The Washington Post does us a disservice when it prints stories like this:
Also beyond dispute is the fact that the little-known diplomat [Joe Wilson] took maximum advantage of his 15 minutes of fame. Wilson has been a fixture on the network and cable news circuit for two years -- from "Meet the Press" to "Imus in the Morning" to "The Daily Show." He traveled west and lunched with the likes of Norman Lear and Warren Beatty.
How do the Washington Post reporters think that politics works?
I'm getting tired of this line of attack. Not because it's effective (which I doubt), but because it's inane. Politics requires that you get the limelight. It's how you get your message out. For most in the politics business being in the limelight is work. For many, it's a pain. It's something you have to do given your line of work.
So it's no surprise the Joe Wilson wrote a book, got on tv and kept talking. If not for his skills at getting his message across Plamegate might be a dead story. And the reporters who wrote the above passage know this. So either they are simply churning out the quickest and easiest clichéd crap, or they are pushing their own (or the paper's own) partisan agenda. Either way, it does not speak well for the Washington Post, whose brand is based on things other than crap and peddling the White House's partisan agenda.
The article continues:
Wilson's critics in the administration said his 2002 trip to Niger for the CIA to probe reports that Iraq was trying to buy uranium there was a boondoggle arranged by his wife to help his consulting business.
Good reporters would've inserted the pertinent facts to a statement like the one above, such as:
Wilson's critics in the administration most likely committed treason by saying that his 2002 trip to Niger for the CIA was a boondoggle arranged by his wife to help his consulting business.
The article continues to question Wilson's integrity by putting him up against people in higher up positions whose integrity is in doubt. In a way, it's good irony. But that's not what we need from the Washington Post. We don't need absurdity in reporting. We don't need to read the White House's talking points under the masthead of top media outlets.
Joe Wilson has been effective at keeping the story going. He has also been effective at connecting the story of his wife to the larger story of the lies leading to war. But he also suffers from a bit of Kerryism, in that he is subtle and nuanced. Either the Post reporters miss this, aren't very bright, are lazy, or are partisan hacks, because they have not picked up on the ways in which Wilson carefully presents his story. Wilson, from what I've heard of him, is very exact in what he asserts - but does so in way that leads the listener to bigger implications. He does this with very exacting, factual language while also hinting at "how things work," implying that his prior language was a code for more.
For example, when I've heard Wilson talking about his report going to Cheney his claim is not that he knows that a report went to Cheney but that when you give an oral report at that level "it's the way things work" that the oral report will be passed on. Since Wilson has said this many times, if it's not the case, I'd like to hear intelligence reporters at the Post tell me so. But they don't do that - and instead they just revert to he-says she-says reporting.
The Washington Post and the New York Times are not good newspapers from the standpoint of American democracy. Both papers have failed us. They have tremendous power as information organs, and they use that power to support a White House that makes bald faced lies about going to war. As citizens, we should do what it takes to bring these organizations down. We can do that by destroying their brand, by discrediting their reporting and by going to other sources for our news and information.
Cross posted: Political Porn