Perfect. Fred Hiatt's WaPo Edit Page Still Pushing Bogus "Petraeus Report" Line
August 16, 2007 -- 11:39 AM EST // //
Wow, that didn't take long.
Yesterday I wondered whether the big news orgs would continue describing the imminent September Iraq progress report as representing solely the word of General Petraeus -- as the Gospel According To Petraeus -- now that we know that the report is being written by the White House. As Atrios put it, "a major test of our media right now is whether this bait and switch enters the basic narrative or not."
Well, we now have our first major failure of that test, and fittingly, it's The Washington Post's editorial page, which at this point is devoting its powerful opinion-shaping real estate to little more than a rearguard effort to salvage what's left of the reputations of Beltway war supporters. And not only does WaPo's editorial page today not acknowledge that "bait and switch," it actually continues to try and maintain the fiction that the September report will represent the sole word of Petraeus.
From its lead editorial:
The bombings came as Gen. Petraeus and others claimed to be making progress in their campaign against al-Qaeda in Iraq. The general is expected to elaborate on that progress in a report to Congress in September and to ask for more time for his strategy to work, while acknowledging -- as he also said yesterday -- that the U.S. military presence in Iraq will have to be "a good bit smaller" by next summer.So perfect.
It's hard to overstate the amount of contempt you need to have for your readers in order to pull nonsense like this. A more charitable explanation here is that the people responsible for this editorial are clueless, and missed the big news about the report yesterday. Neither is all that admirable. After all, WaPo's own news pages did get it right, describing the report as "the Bush administration's progress report," adding that it "would not be written by the Army general but would come from the White House, with input from Petraeus, Crocker and other administration officials." Um, exactly.
Look, the larger story here is that this report is basically the last thing the war supporters have left. They're desperately trying in advance to do the maximum to ensure that it's granted a modicum of credibility by an electorate that's sick of being lied to about Iraq. Thus the extensive campaign by the White House to dupe the public into believing that the report would represent the Gospel According To Petraeus, lest people realize that this report is actually being produced by the same crew who has been lying to them for years and years now.
You really couldn't ask for a more perfect example of this than today's perpetration of the Gospel According To Petraeus myth by WaPo's edit page. That they're still hanging onto this is perhaps inevitable, of course, since it's the last piece of driftwood left.