Horses Mouth

My problems with the story by National Desk political reporter Perry Bacon Jr. and the headline ("Foes Use Obama's Muslim Ties to Fuel Rumors About Him") were that Obama's connections to Islam are slender at best; that the rumors were old; and that convincing evidence of their falsity wasn't included in the story...

The story also brought up a discredited Jan. 16 story in Insight magazine, which is owned by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, founder of the Unification Church and owner of the Washington Times. The Insight story said that Obama had gone to a madrassa, an Islamic religious school, as a child. CNN, ABC-TV and the Associated Press went to the school and reported that it was not a religious school but a public school. Bacon's story should have noted that information...

Another problem: Bacon's story also picked up a quote labeling Obama a Muslim from the Snopes.com Web site, which knocks down Internet rumors, but it didn't mention the investigation that found the rumor to be false.

Howell noted in her piece that there was no deliberate "smear job" intended towards Obama, as many readers alleged. And the editor of the piece, Bill Hamilton, had this to say about the whole affair: "Reasonable people can disagree on this. But the people I have heard from are not reasonable. What I find especially disheartening is the idea that our motives are simply assumed to have been malicious."

Look, let's not let a bunch of nasty emails distract us from the true nature of what really happened here. If people got a bit bent out of shape, it's because the piece seemed to capture a lot about what's wrong with the way journalism is practiced today. The real reason this episode touched such a nerve wasn't just about this one article. It triggered people's pent-up frustration with the larger failings of political journalism-as-usual.

It's really not too much of a stretch to say that the traditional media's mass and sometimes willful refusal to label falsehoods what they are -- false -- was largely responsible for bringing us the Bush era. The story's been told too often to rehash here, but there's no longer any real doubt that this press failing is one of the primary reasons George Bush was able to prevail in the 2000 and 2004 elections. When people read pieces like the Obama Muslim one, they quite properly worry that, you know, the same thing is well on its way to happening again. And this puts them on edge a bit.

Do some people overreact? No question -- after all, there's a lot to be pissed off about. But when editors complain about people sending them mean emails presuming bad motives on their part, they're just ducking the real issue here, which is one of execution. This isn't complicated: If something is false, say so clearly and directly -- and provide the necessary info to contradict it. No more euphemisms. No more timidity. No more averting your eyes when one side is lying. Tell your readers the truth. That's all there is to it.

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Posted by Greg Sargent at 10:55 AM | Permalink

Those questions are: Was the White House's intention -- provided that the new intel remained classified -- to continue to falsely hype the Iran nuke threat? Was the White House advocating for the concealment of the info with an eye towards continuing to do this?

Here's what we know so far. Back in August, Bush was privately told of the general thrust of the new intel -- he was told that the new info found that Iran's nuke program "may be suspended." This is no longer in doubt at all. White House flack Dana Perino admitted this yesterday, and the big news orgs appear to have accepted it to be the case. Three months later, however, Bush continued to hype the Iran nuke threat, albeit in somewhat vague language.

But here's the interesting point. The key isn't simply that Bush continued to hype the threat after being told it was bogus. Rather, it's that at this juncture, the NIE was still going to be kept secret. We know this because Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell was saying as late as mid-November that the document would remain classified.

This presents an obvious question: Was the White House continuing to hype the threat in the expectation that the NIE would remain secret?

Bolstering this theory, we also know that Vice President Dick Cheney was actively working behind the scenes to discredit the intel. This comes to us via an oddly overlooked nugget buried in a Times piece yesterday:

[American officials] said that the Central Intelligence Agency and other agencies had organized a “red team” to determine if the new information might have been part of an elaborate disinformation campaign mounted by Iran to derail the effort to impose sanctions against it.

In the end, American intelligence officials rejected that theory, though they were challenged to defend that conclusion in a meeting two weeks ago in the White House situation room, in which the notes and deliberations were described to the most senior members of President Bush’s national security team, including Vice President Dick Cheney.

“It was a pretty vivid exchange,” said one participant in the conversation.

So again, here are the larger questions which to my knowledge haven't been answered yet: Did the White House actively lobby to keep the info concealed? To what degree did Cheney and other Iran hawks try to discredit the info? Why was the decision to release it ultimately made -- could other officials, alarmed by the efforts of Iran hawks, threaten to leak it? Did administration officials fear that this would happen?

There's tons more here.

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Posted by Greg Sargent at 12:20 PM | Permalink

"The President's candor is at issue," Henry told his viewers. Why yes, it is, now isn't it. At yesterday's White House press briefing, Bush flack Dana Perino confirmed that Bush had been told of the general thrust of the new intel back in August -- despite the fact that the President said on Tuesday that he had only learned about it "last week."

