Given the number of fluff pieces running in major newspapers and on television news, it’s exasperating to watch a story that might actually be important (and there aren’t many) slowly wind its way aimlessly through the media, never quite building up the head of steam necessary to burst onto front pages.
The enduring case in point is the stutter-step coverage of the “Downing Street Memo” in the United States, since it was originally published on May 2 by the Sunday Times of London.
The memo — for a brief refresher — consists of the notes from a meeting of Tony Blair’s senior national security team on July 23, 2002, eight months before the invasion of Iraq. In the memo, one of the participants, cited as “C” (Sir Richard Dearlove, then head of MI-6, Britain’s secret intelligence service), just back from meetings with American officials in Washington, recounts his impressions of the Bush administration’s intentions to go to war with Iraq.
The smoking gun many see in the memo revolves, in part, around Dearlove’s contention that “Bush wanted to remove Saddam, though military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy” — not vice versa.
We wrote about this whole thing a few weeks ago when we noted that coverage of the memo in the American media had been almost non-existent, as opposed to the British media, which was battering Tony Blair about the head with it pretty handily in the run-up to elections there.
Since then, coverage of the memo and the questions about the cooking of intelligence it raises have stayed off the front pages, despite the fact that liberal bloggers have been throwing fits on a daily basis over the lack of major media coverage.
But now something seems to have changed, however slightly, in the story of the story. Since Sunday, it has seen much greater coverage, beginning on Sunday morning when the guy so many lefty bloggers love to hate, Tim Russert, interviewed Republican National Committee chief Ken Mehlman on “Meet the Press.”
Russert asked Mehlman about the memo, to which Mehlman replied, “Tim, that report has been discredited by everyone else who’s looked at it since then. Whether it’s the 9/11 Commission, whether it’s the Senate, whoever’s looked at this has said there was no effort to change the intelligence at all.”
Little Russ wasn’t biting, though, telling Mehlman that “I don’t believe that the authenticity of this report has been discredited.” And in that, he got it exactly right. Since the Downing Street Memo wasn’t public knowledge until May 2 of this year, obviously neither the 9/11 Commission nor the Senate has either studied it or discredited it.
True, while that discussion didn’t amount to much, at least it was something — despite the inability of many leftie bloggers to give Russert much credit for having brought the issue up on national TV.
Also on Sunday, the new public editor of the New York Times, Byron Calame, made reference to the paper’s lack of coverage of the issue — a point he also raised in his Web journal, albeit inconclusively, back on May 24.
Since yesterday we’ve seen a relative explosion of coverage of the memo, with the New York Times and Washington Post throwing their hat into the ring. The Times ran a piece looking at Tony Blair’s visit to Washington, noting that yesterday’s meeting between Bush and Blair would be their first since “the disclosure last month of a memo written by a foreign policy aide to Mr. Blair in 2002 that reported … that the White House was fixing its ‘intelligence and facts’ about the threat from Saddam Hussein ‘around the policy’ of removing him from power through military action.”
Not exactly in-depth coverage, but it captures the essence of the memo well enough, and we’ll take what we can get.
The Post‘s Jefferson Morley, in his online-only “World News Roundup” treated the issue with much more care, looking at the coverage the story has received — or not received — so far (much of which we cataloged on May 20), while including some updates. (The issue was raised, briefly, at the Bush-Blair joint press conference Tuesday afternoon, but was swatted away like an errant housefly, as the reporters attendant once again demonstrated their collective inability to stay with a question until they get an answer.)
Today, the Times weighs in again on the memo and the single question about it posed at the Bush/Blair press conference, with Elisabeth Bumiller taking the helm in a piece that lays out the whole controversy nicely.
The Post‘s Dana Milbank also treats the issue this morning, making the case that the American media has largely ignored the story because the idea that Bush was bent on invasion had already been reported in books by Paul O’Neill and Bob Woodward last year. He’s right, and we’re not criticizing Millbank here, but as we said weeks ago, just because part of a story has already been reported, that doesn’t excuse reporters from writing about emerging evidence that may add a new twist to it.
USA Today also belatedly jumps on the bandwagon in today’s edition, noting that although this is the first time they have covered the issue, other major media outlets, “including the evening news programs on ABC, CBS and NBC, had not said a word about the document before Tuesday.”
While we’re happy to see that the memo has been called up to the major leagues in the domestic media, these mea culpas strike us as a bit defensive — and it seems that the reporters covering the issue know they’ve dropped the ball.
Though the memo will likely change few minds about the intelligence surrounding Iraq’s WMD threat or the American and British administrations’ conduct leading up to the war, we’re glad to see another piece of the puzzle receiving the treatment befitting a story of its magnitude.
–Paul McLeary
Paul McLeary is a former CJR staff writer. Since 2008, he has covered the Pentagon for Foreign Policy, Defense News, Breaking Defense, and other outlets. He is currently a defense reporter for Politico.