More on The Weapons Story

Okay, I couldn’t resist one more story on this today and then, I promise, no more unless something really big hits the fan. Deal?

Howard Kurtz – a columnist and media watcher I very much enjoy reading even when I think he’s dead wrong – has some great quotes from Bill Keller. Keller is the Executive Editor of the New York Times.

Some bloggers have glommed onto the main quote of the article – that internet leaks forced the Times to come out with the article before CBS News wanted to do so. For those not up on the story, CBS wanted to release this story on the morning of Election Day. Nice folks, huh?

But Keller shot that story out of the water with a later quote.

Keller said “60 Minutes” executives asked the newspaper to hold the story until this Sunday so they could report it the same day, and “we said we weren’t comfortable doing that because it wouldn’t give the White House a fair opportunity to respond.”

So, the NYT had to rush the story by putting it out on Tuesday instead of Sunday. And it wanted to put the story out on Sunday to give the President a fair chance at responding.

Keller apparently believes that one day is a “fair opportunity” to respond to a story they’re been holding for who knows how long. But at least he gets to announce his basic fairness. Nope! No bias here, folks. Move along! [Check the updates. I got this one wrong - J]

The priceless quote, though, is right here.

Bush campaign officials thought that “if they barked at us, we would back off. . . . We’ve vetted this every way we can, and we continue to do that.”

They vetted the story every way they could. Except that they continue to vet it. Does that mean that they find some new eays to vet the story they couldn’t do before? If that’s the case, then I have one more quick vetting idea for them: Reading their own newspaper.

Senior American officials have barely mentioned the hunt for Mr. Hussein’s unconventional weapons in recent days. At an industrial site south of Baghdad today, United States troops found what were reported to be thousands of boxes of white powder, believed to be a nerve agent antidote. But preliminary tests showed it to be an explosive.

April 5, 2003 – US Troops at al Qaqaa finding explosives, but obviously not the 380 tons the IAEA say there should have been. That seems to answer the question “When were the explosives removed?” with the answer “Before April 5, 2003″.

Apparently the basic step of searching what his reporters have written on this place before is beyond the ken of Mr. Keller. Does that sound reasonable to you, or does it just sound like he’s trying to bullafo us into thenking they made an honest mistake?

UPDATE: I got a couple details of the story wrong. Here’s what I found, when I went back and read a couple articles. CBS and the Times worked the story together with the same source. It was CBS’ intention to run the story on Sunday before the election, not the day of the election like I believed. I have that, thanks to the LA Times. So I blew that one.

I also mis-read Keller’s second quote, about his discomfort putting the story out on Sunday. He obviously felt it would not be fair to the President to give only one day to reply to it and I read it the other way around.

Thanks to Reader EricH for pointing both of those out to me.

On the other hand, I do have a defense to make. The LA Times article is short a couple crucial details but it does paint a picture of two news organizations treating a story on which they’d already reported to one degree or another as a breaking news story. I should perhaps give Keller a break for running the story early to be fair to the President.

But that’s not why they ran it early. As Keller said in his first quote, he ran the story because he had to, not beause he wanted to. Jeff Fager, the “60 Minutes” Executive Producer confirmed that in the LA Times story.

Jeff Fager, executive producer of the Sunday edition of “60 Minutes,” said in a statement that “our plan was to run the story on [Oct.] 31, but it became clear that it wouldn’t hold, so the decision was made for the Times to run it.”

Later on, the story notes that “other journalists were on the story” so the NYT broke it Monday with the blessing of CBS. Keller tells us in today’s article that it was his fear of the story leaking on the internet that drove him. In neither story, though, does it imply at all that being unfair to the President was a particularly strong motivation to run the story early, except for Keller’s quotes. But the majority of the story seems to be that they had to push the story out there or get scooped. You’re left with the distinct feeling that if he could have done so, Keller would have held the story to match CBS’s release schedule. CBS would have done the story on Sunday night and the NYT would have it on Monday morning. Unfair, sure, but it was the plan right up to the point where they didn’t have any other choice.

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Category: Oh, THAT liberal media., President George Bush