Naturally, CNN's Henry reported this to his viewers, highlighted it, and told them that this was a contradiction that threw Bush's candor into question.

But today's New York Times carries no mention whatsoever of this latest development. And today's Washington Post puts Perino's new quote in the last paragraph of a long article about another aspect of this -- without even explaining to readers outright that this is a contradiction. This comes a day after both papers severely downplayed the emerging news of Bush's dissembling and buried it under a thick layer of euphemisms.

Why won't The Times and The Post tell their readers what's really going on here? Look, if these papers are too timid to do a stand-alone news story about this, how about slugging it a "news analysis" or something?

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Posted by Greg Sargent at 10:07 AM | Permalink

As noted below, neither The New York Times nor The Washington Post had stand-alone stories today on the fact that White House flack Dana Perino's comments yesterday left little doubt that the President lied about when he knew about the new intel suggesting the Iran nuke threat might be bogus. On Tuesday Bush suggested that he'd first learned about it "last week." But Perino yesterday admitted that Bush was in fact told last August that Iran's nuke program "may be suspended."

Well, today Perino answered more questions about this, making the White House's dissembling even more clear:

The key exchange with Perino concerning his answer was this:

Q: Dana, but listen to what he said: "He didn't tell me what the information was; he did tell me it was going to take a while to analyze." Was the President told that there was a possibility that Iran's nuclear program could be suspended? That's what you said he was told.

MS. PERINO: Yes, the President was told that there is new information in the context of raw intelligence, not told the details of what it was.

In other words, it depends on what the meaning of the word "was" is.

If the kind of verbal hocus-pocus Bush used here had come from a Dem President, the pundits would spend days and days having a grand old time mocking him. Oh, wait -- that already happened!

Now go back and look at the original exchange with Bush from the press conference:

Q: When it came to Iran, you said in October, on October 17th, you warned about the prospect of World War III, when months before you made that statement, this intelligence about them suspending their weapons program back in '03 had already come to light to this administration. So can't you be accused of hyping this threat?...

THE PRESIDENT: David, I don't want to contradict an august reporter such as yourself, but I was made aware of the NIE last week. In August, I think it was Mike McConnell came in and said, we have some new information. He didn't tell me what the information was; he did tell me it was going to take a while to analyze.

Look, the man lied. And given that he lied about hyping the threat from a second country he's itching to go to war with, I'd say that deserves some stand alone stories tomorrow.

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Posted by Greg Sargent at 5:29 PM | Permalink

Case in point: Today's coverage of White House flack Dana Perino's surprising statement last night. In it, Perino left little doubt that Bush had dissembled the day before about when he learned that new intelligence said the Iran nuke threat might be bogus. Perino said that Bush was told in August that Iran's nuke program "may be suspended." Bush had claimed he hadn't been given any new info about this until "last week."

Today, neither The New YorkTimes nor The Washington Post have stand-alone stories on this. By contrast, CNN's Ed Henry quite properly did put this info right in the headline and lede:

Bush told in August that Iran nuke program 'may be suspended'

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- President Bush was told in August that Iran's nuclear weapons program "may be suspended," the White House said Wednesday, which seemingly contradicts the account of the meeting given by Bush Tuesday.

The White House also sought to clarify Bush's ambiguous remarks Tuesday about how much he learned when Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, first told him in August of new information that might alter the U.S. assessment of Iran's nuclear activities that was being prepared for delivery to Congress.

Press secretary Dana Perino said in a statement that McConnell told Bush "that if the new information turns out to be true, what we thought we knew for sure is right. Iran does in fact have a covert nuclear weapons program, but it may be suspended."

Meanwhile, The New York Times put this in the 12th graf of its piece today, saying that the White House had "revised" its account -- another euphemism. While The Times piece was a laudable news-break on another aspect of all this, making it understandable that it had the lede it did, there's no reason not to do a separate stand-alone piece on the Bush fib revelations, or at least to highlight them better.

Look, here's the deal. The biggest story of the Bush Presidency by far was that he misled the nation into an unnecessary and disastrous war. Now Bush is again talking war, and he apparently hyped the Iran threat this fall in the full knowledge that our intel might have been telling us that his own threat talk was bogus. This is important. Bag the tentativeness, the euphemisms, and the instinct to bury this sort of uncomfortable info, please.

