Why now?

Yellowcake break is over.

Watching Rumsfeld and Rice perform the talking points on the chat shows this morning was remarkable for many reasons. They performed poorly and, yes, dishonorably for one. But more telling to me was the fact that one major theme of every interview was: we take it back. The uranium story is not false—we never said it was false, we just said that it didn’t rise to the level of being included in a Presidential address.

These people understand how the press works. So well, in fact, that this whole affair Niger came as a huge surprise to me, because I never would have imagined that they would make the most elementary and dangerous mistake possible: admitting they were wrong on the record.

The political press (most of the them, anyway) likes to imagine that it is objective, but their version of objectivity is terribly flawed. Consider the following scenario:
# Politician A claims proposition P is true
# P is demonstrably and clearly false
To keep partisan emotion out of it, let’s say that the politician is Pitt the Elder, and the proposition, “Goldfish are made of wood”. How would this be reported by today’s political press? Most of the stories would go something like:
bq. Prime Minister Pitt stands by his claim that goldfish are made of wood, in spite of critcism from Tory MPs.
Every once in a while, in the hands of a Dana Milbank or Sy Hersh, we might get:
bq. Prime Minister Pitt stands by his claim that goldfish are made of wood.
bq. In fact, unlike wood, goldfish appear to swim around and eat fish food, and are very squishy when stepped on.
But those sorts of pedantic, factually-oriented stories are far from the norm in American political reporting, and are almost never picked up by TV news, which makes them only slightly more relevant than this blog post. The more common case is the first, in which every dispute of fact—no matter how checkable—is reduced to a he said/she said. Because the press thinks that they do not seem objective when they themselves confront a lying public figure with the truth. Even when the facts are no longer in any kind of reasonable dispute, to hold a fact up against a lie, they have to put the words in someone else’s mouth.
This is why admitting that you are wrong is the worst thing you can do, if you happen to be a politician with truthfulness issues. In this case, and this case alone, is the press freed from its self-imposed shackles of pseudo-objectivity. Only when you admit that the fact is a fact can it be reported as a fact, and not as the theory of a “critic”.
This is why the Niger uranium issue only became an issue in the past week, even though the facts about the forged documents and the Wilson trip have been widely known for months. When David Sanger got Ari Fleischer to tie himself in knots, he forced a clearly-worded admission from the White House, and that admission opened the door for the political press to report what was long known: there was no reliable evidence to back up the President’s assertion, and there are clear indications that that was known in the White House at the time of the speech.
Now the White House is trying to stuff the horse back in the barn, if they have to grind it up and squirt it through the slats in the door, because they know the only way this scandal can end without major resignations and permanent damage is if they can convert it back from a factual story to a he said/she said. They have to stop the press from investigating and reporting on what happened, and go back to reporting on what each side says about what might have happened. Whether the press will stand for this, and whether it will make much difference to Bush’s political future anyway given the broad and vigorous criticism (finally!) from Democrats, is anybody’s guess.

Filed under: politics/war