Last night’s Presidential press conference unleashed a press contingent intent on forcing President Bush to admit to mistakes made during his tenure.
Accordingly, most news accounts contained a paraphrase of the question John Dickerson, Time magazine’s White House correspondent, posed to the president in the latter half of the question-and-answer session. After recounting some baseball history Dickerson hit Bush with this compound question: “You’ve looked back before 9-11 for what mistakes might have been made. After 9-11, what would your biggest mistake be, would you say, and what lessons you have learned from it?”
Bush stalled his way through a non-answer to the first question, and ignored the second (which he had addressed earlier in the press conference). Evidently, however, the exchange was too much for several members of the press corps.
Dan Balz managed to suggest that Bush’s non-answer to the first question (what was his biggest mistake) was somehow an answer to the second (lessons learned from 9-11). Balz wrote in this morning’s Washington Post:
Toward the end of the news conference, Bush was asked what lessons he had taken away from events since the Sept. 11 attacks. He stopped, shook his head, looked quizzical and then came up empty, although it was the kind of question he must have been told to prepare for. “I’m sure something will pop into my head here in the midst of this press conference, all the pressure of trying to come up with an answer,” he said. “But it hasn’t yet.”
Balz’s style-section counterpart Tom Shales also slipped up, omitting the crucial “after September 11” qualifer from Dickerson’s question, writing that, “Bush similarly struggled, a few minutes earlier, to cite the single biggest mistake of his presidency.”
The Chicago Tribune’s Bob Kemper committed a similar error, recounting Dickerson’s question as if it had been asked about the beginning of Bush’s term. Kemper wrote, “When asked what his biggest mistake had been before Sept. 11, the president at first stood silently at the lectern.”
As for an example of a reporter who correctly paraphrased Dickerson’s question, Campaign Desk turns to Maura Reynolds, writing in today’s Los Angeles Times. “At one point,” Renolyds writes, “[Bush] acknowledged the stress he was under during the news conference, noting ‘all the pressure of trying to come up with an answer’ to an unexpected question to name his biggest mistake since Sept. 11. ‘I wish you would have given me this written question ahead of time so I could plan for it,’ Bush said.”
The errors made by Balz, Shales, and Kemper are minor mistakes and we don’t contend otherwise. But they’re also the kind of errors that can get endlessly picked up and repeated in the echo chamber, until they become gospel. It’s Reynolds’ account, not the others, that belongs in the permanent record.
–Thomas Lang
Thomas Lang was a writer at CJR Daily.