After all, these revelations present a host of new questions. If Bush had been told that the Iran threat just might be inoperative, why did the White House keep escalating the rhetoric? The White House was saying last month that this new NIE info wouldn't be publicly released. Why the reversal? Was the White House opposed to its release, with the intention to keep hyping the threat, as has been alleged?

Bottom line: There are lots of threads for reporters to pull on here. Might be a good idea to start pulling on them, you know, right now, so we don't make the same catastrophic mistake as we did last time around and let this stuff go unexamined until it's too late.

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Posted by Greg Sargent at 10:52 AM | Permalink

Clinton Campaign Volunteer Out Over False Obama Rumors

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Posted by Greg Sargent at 5:59 PM | Permalink

As you may have already heard today, the actual editor of that piece has defended his handling of it in an interview with The Politico. The editor, Bill Hamilton, does acknowledge that he's now questioning the edit he did, but he also adds this astonishing explanation:

The paper’s intention, Hamilton said, was “to write a story about the kind of rumors that are out there,” and added that “saying something is a rumor is not saying it’s true.”

“We didn’t say it was a false rumor,” Hamilton added. “To me, a rumor is not true.”

Indeed, if Hamilton believes this, perhaps they should put it in the style manual at the Post. Because other employees of the paper recognize that readers won't presume that rumors are automatically false and that a call needs to be made on a rumor's veracity. WaPo reporter Chris Cillizza, the other day:

Rumors are flying fast and furious that the Manchester Union Leader newspaper is planning to endorse the presidential candidacy of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in its Sunday edition...

If true -- and we should know sometime late tonight -- the endorsement would amount to a major coup for McCain...

I don't think the story made clear enough that these rumors are false.

Robert D. Novak: No, I would not report a rumor that could not be verified. But the Internet does.

At this point, a quick word in quasi-defense of Perry Bacon, the author of the piece. This is the sort of stuff that editors should prevent from happening. The Politico additionally reports that WaPo executive editor Len Downie read the piece and "liked the finished story enough for it get front page treatment." So presumably Downie signed off on it in its current form.

But either Downie or Hamilton could have headed this whole thing off by saying, "We're not quite there yet. We need to say a bit more clearly that this stuff isn't true. And heck -- let's throw in a bit of the evidence from the public record proving this." This is the sort of thing good editors will do to save a reporter -- and the paper -- from going over a cliff. Neither editor did this, and ultimately, this whole thing is on them.

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Posted by Greg Sargent at 4:08 PM | Permalink

The Post ran a story on the front page this week on the whispers about Obama's supposed Muslim faith even though he is a Christian. The reporter wrote the story because a voter in Iowa told him that Obama is a Muslim and he was struck that people remain so ill informed. That sort of misinformation has been common out there and, as the story showed, spread by some people in an attempt to taint Obama. But somehow a story intended to debunk the false claims, trace their origin and explore the challenge they present the campaign in trying to quash them spawned a furious eruption among liberal bloggers accusing the Post of spreading the rumors.

Any reasonable reading of the story makes clear they are not true. Right there in the second paragraph, it says Obama is a member of the United Church of Christ in Chicago. In other words, a Christian, not a Muslim. And yet the bloggers seem to think readers are so stupid they will actually think the Post is saying the opposite. The story's obvious intent is to clarify, which it did. If people are misinformed about a key aspect of a major presidential candidate to his detriment, then journalism performs a service by addressing misinformation. And if foes are using unfounded rumors to damage a candidate, especially in a subterranean way, then journalism should expose that. Critics can reasonably debate this or that wording in the story, but certainly the intent is clear no matter how much it is distorted on the Web.

What this week shows is that intent is in the eye of the beholder. And the campaign developing over the next 11 months will be filled with more anger, accusation and antipathy.

Judging by the email exchanges I've had with Baker, he's a decent enough guy. So I'm hoping he'll answer the following: If the story was "intended to debunk the false claims," as Baker says, then tell me how exactly the piece did this.

Baker offers a single fact to prove the piece's noble intent: It pointed out in the second graf that "Obama is a member of the United Church of Christ in Chicago." But the problem here is that this doesn't debunk the totality of the smears at all, and Baker's assertion that it does betrays that he isn't acquainted with the basic facts of this case.

The key charge being made here isn't simply that Obama is a Muslim now, but that he has a shadowy Muslim past that he's now trying to cover up by pretending to be a Christian. As the original WaPo piece notes, a key smear email says that Obama is taking great pains to "conceal" that past, adding that "Obama joined the United Church of Christ to help purge any notion that he is still a Muslim."

