The Disassemblers
Here's a link, from crooksandliars.com, to a moment in Bush's 4/28/05 news conference. His eyes cast down, the president pauses in the middle of a sentence, mutters, "in a minute," then resumes his answer. It's stunning. Watch it on the higher resolution version if you can, the wmv. file.
Nobody in the press mentioned it. (See 6/13 postscript below***) As the Gannon episode showed, the White House reporters-who-do-not-report are skilled at averting their eyes and turning off their brains. It may seem like a strange skill set for journalists, but it enables them to avoid stories that might trip up their careers.
Okay, I understand that half the MSM has left the journalism business and set up as a wing of government public affairs. But what about real journalists, people like David Corn? Why did they give Bush a pass on the wire, too?
I met a reporter recently, a fan of this site, who told me of pressing Seymour Hersh about the box. Hersh said that an audio prompter would never be proven. He'd asked, and his sources knew nothing about it. As the reporter quoted Hersh, "If there's something there, I'd find it out. If there's something that isn't there--I'd find that out, too."
Gotta love Sy Hersh. But I think he gave up too soon. Sometimes only three or four people know about a wrongdoing, and they'll never tell. Smoking guns and documents don't exist for every story. But that doesn't mean those stories can't be pursued from another angle, even if one amasses only circumstantial evidence. As Thoreau said, "some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk." I think the president talking to his shoes qualifies.
I wish Hersh and his editors at The New Yorker would hire linguists and experts in the coordination of speech and eye movements to analyze the president's speech in the debates and at news conferences. Or put Malcolm Gladwell on to it. Or hireDave Lindorff , an undersung hero of journalism for his reporting on this story and many others.
David Corn, for his part, dismissed the audio prompter story out of hand, and strenuously discouraged a writer acquaintance of mine from pursuing it in early October, after this blog first published. There was no story there, Bush did not use an earpiece, it was blogger hysteria, and that was that. Corn never did write about it except in passing reference to a "conspiracy theory," when heblogged in December about a notion then making the rounds that the bulge was a wearable defibrillator:
"...seeing is (almost) believing. And there sure looks like a bulge in several photographs of Bush. The LifeVest explanation seems more reasonable than that offered by the Bush White House: a lousy tailor. I'm not sold on this theory. But I would not discourage further exploration."
Right. I've admired David Corn's work, but those shifty lines give me serious pause. Would he really rather protect his amour-propre than report on this honestly?
To itemize Corn's inaccuracies: 1) He implies the Bush White House offered a single, perhaps "reasonable" "explanation" for the bulge, rather than a series of obvious falsehoods that had to be successively discarded, beginning with its suggestion that the images were faked, and ending with an uncomfortable Bush delivering a rehearsed joking denial in answer to a serious question from Good Morning America's Charlie Gibson. 2) Corn implies the video (not photographic) images are ambiguous and do not unmistakably show a bulge with the outlines of a box and wire. 3) His headline tags the subject as being in the realm of "conspiracy" thinking. Tell me again why that would be? 4) Corn says he won't "discourage" the (risible) defibrillator notion, but doesn't mention that he discouraged investigation into another, stronger theory--which he omits here even to cite, as if it's been conclusively dismissed (unlike his respectful mention of the White House's "explanation.")
KELLER KARL
New York Times executive editor Bill Keller reportedly commented publicly for the first time a few months ago about the pre-election spiking of the Times story on the box. Dave Lindorff's blog,thiscantbehappening.net, reports that Keller told a group of Columbia students that the major story, by the Times's William Broad, Andrew Revkin and John Schwarz, who had interviewed a NASA imaging analyst among others (see our previous posts on this), "didn't hold up."
A story by Nicholas Lemann inThe New Yorker tells of Keller and Rove meeting for drinks on October 22, and Rove seizing the occasion to complain bitterly about the Times's supposed anti-Bush bias. As Keller recalled it in an email message to Lemann, Rove "fired off complaints like a Gatling gun, some specific, some generic, some about specific writers, some about specific elements of specific stories.” A few days later, according to Lindorff's comprehensive report on fair.org, the Times decided to hold the Bush bulge story. They killed it on October 27th, the day before it was set to run.
Lemann's story, "Why is everyone mad at the mainstream media?" somehow missed this striking incident. A story that Keller reportedly said he thought could affect the outcome of the presidential election was spiked five days after the Happy Hour gone wrong. It would seem that some mainstream-media "haters" have more sway than others.
I don't believe that Rove would have been so clumsy as to urge Keller to quash the story. It seems more likely that he would hint that the box was a security device that he could say no more about, but that the Times would be making an error of faked-National-Guard-document proportions if it published even expert speculation that Bush had used a prompter.
