Slate's Jack Shafer gives some good advice:
Streaming Media - Making sense of the leaks and counter-leaks in Plamegate. By Jack Shafer: Readers find themselves in the position of an audience watching a play in which the curtain is drawn. We hear the noise of voices and shuffling feet and an occasional scream, but can't follow the story. That's not likely to change overnight, but if this scandal spreads and the dueling leaks continue to stream in from anonymous and thinly veiled sources, don't automatically expect the newspapers and the networks to decode the messages. You'll have to do it yourself. Ask, Who leaked? Why did they leak? Who was hurt and helped by the leak? Which reporters carried water for their sources? And most important, Which sources spoke most candidly and honestly on the record, and where were their voices heard?
But he then singularly and extraordinarily fails to follow it. He writes:
...competing White House interests took a hammer to the Wilson-Plame leakers, according to Mike Allen and Dana Priest's Sept. 28 Washington Post story, signaling internal White House strife. An anonymous senior administration official (a non-con?) denounced the leakers, saying the leak was "meant purely and simply for revenge." Allen and Priest continue: "It is rare for one Bush administration official to turn on another. Asked about the motive for describing the leaks, the senior official said the leaks were 'wrong and a huge miscalculation, because they were irrelevant and did nothing to diminish Wilson's credibility.'"
Once again: no. That's not what happened--at least, not unless Jack Shafer knows something very important that I do not. There is meaning in Allen and Priest's calling their source a "senior administration official" while he calls the leakers "senior White House officials." According to ABC News's The Note, you can get 24-1 odds in Washington today that Allen and Priest's source is not a White House staffer but is instead somebody very familiar with the thinking of CIA Director George Tenet.
So far the White House staff has stayed united: eager to join in the campaign of "slime [Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame Wilson] and defend [the White House aides who destroyed her cover]", and not-very-concerned with the presence of criminals in its midst. Shafer misleads his readers when he implies that there are divisions within the White House staff without any evidence that I can see.
Posted by DeLong at October 2, 2003 08:37 PM | TrackBack
On the psychology of George Tenet’s mutiny, if that is what it is, some splendidly OTT lines by Thomas Babington Macaulay from Virginia, in Lays of Ancient Rome :
“Spare us the inexpiable wrong, the unutterable shame
That turns the coward’s heart to steel, the sluggard’s blood to flame;
Lest, when our latest hope is fled, ye taste of our despair
And learn at last, in some wild hour, how much the wretched dare!”