Very plainly, the mere mention of the fact that Obama is now a member of this church doesn't debunk this claim in any way. By contrast, the Chicago Tribune did genuinely debunk this last spring by, you know, doing a bunch of reporting and talking to a lot of people from Obama's past.

The second piece of "evidence" the smear offers to bolster the notion that Obama has a shady Muslim past is that he attended a madrassa as a child. This, too, is not debunked in any way by the reference to the current church Obama attends. CNN, by contrast, did in fact debunk this by speaking to a top official at the school.

None of these true media debunkings were mentioned in the WaPo piece. Nor did WaPo do anything like what the Trib and CNN did. Instead it quoted the Obama camp's denials of these smears. Baker above calls the Muslim smears "false." The WaPo piece didn't. Nor did it provide any facts to debunk the key charges about Obama's past in any meaningful way.

Baker's final argument is that bloggers are distorting the piece's true "intent." But that isn't what most of us are doing at all. Who cares what the "intent" was? The main substance of the blogospheric case against the piece concerns not its motives, but its execution. Indeed, the case being made here is really a small part of a much larger challenge many are mounting right now to journalism-as-usual. This isn't about "anger." If something is false, say so -- and provide the facts necessary to contradict it. That's all there is to it.

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Posted by Greg Sargent at 9:35 AM | Permalink

Well, today brings yet another egregious example of this. Specifically, the paper was so reluctant to subject Bush's claims to any real scrutiny that today it actually ignored its own reporting from only a day ago basically contradicting what the President said this morning at a press conference. The presser was about the new NIE saying Iran shuttered its nuke program years ago.

Bush, who's kept up the Iran war whooping of late, today he denied that he'd known about the NIE's findings until very recently. Here's how WaPo's piece today reported on this:

He denied that he knew about the new assessment before his Oct. 17 remarks, saying he was briefed on the latest NIE only last week. He said the director of national intelligence, John M. McConnell, informed him in August that the intelligence community had "some new information" about Iran's program. "He didn't tell me what the information was. He did tell me it was going to take a while to analyze."

The assessment, under preparation for more than 18 months, was completed on Tuesday and President Bush and Vice President Cheney were briefed on Wednesday, intelligence officials said. Hadley said Bush first learned in August or September about intelligence indicating Iran had halted its weapons program and was advised it would take time to evaluate.

The Associated Press, too, appears ready to let Bush skate on this. Their piece today also included his claim that he'd only learned about the substance of the new intel last week. But AP, too, declined to tell its readers what Hadley said only yesterday.

On a separate note, it's pretty bizarre that both WaPo and the AP are downplaying the "last week" claim; both news orgs bury this deep in their stories. It's tough to fathom why this assertion -- and the fact that it seems to be contradicted by his own advisers -- isn't getting a heavier focus from these news orgs here. After all, given that this President already lied us into one war -- and given that Bush has been talking trash towards Iran relentlessly of late -- the question of whether Bush was telling the truth today about what he knew about the bogus Iran nuke threat and when is kind of an important one.

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Posted by Greg Sargent at 3:52 PM | Permalink

Here, for instance, is New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt, devoting his whole column this week to this quaint notion:

Last Monday’s Times reported that Rudolph Giuliani had accused Mitt Romney of having a bad record on crime while governor of Massachusetts.

“Violent crime and murder went up when he was governor,” Giuliani said of his Republican rival.

In time-honored journalistic fashion, the newspaper noted the Romney campaign’s response: No, violent crime, which includes murder, actually went down during Romney’s tenure.

If you were like me, you wondered, impatiently, why the newspaper didn’t answer a simple question: who is telling the truth? I wanted the facts, and, not for the first time, The Times let me down.

Post editors say they were trying to knock down the Obama-is-a-Muslim rumor, but I don't believe the piece was well executed. It didn't read like a debunking piece. There was too much about Obama "denying" or "disputing" allegations rather than just branding them false. This was particularly true in the case of the madrassa he allegedly attended as a child. That charge is bogus, as a CNN interview with a top official at the Indonesian school demonstrated, and the Post story failed to make that clear, in my view.

That said, I want to second Matthew Yglesias' assertion that the only way aggressive fact-checking will make a real difference is if the big news orgs make a regular habit of it and start calling out falsehoods and lies for what they are again and again and again. The point here is that the reason someone like Karl Rove keeps lying about what happened in the runup to the Iraq War is precisely because he knows that big news orgs won't call him out on it often enough for there to be any serious downside to doing it. But if they did do this regularly, the cost of telling this lie would begin to outweigh the benefit and Rove would stop doing it.

