WaPo ombudsman endorses practice of printing misleading Bush admin claims

Wash. Post ombudsman endorses practice of printing misleading -- even false -- Bush administration claims without rebuttal

In a post on her internal weblog, Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell has reportedly endorsed the practice of printing misleading -- even false -- Bush administration claims without including a word of rebuttal to those claims. Howell's post, which concerned a recent Media Matters for America item about a Washington Post article, also contained a misleading description of a conversation between the Post reporter who wrote the article and a Media Matters spokeswoman.

In a January 4 article about the Bush administration's domestic spying operation, Post staff writer Dafna Linzer reported:

The NSA program operated in secret until it was made public in news accounts last month. Since then, President Bush and his advisers have defended it as legal and necessary to protect the country against future attacks and have said Congress was repeatedly consulted.

Linzer's article did not include a single word, in either her voice or anyone else's, pointing out that the administration's claim that "Congress was repeatedly consulted" is misleading at best. Media Matters noted in an item in response to Linzer's article:

Yet the available evidence suggests that the administration did not fully inform congressional leaders about the program, let alone "consult" them, which the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary defines as "to ask the advice or opinion of" or "to deliberate together." As Media Matters for America has noted, Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-WV), Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-MI), former Sen. Bob Graham (D-FL), and Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) have all stated that they did not receive written reports from the White House on the surveillance operation, as required by the National Security Act of 1947, as amended in 2001. Further, Rockefeller wrote in a 2003 letter to Vice President Dick Cheney that security restrictions made him "unable to fully evaluate, much less endorse" the program, and has since said that his concerns about it "were never addressed." As the New York Times reported on December 21, Graham claimed that he was never informed "that the program would involve eavesdropping on American citizens."

http://mediamatters.org/items/200601100004


Remember the stink about the WaPo polling editor that refused to consider a poll about impeaching Bush?