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The White House Strikes Back

Jimmie | May 19, 2008 | Comments (0)

It only took five and a half years, but finally the President is seriously kicking back against the MSM’s craptastic reporting. Today, Ed Gillespie sallied forth on behalf of the White House and scolded NBC for editing an interview with the President in a particularly nasty and dishonest way. While he was there, he also decided to take a couple more whacks at the network for a couple editorial position that bent the truth over a log like it was Ned Beatty in Deliverance.

The juiciest part of the e-mail comes after the jump. It’s a pretty nice piece of work.

NBC’s selective editing of the President’s response is clearly intended to give viewers the impression that he agreed with Engel’s characterization of his remarks when he explicitly challenged it. Furthermore, it omitted the references to al Qaeda, Hezbollah and Hamas and ignored the clarifying point in the President’s follow-up response that U.S. policy is to require Iran to suspend its nuclear enrichment program before coming to the table, not that “negotiating with Iran is pointless” and amounts to “appeasement.”

This deceitful editing to further a media-manufactured storyline is utterly misleading and irresponsible and I hereby request in the interest of fairness and accuracy that the network air the President’s responses to both initial questions in full on the two programs that used the excerpts.

As long as I am making this formal request, please allow me to take this opportunity to ask if your network has reconsidered its position that Iraq is in the midst of a civil war, especially in light of the fact that the unity government in Baghdad recently rooted out illegal, extremist groups in Basra and reclaimed the port there for the people of Iraq, among other significant signs of progress.

On November 27, 2006, NBC News made a decision to no longer just cover the news in Iraq, but to make an analytical and editorial judgment that Iraq was in a civil war. As you know, both the United States government and the Government of Iraq disputed your account at that time. As Matt Lauer said that morning on The Today Show: “We should mention, we didn’t just wake up on a Monday morning and say, ‘Let’s call this a civil war.’ This took careful deliberation.’”

I noticed that around September of 2007, your network quietly stopped referring to conditions in Iraq as a “civil war.” Is it still NBC News’s carefully deliberated opinion that Iraq is in the midst of a civil war? If not, will the network publicly declare that the civil war has ended, or that it was wrong to declare it in the first place?

Lastly, when the Commerce Department on April 30 released the GDP numbers for the first quarter of 2007, Brian Williams reported it this way: “If you go by the government number, the figure that came out today stops just short of the official declaration of a recession.”

The GDP estimate was a positive 0.6% for the first quarter. Slow growth, but growth nonetheless. This followed a slow but growing fourth quarter in 2007. Consequently, even if the first quarter GDP estimate had been negative, it still would not have signaled a recession – neither by the unofficial rule-of-thumb of two consecutive quarters of negative growth, nor the more robust definition by the National Bureau of Economic Research (the group that officially marks the beginnings and ends of business cycles).

Furthermore, never in our nation’s history have we characterized economic conditions as a “recession” with unemployment so low – in fact, when this rate of unemployment was eventually reached in the 1990s, it was hailed as the sign of a strong economy. This rate of unemployment is lower than the average of the past three decades.

Are there numbers besides the “government number” to go by? Is there reason to believe “the government number” is suspect? How does the release of positive economic growth for two consecutive quarters, albeit limited, stop “just short of the official declaration of a recession”?

I can’t help but wonder what things would be like in this country and in Iraq right now had the administration done this in 2003 instead of waiting until now. It’s not hard to envision a country with a few hundred fewer dead soldiers because the administration could actually concentrate fully on fighting a war without getting stabbed in the back by news outlets far more interested in making the news than in reporting it accurately. It’s also not difficult to imagine a stronger economy, free from the burden of fears ginned up by journalists whose memories don’t seem to reach back to the economy of 15 years ago.