This is how the MSM operates. One of them gets an anonymous leak from libs with an ax to grind that paints the Bush Admin as liars, etc. It's just too good to be true because it fits their liberal world view so they run with it without attempting to verify the story. The rest of the MSM picks up the story & piles on big time.
The blogosphere almost immediately debunks the story. The MSM just can't let it go. Most of them don't bother to adequately report a correction let alone a retraction of all the BS they added to the original report.
Case in point....
Even More Media Deception On GMA
-- Lorie Byrd
PoliPundit.com
I just watched another misleading and deceptive ABC News report on Good Morning America. (Ian has the video.)
exposetheleft.com
It was a followup to the story they did yesterday on the Washington Post story about a report saying an expert team inspected trailers in Iraq and determined that they were not mobile labs, yet the adminstration claimed they were for months after that. In today’s report they still neglected to make any reference at all to the fact buried in the 12th paragraph of the Washington Post story that there were actually three expert teams sent to examine the trailers and that two of the three teams came to the conclusion that they were mobile labs.
On today’s GMA, the only update to yesterday’s story was to say that the question is whether or not the President was aware of the report (the one minority report of the three, although they still do not tell viewers that there was more than the one report). The only other “update” to the story was to add additional video of other administration officials stating that mobile labs were found, after the date of the one report. Oh, and they added that the administration criticized the WaPo and ABC News for their coverage, but they still did not tell viewers about the other two reports that GMA kept from their viewers.
I could perhaps give GMA a pass on the first report and chalk yesterday’s omission up to laziness and sloppiness, but after being criticized for not telling the whole story, they had no excuse today. This is one of those stories that, in my opinion, is a prime example of agenda journalism. Watching the report this morning, which implied that administration officials misled the country about what was found in Iraq, while at the same time ABC News was misleading their viewers about the facts of the story was almost too much to believe. And I thought that nothing could surprise me anymore when it came to media bias. Un. Be. Lievable.
Update: Let ABC News and GMA know what you think of their misleading reporting by clicking here.
abc.go.com
Update II: Kudos to CNN’s David Ensor for getting the story right. (Yes, I said CNN, and I happily commend them when they get things right. I only wish I could do so more frequently.) Here is the relevant portion of the transcript:
<<< CNN’s “The Situation Room”
April 12, 2006
CNN’S HEIDI COLLINS: “And for more now, we want to go ahead and bring in CNN national security correspondent David Ensor. David, I think, people might not have a really clear understanding of how long it takes for information like this to actually reach the highest rank of the President. Can you explain it a little bit for us?”
CNN NATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT DAVID ENSOR: “Well, something like this is a field report, Heidi, done by a group of people. They were actually not government employees, but they’ve been asked by CIA and others and the Pentagon, to go look at these labs. So, this kind of a report is a raw field report. It would not have gone to the President’s desk. He’s not an intelligence officer. He’s a consumer of intelligence. It would go to the CIA, or to the appropriate place in the government, where they would analyze it, compare it with other intelligence they had, and only when they were satisfied that they could draw some kind of meaningful conclusion, they would then pass that on to policy makers possibly including the President. So, it’s really not fair in a way to accuse him of saying the wrong thing in this particular case. And after all, in October of that year, many months later, David Kay, who was assigned by the CIA to look into these weapons, was still saying they could be bio weapons labs. February, the following year, George Tenet the then still director of Central Intelligence was saying in a speech that he wasn’t sure. So to blame the President for saying it back in May, may not be fair.”
COLLINS: “But the fact that, you said, you know, they take all the information and of course analyzed it if it’s deemed necessary, it then gets to the President. Because it did not get to the President, does that say anything conclusive?”
ENSOR: “Not really. And in fact there was another report that came the day before - the day after this one did that was from Pentagon and Central Intelligence people, and in fact I was briefed on it. This was May 28, I believe, 2003, which said that they believed these probably were biological weapons labs.[My edit: It came a day before Bush's comments about the mobile labs] So, there was a lot of disagreement and ferment within the government over this. The predominant view at the time, and the President correctly stated it, was that they probably were labs. That view was overcome eventually. So all you have here is a story where well the first word that some people thought it wasn’t, or that they weren’t labs, did come earlier, but didn’t come to the White House. So, you know, it’s a murky story.” >>>
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