I Cogitate

Bush's Climate-Change Feint
Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
June 1, 2007

The White House yesterday showed that it still knows how to play the American press like a harp.

President Bush yesterday put forth a new proposal on climate change that is most newsworthy for its attempt to muddy the debate about the issue and derail European and U.N. plans for strict caps on emissions. Bush's proposal calls for a new round of international meetings that would nearly outlast his presidency. The purpose of the meetings would not be to set caps on emissions, but to establish what the White House -- uncorking a bold new euphemism -- calls "aspirational goals."

But a change in rhetoric was enough to generate some headlines about the administration's attention to the issue: Bush Proposes Goals on Greenhouse Gas Emissions, reads the New York Times headline. Bush Proposes Talks on Warming, says The Washington Post's front page. Bush offers to take climate lead, proclaims the Los Angeles Times.

* The collecting, writing, editing, and presenting of news or news articles in newspapers and magazines and in radio and television broadcasts.

* The style of writing characteristic of material in newspapers and magazines, consisting of direct presentation of facts or occurrences with little attempt at analysis or interpretation.

* the actions of a corporation, store, government, individual, etc., in promoting goodwill between itself and the public, the community, employees, customers, etc.

Three DC journalists on the state of investigative reporting
Walter Pincus, John Walcott and David Corn think the Washington press corps is being manipulated by administration officials who have become supremely adept at dominating the news agenda. They discussed that and other challenges facing investigative journalism on the Diane Rehm Show.

Barry Sussman
COMMENTARY
May 31, 2007

Three Washington journalists heaped praise and scorn on the status of investigative reporting­sometimes in the same breath­on the Diane Rehm radio program on May 30th.

Some of the scorn was for editors and reporters letting themselves become part of what Walter Pincus of the Washington Post called a “PR center for government” in the nation’s capital. A great deal of information is nothing more than PR, Pincus said, “but we are covering it rather than setting up our own agendas.”

Pincus was joined on the program by John Walcott, Washington bureau chief for the McClatchy Company, and David Corn, Washington editor of the Nation magazine.

Walcott, whose bureau is credited for its aggressive, independent reporting during the run-up to the Iraq war, made a criticism heard frequently: that the press during that period “became stenographers, they were not journalists. They simply repeated what people in high places said; they didn’t ask whether or not it was true.”

Corn, talking about Washington reporting in recent years, said “it was the worst of times, it was the best of times.” He listed a series of stories broken by traditional news organizations that included “Jack Abramoff, Duke Cunningham, secret CIA prisons; the NSA is [eaves]dropping, Bush signing statements…I took my hat off to the reporters who did that.”

The Politico: Exhibit A for our broken political press
The publication's "senior political columnist" writes its eighth story on John Edwards' hair in two weeks.

Glenn Greenwald

May. 03, 2007 | This week, the Bush administration sought vastly increased powers to spy on the telephone conversations of Americans, and then threatened to begin spying again illegally and without warrants. It was revealed that Condoleezza Rice would meet with Syrian officials, a significant shift in Middle East policy.

Yesterday, it was disclosed that Iraq's government is actually purging itself of anyone who seeks to impede lawless Shiite militias. And one of the right-wing's most influential academicians published an article on The Wall St. Journal Op-Ed page explicitly advocating "one-man rule" in America whereby the President can ignore the "rule of law" in order to fight The Terrorists.

None of that -- or virtually anything else of even marginal significance -- was reported by The Politico, an online political magazine founded by some of the nation's most prestigious and admired (in Beltway terms) political journalists. But yesterday, The Politico's so-called "chief political columnist," Roger Simon, published a 674-word article -- prominently touted on The Politico's front page -- exclusively about John Edwards' haircuts, cleverly headlined "Hair today, gone tomorrow."

To begin his article, Simon pronounces:
It is the haircut that will not die.

He can spin it, he can gel it, he can mousse it. But it is not going away.

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