Or maybe nothing at all was said between the two men about the jokes and questions and Doonesbury strips that had made the bulge the most widely-referred-to nonstory of the year. Of course, at that point, the Times's story on the bulge was still a go. And Rove and other Bush officials had been frantically trying to discredit it with references to "grassy knolls" and "little green men." So, maybe Rove did have something to say on the subject.
Either way, I think that Keller and the Times still owe readers an explanation of why its one real report on such a serious subject wasn't worth printing. Keller wrote something recently about the Times needing to take on its critics directly, and to be more transparent. Here's an invitation to do just that, Mr. Keller. Did Karl Rove talk to you about the Bush box story on October 22, or tell you something to persuade you that the story didn't hold up? And if so, won't you please share that information with your readers?
***
POSTSCRIPT:
The official transcripts of the 4/28/05 news conference by CQ Transcripts and the White House record the muttered words as “kind of." I've watched and listened to the clip many times, and he's not saying, "kind of."
I don't know if CQ makes its transcriptions entirely independently or against an early White House transcript (or vice versa). This is not the first time, however, that these official transcripts have airbrushed one of Bush's verbal missteps. I was watching with only half an eye the Dec.15, 2003 news conference, when Bush responded strangely to a Gannonesque question about whether Democratic criticism amounted to "hate speech." At first Bush seemed to draw a blank. "There's time for politics," he said uncertainly. "There's time for politics, and I--" "It's an absurd asinuation," he suddenly popped out, with an air of surprise at his own words. That was the moment it hit me that Bush was using a prompter.
Both the White House and CQ transcripts of that news conference rendered Bush's neologism as "insinuation." So, I'm curious just how CQ's transcription process works. I'll ask the company to explain it for the edification of stupefied (that means made stupid) Bush-watchers everywhere.
Meanwhile, here’s the relevant 4/28/05 passage from the White House and CQ transcripts with the correct "in a minute" reinserted in the place of "kind of."
Q Mr. President, it was four years ago when you first met with Russian President Vladimir Putin. You said you looked into his eyes and you saw his soul. You'll also be meeting with the Russian leader in about a week or so. What do you think of Putin now that he has expressed a willingness to supply weapons to outlaw regimes, specifically his recent comments that he said he would provide short-range missiles to Syria and nuclear components to Iran?
THE PRESIDENT: We have -- first, just in a broader – in a minute -- in a broader sense, I had a long talk with Vladimir there in Slovakia about democracy and about the importance of democracy. And as you remember, at the press conference -- or if you weren't there, somebody will remember -- he stood up and said he strongly supports democracy. I take him for his word.
I -- and we'll continue to work. Condi just -- Condi Rice, our Secretary of State, just came back and she briefed me that she had a very good discussion with Vladimir about the merits of democracy, about the need to listen to the people and have a government that's responsive.
Nobody in the press mentioned it. (See 6/13 postscript below***) As the Gannon episode showed, the White House reporters-who-do-not-report are skilled at averting their eyes and turning off their brains. It may seem like a strange skill set for journalists, but it enables them to avoid stories that might trip up their careers.
Okay, I understand that half the MSM has left the journalism business and set up as a wing of government public affairs. But what about real journalists, people like David Corn? Why did they give Bush a pass on the wire, too?
I met a reporter recently, a fan of this site, who told me of pressing Seymour Hersh about the box. Hersh said that an audio prompter would never be proven. He'd asked, and his sources knew nothing about it. As the reporter quoted Hersh, "If there's something there, I'd find it out. If there's something that isn't there--I'd find that out, too."
Gotta love Sy Hersh. But I think he gave up too soon. Sometimes only three or four people know about a wrongdoing, and they'll never tell. Smoking guns and documents don't exist for every story. But that doesn't mean those stories can't be pursued from another angle, even if one amasses only circumstantial evidence. As Thoreau said, "some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk." I think the president talking to his shoes qualifies.
I wish Hersh and his editors at The New Yorker would hire linguists and experts in the coordination of speech and eye movements to analyze the president's speech in the debates and at news conferences. Or put Malcolm Gladwell on to it. Or hire
David Corn, for his part, dismissed the audio prompter story out of hand, and strenuously discouraged a writer acquaintance of mine from pursuing it in early October, after this blog first published. There was no story there, Bush did not use an earpiece, it was blogger hysteria, and that was that. Corn never did write about it except in passing reference to a "conspiracy theory," when he
"...seeing is (almost) believing. And there sure looks like a bulge in several photographs of Bush. The LifeVest explanation seems more reasonable than that offered by the Bush White House: a lousy tailor. I'm not sold on this theory. But I would not discourage further exploration."
