mediachannel.org: The Media's Terrorism Test
Submitted by editor4 on January 23, 2006
By Dan Kennedy
Source: Media Nation
President Bush's top two political advisers said on Friday that they intend to conduct the 2006 congressional campaign on the basis of an appalling lie about the Democrats. Will the media call them on it? Or are they too hidebound by the traditional rules of objectivity to get beyond their characteristic "on the one hand/on the other hand" style of coverage?
I'm all for fair, neutral coverage of politics. But it also has to be tough-minded. So when White House deputy chief of staff Karl Rove and Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman claim -- falsely -- that Democrats oppose efforts to spy on Al Qaeda, that lie needs to be pointed out.
Unfortunately, our two leading newspapers, the New York Times and the Washington Post, are off to a bad start. Here's what Adam Nagourney writes in today's Times: "The United States faces a ruthless enemy," Mr. Rove said, "and we need a commander in chief and a Congress who understand the nature of the threat and the gravity of the moment America finds itself in. President Bush and the Republican Party do. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for many Democrats."...
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Nagourney treats Rove's remarks -- made at a meeting of the RNC -- as straight-up event coverage, and doesn't even make an effort at ordinary objectivity in terms of getting comment from the Democrats. In the Washington Post, Dan Balz manages to go one better, quoting Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean as saying that Rove should resign over whatever his role was in the Valerie Plame matter. But Balz also reports this without rebuttal: "Mehlman and Rove ... defended Bush's use of warrantless eavesdropping to gather intelligence about possible terrorist plots. 'Do Nancy Pelosi and Howard Dean really think that when the NSA is listening in on terrorists planning attacks on America, they need to hang up when those terrorists dial their sleeper cells in the United States?" Mehlman asked....
http://mediachannel.org/blog/node/2987