Logging on to CNN.com this morning, we dug into a “Special Report” touting Larry King’s broadcast interview with vice president Dick Cheney the night before.
The interview, which was about as “in-depth” as Larry King ever gets — we’re talking the shallow end of the pool here, folks — was also briefly covered by the New York Times, USAToday.com and the WashingtonPost.com. But while those papers focused on Cheney’s cavalier dismissal of the recent Red Cross report on the alleged abuses at Guantanamo Bay, CNN in retrospect decided to play up the VP’s startling contention that the Iraqi insurgency was in its “last throes.”
Reading this comment in the face of the massive wave of violence that has gripped Iraq all month, we were brought back to those hazy days just before the long weekend, when we wrote about the cyclical nature of war reporting.
And here we go again.
CNN.com highligted Cheney’s contention that, “The level of activity [by the insurgents] that we see today from a military standpoint, I think, will clearly decline. I think they’re in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency.”
Cheney makes these comments just after more than 700 Iraqis have been killed over the past month, and just about a week after General John Abizaid, the top U.S. military man in the Middle East, reported to Congress that the 21 car bombings in Baghdad so far this month have almost matched the total of 25 bombings for all of last year. Throughout Iraq, according to the AP, there have been about 143 car and suicide car bombings in May, a new record. The old record was set a month earlier, in April, which saw 135 car bombings.
Nowhere in the reporting on the VP’s speech do we learn this — nor do we see anyone questioning the rigor of Cheney’s logic, certainly not by Larry King himself.
The administration knows what it’s doing here; it has rolled out unchallenged comments like these before with hardly a squeak from the media. Hearken back to July 2003, while fighting was still raging, when the president said that “Conditions in most of Iraq are growing more peaceful.”
This sounds a lot like the president’s comments this morning — about two years later — when at a Rose Garden press conference he claimed that “I think the Iraqi people dealt the insurgents a serious blow when we had the elections.”
The most recent elections, of course, happened at the end of January, before two car bombing records were set and American and Iraqi forces started a massive new counteroffensive in Baghdad and near the Syrian border.
It’s a given, now and forever, that politicians spin the narrative of the moment to fit their own preferred view of the world. Both the public and the media expect nothing less from leaders, no matter what their political stripe.
But the problem starts when reporters act as little more than stenographers. Simply by not fitting such comments into the context of the time, they give them an unstated — and undeserved — imprimatur.
–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.