For Blair and Bush, No Fleet Street Credibility
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, June 16, 2003; Page C01
LONDON -- George W. Bush bloody well has it easy.
He doesn't have to put up with the hour-by-hour pounding that the British press gives Tony Blair, with journalists calling him a liar and worse in a raging debate over whether Iraq really had weapons of mass destruction.
A week's excursion here provided a spot-on contrast with the American media, most of which pursue the weapons issue with tea-and-crumpets politeness compared with the screaming headlines inflicted on the prime minister -- along with his American counterpart, the subject of a London play called "The Madness of George Dubya."
The media assault on 10 Downing St. has been relentless. "Revealed: How Blair Used Discredited WMD 'Evidence,' " shouted the Independent. "No. 10 'Doctored' Iraq Dossier," bellowed the Sunday Times. When the prime minister denied that his government had misled anyone, the Daily Mirror ran a close-up shot of his perspiring forehead, with the banner: "Blair Feels the Heat."
And what American paper would run a cartoon, as the Times of London did, with the words "Yes, Folks, You Can Trust Us!" emanating from the leader of the country's rear end?
For all the hubbub, some of the media's evidence was rather thin. The Guardian made the sensational front-page charge that Secretary of State Colin Powell and British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw had questioned the quality of intelligence on Iraqi weapons at a New York meeting on Feb. 5. When it turned out Straw was in France that day, the Guardian waited days before running a correction on Page 25.
Some scoff at their American cousins. Guardian columnist Gary Younge chided the U.S. press for "at best a reluctance, and at worst a downright refusal, to engage with views and voices opposed to George Bush's foreign policy."
The distrust of leaders runs deep here. "So How Do You Know When a Politician Is Lying? When His Lips Move," scoffed a Times of London headline. About the only public figure to escape public flogging is Queen Elizabeth, who drew gushing coverage on her 50th anniversary as monarch (even as the papers were kicking around Prince Charles for planning to publish a job description of whatever it is that he does).
The old Fleet Street style, meanwhile, is still thriving. Rupert Murdoch's News of the World touched off a furor last November with this understated headline: "World Exclusive: We Stop Crime of the Century." This concerned a supposed attempt to kidnap Victoria Beckham, a former Spice Girl who, with her husband, soccer star David Beckham, seems to be in the news every 10 minutes. But the suspects' trial collapsed when it turned out that News of the World had paid a key informant $16,000, prompting much harrumphing about the need to police "chequebook journalism."
On the BBC, former television "presenter" Anthea Turner struggled to explain why she blew up her career by (a) running off with a married man, (b) taking him back after he returned to his wife and kids and sold photos of the blessed event to a glossy magazine, and (c) let herself be photographed (when she finally married the guy) chewing on a brand-name chocolate bar as a favor to OK Magazine, which was paying for the wedding pictures. She was, said Turner, a victim of the press.
Then there's England's soccer coach, Sven Goran Eriksson, who betrayed his live-in girlfriend by carrying on with a prominent TV personality during the run-up to last year's World Cup. The incumbent girlfriend, Nancy Dell'Olio, dealt with this humiliation by posing for a photo spread in Hello! magazine, saying that she behaves "like a geisha" around Eriksson because "my priority is to please my man."
Which raises the burning question: Does anyone in Britain do it and not blab about it?
Clintonian Diplomacy
From the moment the New York Times broke the Whitewater story in 1992 to Howell Raines's thundering editorials against him during the impeachment saga, Bill Clinton has had a highly contentious relationship with the paper.
Which makes it all the more surprising that he called Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. at the height of the Jayson Blair furor to express his sympathy as someone "who has been through this kind of firestorm," a source close to Clinton says.
Clinton told Sulzberger that the Times was a great newspaper and that "these were not mistakes of malice and they'd be able to get by it," the associate says. But contrary to an account in the New York Daily News, which first reported the call, the former president, while expressing sympathy for Raines's plight, did not offer an opinion on whether Raines should resign.
Jayson Blair, Cont'd
In a footnote to the Jayson Blair affair, a Washington Post review has found problems with two of the 19 stories he wrote for the paper as a Howard County freelancer in 1996 and 1997, before he joined the Times.
One story quoted Maryland state Sen. Arthur Dorman as confirming that a murder victim was his daughter but declining to comment further. Dorman told Post reporter Valerie Strauss that he did not talk to Blair that night. Another Blair story on crime in the county contained some passages that were very similar to an earlier piece in the Baltimore Sun.
Meanwhile, the Times has posted on its Web site corrections to 10 more Blair articles, including two instances of plagiarism and five in which people say they were misquoted.
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