.

[95flhtcu]

Liberal media? IS this the same liberal media that refuses to even look in John McCain's direction? He is absolutely right, the media didn't do their job. Just reported what the Whitehouse fed them. No investigation, no looking behind the curtain. In their quest for ratings or book deals, todays journalist isn't investigative and the networks don't encourage it. when you add to that the number of brain dead followers of Bill Orally and oxy-limbaugh that actaually take what they say as truth it's very easy to get the right-wing message of the day to millions of people.

[BluGirlRedState]

Helen Thomas questioned the war from the very beginning. How was she treated by the W.H. Press Secretaries? She was belittled and treated as if she were crazy or senile. To her credit this treatment never stopped her from asking the tough questions, which she continues doing to this day. She deserves our thanks and respect.

[Thebigkate]

Good for Scott McClellan for "outing" the NY Times. I have not yet read his book, but I hope he gets specific, because there are a few reporters there who should have been blacklisted after the "no WMD" news got out! Judy Miller, is at the top of the list. I guess in a way she has been punished--and I don't mean her jail term! At the top of my list of miscreants is Thomas Friedman (aka Tommy Freedom) who was a cheerleader for the war and was, like Cheney, positive we would be greeted as liberators! He even went so far as to call it "Tom's War," by which he meant using his own strategy--different from the Administration's! Through the years, Tom has changed his views. However, he has never apologized, or admitted error! And he stays on as the star columnist at the Times. What a sham! I am reading his columns lately with a cynical eye, since it seems he sees the handwriting on the wall, and is seeking access to a new Obama administration. Good luck, Tom! I think they are on to you!!!

[coolrepublica]

The Times naive? Who would have thunk it. These Obama is our savior editorials of late only reinforced my believe that the Times is a bunch of idiots that happened to go to great schools. They couldn't see a fraud being pulled on them, if it fell over their head.

[JJK]

The truth is that many of us are now ashamed, but honest enough, to admit that we bought the alleged presence of WMD in Iraq. Those of you who didn't buy that pile of lies have earned the respect of the rest of us.

It's easy for me to look today for people to "blame." I believed Colin Powell, a man I once respected but whom I would now assign to a particularly horrid place in hell. I believed Condoleeza Rice, a woman I truly used to admire, but whom I now regard as an ambitious, opportunistic and evil human. I believed the media because I assumed they had turned over every stone in their search for truth. Instead, I now realize that they were themselves rolling over for power. Because I believed all of them, I believed a President whom we had never elected but who nonetheless held our country's highest office and the responsibility to protect my children in New York after our trauma on 911. However, ultimately, I have to blame myself for not recognizing what was obvious to many others.

In 1981, I heard Robert McNamara speak. I had opposed the Vietnam War from its beginning, well before opposition was PC. As I listened to him, I remember thinking that I could never forgive him for what he had done by waging that War nearly two decades earlier. I still don't forgive him, as I will never forgive Powell and Rice and Bush.

[michael429]

Does McClellan really think anyone will believe that he was that naive?....he is trying to profit from his own culpability.....the entire gang of thugs are disgusting.

[Doofus]

McClellan is a fairly dim guy, no? Also, worked for a fairly dim guy, no?
(Dim but shrewd, somehow, or just with a HUGE ego.) Surrounded by
lots of other dim people. If you thought, as I did, that you could make
them all go away, by ignoring them, you were sadly mistaken.

[S1m0n]

Funny in all this I've seen no mention of McClellan's role in perpetrating this criminal conspiracy. Does he get there in the end, or is he too busy inventorying the motes in everyone else's eyes?

[burnt]

The NYT has lost my respect... mostly for the way they have skewed their reporting to favor the editorial board's endorsed Democratic Party candidate in this primary. That their bottom lined is mirroring the displeasure of their subscribers and advertisers, is evident. That they are frantically cutting staff to stem the bleeding, is as it should be. That they retain those who are the cause of these problems, is tragic... and self-defeating.

They could be great again. However, I don't believe they will pull out of this downward spiral anytime soon. Fortunately, the blogosphere is done a fine job of filling the vacuum, so I am not as sad for the demise of the NYT as I could have been.

[ornovscot]

This is the same "newspaper of record" that recently published an editorial penned by Edward N. Luttwak.

This gentleman argued that providing security for Senator Obama as President would be difficult because Barack Obama converted to Christianity.

His curious reasoning was that because there are Muslims who consider conversion to be a crime
that deserves execution, Senator Obama would be at greater risk.

Of course, Mr. Luttwak defensively wrote that he was not positing that his concerns were reasons why Senator Obama shouldn't become President.

[Counterglow]

The ironic part of the whole thing is that if a Democrat winds up in the White House, the pack of lapdogs we call the Washington Press Corps, ably assisted by the soiled and culpable New York Times, will re-discover their cojones and pound away mercilessly at the new administration. They always get brave when it's safe, the goddamned cowards.

[OleHippieChick]

Who is Spanky trying to kid with his "liberal Media" BS? Go ahead, you little greaseball, try playing both ends against the middle AGAIN.
If there actually were a liberal media, all these azzholes would've been fired/impe­ached/impr­isoned by now.

[WmC]

'McClellan charges that Bush relied on "propaganda" to sell the war. Allen summarizes: "He says the White House press corps was too easy on the administration during the run-up to the war.'

McClellan seems to be completely oblivious to the fact that he was the voice of the propaganda effort; it wouldn't have succeeded without him. As to blaming the White House press corps for the failure, you can't help but think of Otter in Animal House who said:

"You f#cked up. You believed us."