Frank Rich: Reporters w/out Top-Level Access Who Got The Iraq Story Right

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2005/12/04/frank-rich-its-repor_n_11658.html

From "All The President's Flacks," posted previously: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=5510600



I've been saying as much for the past few years, ever since "Plan of Attack" came out. The reason, I would hypothesize, that Woodward didn't recognize the import is that he didn't want to... Anyway, more Frank Rich:

Denying some reporters access did them a big favor, forcing them to ferret out the truth from alternate sources, from the web, and to read the words of Blix and Ritter and report accordingly.

Gaining access to White House propaganda sessions only ensured that the reporters present would report the propaganda and not search for anything that contradicted it. Access is for the lazy.

''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And
while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll
act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and
that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you,
all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''
Bush aide to Ron Suskind

I guess I am entitled to a big I TOLD YOU SO when I was screaming about his last "ook" that some of you embraced (as well as W who had it on his campaign site).

INDEED it's reporters who didn't have top-level access to the likes of Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney who have gotten the Iraq story right. In the new book "Feet to the Fire: The Media After 9/11," Kristina Borjesson interviews some of them, including Jonathan Landay of Knight Ridder, who heard early on from a low-level source that "the vice president is lying" and produced a story headlined "Lack of Hard Evidence of Iraqi Weapons Worries Top U.S. Officials" on Sept. 6, 2002. That was two days before administration officials fanned out on the Sunday-morning talk shows to point ominously at the now-discredited front-page Times story about Saddam's aluminum tubes. Warren Strobel, a frequent reportorial collaborator with Mr. Landay at Knight Ridder, tells Ms. Borjesson, "The most surprising thing to us was we had the field to ourselves for so long in terms of writing stuff that was critical or questioning the administration's case for war."

Such critical stories - including those at The Post and The Times that were too often relegated to Page 17 - did not get traction until the failure to find W.M.D.'s and the Wilson affair made America take a second look. Now that the country has awakened to that history, it will take more to shock it than the latest revelation that the Defense Department has been paying Iraqi newspapers to print its propaganda. Thanks in large part to the case Mr. Woodward found so inconsequential, everyone knows that much of the American press did just the same before the war - and, unlike those Iraqi newspapers or, say, Armstrong Williams, did so gratis.

I'll look for it. I think I remember that Landay article, too, from when it first came out. May have been on Truthout.org.

They wrote alot of articles that were summarily ignored by the rest of the media, and especially the broadcast media.

You would never see Strobel or Landay on ANY news program by ANY network. And THAT is why the broadcast news media is the real enemy of this country.

Next time freepers claim it's a liberal media ask them why the media chose to stay quiet about the Landay and Strobel reports on the cooked intel books, especially since they have turned out to be correct, and the DSM proves it.

All the while pushing Bush lackeys like Judy Miller, Bob Woodward, Deborah Orin, John Fund, et al, as the "journalists"...what a crock!

should wear flea collars when they enter.