After Bernard Kerik’s nomination to head the Department of Homeland Security imploded over the weekend, the conventional wisdom quickly developed that a hasty vetting process, run by White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, was to blame for leaving the administration unaware of Kerik’s controversial background. On Monday, the New York Times informed readers that “Administration officials seemed eager on Sunday to dispel any notion that Mr. Gonzales’s office short-circuited the process in the case of Mr. Kerik or was not alert to potential problems in his background.” And Newsweek reported that “White House officials are defensive about the vetting process.”
So it’s no surprise that today, in the Times‘ lead story, Elisabeth Bumiller tells us that, “Despite hours of confrontational interviews by the White House counsel, Alberto R. Gonzales, the Bush administration failed to get a full picture of the legal and ethical problems of Bernard B. Kerik, its nominee for homeland security secretary, a government official said on Tuesday.”
There’s a sophisticated political blame game going on here, with the White House pointing the finger at Kerik as it tries to wipe the egg off its own face, and one would think a veteran reporter would give readers some idea of the motivations her source might have in planting this tidbit. But Bumiller eats it up. Nowhere in the entire piece — which, despite running as the Times‘s lead story, contains not a single named source — does she give readers any hint that the “government official” might have an agenda in speaking to her.
Does that mean that his or her information is inaccurate? We have no idea, and neither, we’d wager, does Bumiller — all the more reason to avoid taking the information at face value, and to respect her readers enough to give them a sense of her source’s motives.
Here (with apologies to Brad De Long) is how Bumiller might have written that lede:
White House officials are concerned about the perception that their vetting of Bernard Kerik for the job of Homeland Security Secretary was inadequate. In an effort to challenge that perception, a government official yesterday told the New York Times that White House counsel Alberto Gonzales in fact conducted hours of confrontational interviews with Kerik. The Times has not been able to independently verify that this is true. Anonymous government officials almost always speak to reporters in order to advance a particular agenda, and have sometimes provided information that turned out to be false — most recently when one source, in an apparent effort to undermine Treasury Secretary John Snow, incorrectly told the Times that Snow would indeed be replaced.
Of course, the Times couldn’t have played a hedging, unverified claim like that as its lead story for the day. But seen in this light, here’s what the news boils down to: An anonymous administration official told the Times that the White House thoroughly vetted Kerik. Does that really merit placement on the front page, let alone top billing?
Bumiller and the Times are asking readers to accept, on faith, the veracity of an anonymous source with a fairly obvious agenda to advance. And while they may trust that source, the bigger question is why readers, given no context with which to evaluate it, should trust the Times.
–Zachary Roth
Zachary Roth is a contributing editor to The Washington Monthly. He also has written for The Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, Slate, Salon, The Daily Beast, and Talking Points Memo, among other outlets.