On this score, I submit that our goal here should be nothing less than seeing a day when calling out the falsehoods and lies for what they are on a regular basis, day after day, in article after article, in paragraph after paragraph, becomes a regular convention of daily journalism at the big news orgs -- one that is as faithfully obeyed as the inverted pyramid format of hard news writing. That may seem very far off, but I'm going to strike a wildly optimistic pose here and assert that the traditional news orgs can eventually be cracked on this point.

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Posted by Greg Sargent at 9:48 AM | Permalink

Poor Pamela Hess. The AP's rock-solid intelligence reporter did her job today, explaining thoroughly that the intelligence community's latest collective judgment on Iran finds, with "high confidence," that Tehran shut its nuclear program down in 2003. Too bad her headline writers didn't do theirs.

Like all other straight write-ups of the judgment -- known a National Intelligence Estimate -- Hess's story emphasizes that Iran shuttered its nuclear program in 2003 under international pressure. It further reports, faithfully following the NIE, that Iran is considered unlikely to have a nuclear weapon, even if it "went all out" (Hess's words), until 2015. The NIE also says that Iran is continuing to enrich uranium for its civilian energy program, and so Hess reported that as well.

So what did the AP use for its headline, as of 1:03 p.m.?

Now, someone at the AP must have figured that headline was misleading. After all, you'd read that and reasonably believe those U.S. officials are saying Iran has a nuclear weapons program. So what was AP's new headline, at 1:43 p.m.?

And that's where the AP left it, at least as of 6:30 p.m. By contrast, the New York Times's headline read "U.S. Says Iran Ended Atomic Arms Work." The Washington Post: "U.S.: Iran Halted Nuclear Weapons Program in 2003." The Los Angeles Times: "Iran Has No Nuke Program, U.S. Intel Says." None of these stories differs meaningfully from Hess's piece. That's because all of them reported the NIE accurately.

These misleading AP headlines aren't free of consequences. Chances are the headline writers at the AP's bajillion newspaper and web subscribers will riff off of the AP's headlines in their pick-up. That means millions of casual readers will come away with an impression of the Iranian nuclear weapons non-program that's exactly the opposite of what the U.S. intelligence community says it is -- or, at the least, they'll be needlessly confused. And when Bush administration hawks or GOP politicians or Joe Lieberman lie about the nuclear threat from the Tehran Islamofascists, they'll be playing to an already-bamboozled audience. Nice work!

-- Special HM Guest-Star Spencer Ackerman

Posted by Spencer Ackerman at 6:34 PM | Permalink

First, two WaPo reporters have now come out and criticized their own paper for the story. And second, WaPo Ombud Deborah Howell has now told readers that she'll be weighing in on the story in her column next week.

On Friday Howard Kurtz cited a post below which pointed out that the WaPo story failed to tell readers that a central piece of the smear -- that Obama attended a madrassa -- had been called out as false by a top official at the school he attended. Kurtz added:

I can't understand why the story didn't mention that the official at the Indonesian elementary school alleged to have been a madrassa -- according to an unsourced story in the conservative online magazine Insight -- had told CNN it had always been a public school and not a religious school.

New York: Considering that Obama's "denials" of the false (that's right false) charges were relegated to the twelfth paragraph in that article, do you understand why some of us who think journalism should be about reporting the truth (rather than parroting he-said/she-said) might be seeing red, as we peruse The Post's increasingly "neutral-about-the-facts" black-and-white?

Jonathan Weisman: Did you see Tom Toles's cartoon today, attacking The Washington Post? Wow.

I kinda think we should avoid doing stories on rumors, to be honest.

Which brings us to WaPo Ombud Howell. She is supposed to address this kind of stuff; and she has now suggested that next week she'll do just that. At the bottom of her column yesterday, she wrote: "Next week: The Obama story that's burning up the Internet."

If she points out the obvious -- that the story might have done more than just reprint Obama's denials of the rumors and instead might have come out and said they were false -- it's not impossible that WaPo's editors will feel compelled to take this extra step in future stories. In which case all our yelling might end up paying off in some small way.

Relatedly, I would be remiss if I didn't point you to this post by Paul Krugman which sums up as pithily as one could hope for just how absurd WaPo's continuing refusal to call a falsehood a falsehood really is:

Krugman’s version of his appearance is disputed

I say I’m 6′4″, and thin as a rail. But this version is disputed by Republicans and even some Democrats, who say I’m 5′7″ and could stand to lose a few pounds.

Debbie?

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Posted by Greg Sargent at 8:02 AM | Permalink