politics

All Cheney All the Time

We set out to write a Blog Report free of any mentions of the Cheney Hunting Incident. Alas, the blogosphere refused to play along.

February 16, 2006

Our aim was true.

We set out to write a Blog Report free of any mentions of the Cheney Hunting Incident. Alas, the blogosphere refused to play along. It’s all, Media is bad, Cheney is good — mixed in with Media is bad, Cheney is also bad.

To Feztickle Drew at All Shook Down, “this is a watershed moment” for the press. Pointing to a passage from the AP’s report on Cheney’s Fox News interview — “Cheney said he was concerned that if the story broke Saturday night when information was still coming in, some reports may have been inaccurate since it was a complicated story that most journalists had never dealt with before” — Feztickle asks, “Does U.S. media retreat to their cribs with their soothers and Dick Cheney’s thumb stuck up their ass or do they actually grow a pair and counter this patronizing bullshit?” Feztickle, for one, stands ready to dismiss the media “as weak and feeble and piss-poor if they let a paternalistic condescension like that stand.”

Dr. Tom at The Moquol has a similar-yet-different read on the same AP passage. “See? Nothing sinister here: the vice president was just trying to protect journalists from inaccurate information.”

Of Cheney’s Fox News appearance last night, ArchPundit blogs that Cheney “finally gets it right,” but Fox’s Brit Hume, who interviewed Cheney, “not so much.” Exhibit A, according to ArchPundit, is this exchange: “Cheney on Fox via the Hotline Blog: ‘Ultimately, I’m the guy who pulled the trigger who fired the round that hit Harry… That’s the bottom the line. It was not Harry’s fault. You can’t blame anybody else. I’m the guy who pulled the trigger and shot my friend. It’s a day I’ll never forget.’ Hume to Cheney: ‘So I take it you missed the bird?'”

Bill, at The World According to Bill, has a different Fox News reporter in the crosshairs: Neil Cavuto. Scoffs Bill, “In yet another hard hitting news story, Fox ‘News’ asked the question no one has been asking, ‘How is the Vice President feeling after he shot someone?'” — pointing to a frame from Cavuto’s show featuring the on-screen caption: “Hunting Accident Controversy: How is VP Feeling?”

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At the National Review‘s The Corner, Jonah Goldberg makes the following pronouncement: “Today is the day where the serious Cheney story and the Cheneymentia story split off from each other. The serious story will start to die off as reasonable people move on to other things, while those unable to let go ramp-up the volume and get sillier and sillier.” The way Goldberg sees it, the more people who “go the Cheneymentia route … the better it will be for Cheney.”

Goldberg is not alone in seeing an upside for Cheney (and the entire administration) to the ongoing press coverage of the Hunting Incident. Steve at Making a Long Story Longer shares the following “conspiracy thought”: “Dick Cheney does his interview with the MSM/Fox the same day that more Abu Ghraib photos come out. The photos don’t actually add anything to the case mind you, but they are more fuel on the fire. The Cheney story seems to have trumped the photo story.”

Puck amok! does the math: “Google News has 4609 links to Cheney stories, 1373 Abu Ghraib stories, and only 448 Guantanamo stories. Honestly, where are the priorities of the media?”

Liz Cox Barrett is a writer at CJR.