"No WMDs, But Everyone Gets a Mulligan"

[Demit]

Greg Mitchell is the editor of Editor & Publisher, the trade pub for journalism. In this column he compares the fallout from WMD vs. that from the CBS thing, and sums up how each played in the press. I'm posting it here because there's a certain satisfaction to be gotten from knowing that somebody in the press, well, at least *noticed* how downplayed one was, and how overplayed was the other:


(January 12, 2005) -- It's only Thursday, and already it's clear that yesterday's official announcement that really, for sure -- no kidding -- there are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq will get much less play in the media than the report on the “60 Minutes” fiasco released on Monday. That's odd, since the news stories share one important element: Neither was exactly a whopping surprise.

Actually, there’s something else: Neither scandal would have ever happened if journalists had done a better job at the outset.

So how did the press react this morning to closing the book on WMDs? Most major papers I've seen, with several exceptions (such as The Washington Post and The Dallas Morning News), did not play it on the front page. The New York Times ran a microscropic item on A16. It did devote an editorial to the subject, and, after mocking the White House and TV commentators, the Times acknowledged "our own failures to deconstruct all the spin and faulty intelligence." Then it went back to bashing the "fantasies of feckless intelligence analysts" and holding President Bush strictly accountable for the fact that 40% of Americans still think WMDs are there.

But everyone was having a tough time explaining their original embrace of the WMD scenario. On the Jim Lehrer Newshour on Thursday night, Secretary of State Colin Powell admitted that the evidence on WMDs in Iraq that he presented to the U.N. was "not correct," but later in the interview called the same evidence "solid, and it was something that we could rely on."

more at http://www.mediainfo.com/eandp/columns/pressingissues_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000751776

[NoStinkinBadges]

1. One Mulligan?

Or do you get one on the front and back nine?

[otohara]

2. In Today's Paper LTTE - Outrage That Dan Rather Wasn't Fired

nada on missing WMD's...

[Atman]

3. There are mulligans...and there is serial cheating

This ain't no mulligan. If you've ever golfed with a guy who tries to take a mulligan after every tee shot, you'll know the pattern. He usually is the guy who kicks the ball out from behind the tree, too. And takes a "gimme" on a 12-foot putt. That's Bush. He's just a cheater and a liar.

Now watch me hit this drive.

[Raster]

4. Well said!