I'm shocked, SHOCKED to find GAMBLING going on here!
No one that has been paying attention for the last eight years is surprised by the ‘revelations’ contained in Scott McClellan’s new book, but major news outlets like the Washington Post are tripping all over themselves to make McClellan’s insights front page news. The headline of today’s on-line edition of the Post reads, “Ex-Spokesman: Bush Mislead Public on Iraq.” Incidentally, the stories below the fold were: “Water is Wet”, “U.S. Economy: Been Better”, and “Men Think Scarlett Johansson is Attractive.”
The Post even lacked the testicular fortitude to lead without attributing the assertion to McClellan in the headline, which is unsurprising considering how little the paper did to question the rationale for the war in the first place. Would anyone other than administration flaks have made a ruckus if the headline had read, “Bush Lied to the Public about Iraq”? Instead, the Post took the approach of, “Listen, we’re not sure, and we don’t want to cast stones, but this Scott McClellan guy said that Bush may have been a little less than truthful about that whole Iraq War deal.”
The response of the press to McClellan’s tell-all illustrates a key point made in the book. McClellan states that far from being too liberal, the press was deferential to the administration as it made the case for war in Iraq. The collective “My goodness, isn’t this a development” uttered by the journalistic establishment shows how loathe the press has been to do their job.
The way the rest of this story will play out is easy to predict. The administration will trash McClellan on the morning shows, right wing bloggers will make excuses, and the main stream media will forget about the whole thing in a week. None of the really important questions will get asked. Instead of trying to hold the administration accountable, news outlets like the Washington Post will spend ink cataloging the he-said, she-said between McClellan and administration surrogates. Then in a four or five months when another one of these insider accounts is published we’ll go through the whole thing again, still wondering why everything is so screwed up.
But hey, at least Scotty is getting paid for keeping his mouth shut when he could have had a real impact and then suddenly finding his balls when someone waived a book deal in his face.
The Post even lacked the testicular fortitude to lead without attributing the assertion to McClellan in the headline, which is unsurprising considering how little the paper did to question the rationale for the war in the first place. Would anyone other than administration flaks have made a ruckus if the headline had read, “Bush Lied to the Public about Iraq”? Instead, the Post took the approach of, “Listen, we’re not sure, and we don’t want to cast stones, but this Scott McClellan guy said that Bush may have been a little less than truthful about that whole Iraq War deal.”
The response of the press to McClellan’s tell-all illustrates a key point made in the book. McClellan states that far from being too liberal, the press was deferential to the administration as it made the case for war in Iraq. The collective “My goodness, isn’t this a development” uttered by the journalistic establishment shows how loathe the press has been to do their job.
The way the rest of this story will play out is easy to predict. The administration will trash McClellan on the morning shows, right wing bloggers will make excuses, and the main stream media will forget about the whole thing in a week. None of the really important questions will get asked. Instead of trying to hold the administration accountable, news outlets like the Washington Post will spend ink cataloging the he-said, she-said between McClellan and administration surrogates. Then in a four or five months when another one of these insider accounts is published we’ll go through the whole thing again, still wondering why everything is so screwed up.
But hey, at least Scotty is getting paid for keeping his mouth shut when he could have had a real impact and then suddenly finding his balls when someone waived a book deal in his face.
posted by DC Viking at 12:05 PM
3 people of discerning taste are saying