Right. I've admired David Corn's work, but those shifty lines give me serious pause. Would he really rather protect his amour-propre than report on this honestly?
To itemize Corn's inaccuracies: 1) He implies the Bush White House offered a single, perhaps "reasonable" "explanation" for the bulge, rather than a series of obvious falsehoods that had to be successively discarded, beginning with its suggestion that the images were faked, and ending with an uncomfortable Bush delivering a rehearsed joking denial in answer to a serious question from Good Morning America's Charlie Gibson. 2) Corn implies the video (not photographic) images are ambiguous and do not unmistakably show a bulge with the outlines of a box and wire. 3) His headline tags the subject as being in the realm of "conspiracy" thinking. Tell me again why that would be? 4) Corn says he won't "discourage" the (risible) defibrillator notion, but doesn't mention that he discouraged investigation into another, stronger theory--which he omits here even to cite, as if it's been conclusively dismissed (unlike his respectful mention of the White House's "explanation.")
KELLER KARL
New York Times executive editor Bill Keller reportedly commented publicly for the first time a few months ago about the pre-election spiking of the Times story on the box. Dave Lindorff's blog,
A story by Nicholas Lemann inThe New Yorker
Lemann's story, "Why is everyone mad at the mainstream media?" somehow missed this striking incident. A story that Keller reportedly said he thought could affect the outcome of the presidential election was spiked five days after the Happy Hour gone wrong. It would seem that some mainstream-media "haters" have more sway than others.
I don't believe that Rove would have been so clumsy as to urge Keller to quash the story. It seems more likely that he would hint that the box was a security device that he could say no more about, but that the Times would be making an error of faked-National-Guard-document proportions if it published even expert speculation that Bush had used a prompter.
Or maybe nothing at all was said between the two men about the jokes and questions and Doonesbury strips that had made the bulge the most widely-referred-to nonstory of the year. Of course, at that point, the Times's story on the bulge was still a go. And Rove and other Bush officials had been frantically trying to discredit it with references to "grassy knolls" and "little green men." So, maybe Rove did have something to say on the subject.
Either way, I think that Keller and the Times still owe readers an explanation of why its one real report on such a serious subject wasn't worth printing. Keller wrote something recently about the Times needing to take on its critics directly, and to be more transparent. Here's an invitation to do just that, Mr. Keller. Did Karl Rove talk to you about the Bush box story on October 22, or tell you something to persuade you that the story didn't hold up? And if so, won't you please share that information with your readers?
***
POSTSCRIPT:
The official transcripts of the 4/28/05 news conference by CQ Transcripts and the White House record the muttered words as “kind of." I've watched and listened to the clip many times, and he's not saying, "kind of."
I don't know if CQ makes its transcriptions entirely independently or against an early White House transcript (or vice versa). This is not the first time, however, that these official transcripts have airbrushed one of Bush's verbal missteps. I was watching with only half an eye the Dec.15, 2003 news conference, when Bush responded strangely to a Gannonesque question about whether Democratic criticism amounted to "hate speech." At first Bush seemed to draw a blank. "There's time for politics," he said uncertainly. "There's time for politics, and I--" "It's an absurd asinuation," he suddenly popped out, with an air of surprise at his own words. That was the moment it hit me that Bush was using a prompter.
Both the White House and CQ transcripts of that news conference rendered Bush's neologism as "insinuation." So, I'm curious just how CQ's transcription process works. I'll ask the company to explain it for the edification of stupefied (that means made stupid) Bush-watchers everywhere.
Meanwhile, here’s the relevant 4/28/05 passage from the White House and CQ transcripts with the correct "in a minute" reinserted in the place of "kind of."
Q Mr. President, it was four years ago when you first met with Russian President Vladimir Putin. You said you looked into his eyes and you saw his soul. You'll also be meeting with the Russian leader in about a week or so. What do you think of Putin now that he has expressed a willingness to supply weapons to outlaw regimes, specifically his recent comments that he said he would provide short-range missiles to Syria and nuclear components to Iran?
THE PRESIDENT: We have -- first, just in a broader – in a minute -- in a broader sense, I had a long talk with Vladimir there in Slovakia about democracy and about the importance of democracy. And as you remember, at the press conference -- or if you weren't there, somebody will remember -- he stood up and said he strongly supports democracy. I take him for his word.
I -- and we'll continue to work. Condi just -- Condi Rice, our Secretary of State, just came back and she briefed me that she had a very good discussion with Vladimir about the merits of democracy, about the need to listen to the people and have a government that's responsive.
<< Home