Bush met with Editors to suppress stories

[Moses]

Bush Pressed Papers to Kill Scoops on Spying, Prisons


Submitted by editor on December 27, 2005 - 12:15pm.


By E & P Staff
Source: Editor and Publisher

President George W. Bush and senior administration officials have met with top editors of The New York Times and The Washington Post in recent months to try to dissuade the papers from publishing what the administration considers to be articles harmful to its prosecution of the war on terror.

The administration's efforts ultimately failed, although sensitive details likely were removed from the articles that eventually ran. The latest revelations show just how serious the Bush White House views the media's reporting on its anti-terror tactics, and how it would prefer to conduct much of the war on terror in secret.

In his Media Notes column today, Washington Post media writer Howard Kurtz wrote that Washington Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr., met with White House officials on multiple occasions to discuss the paper's Nov. 2 article by Dana Priest disclosing the existence of secret CIA prisons in Eastern Europe where terrorism suspects are interrogated.

"When senior administration officials raised national security questions about details in Dana's story during her reporting, at their request we met with them on more than one occasion," Downie told Kurtz. "The meetings were off the record for the purpose of discussing national security issues in her story."

Kurtz could not get Downie to confirm the meeting with Bush, but Kurtz' sources told him that at least one of the meetings involved John Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, and CIA Director Porter Goss.

Priest's article set off widespread criticism of the CIA's interrogation methods. Shortly after publication, the House Intelligence Committee launched an investigation into who leaked the information, while the CIA asked the Justice Department to review possible sources.

Earlier, on Dec. 19, Newsweek's Jonathan Alter reported that Bush had summoned Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., and Executive Editor Bill Keller to the Oval Office on Dec. 6 to try to dissuade them from publishing their domestic spying story. The Times had already sat on the story for nearly a year, a delay the paper has yet to fully explain.

"The White House asked The New York Times not to publish this article, arguing that it could jeopardize continuing investigations and alert would-be terrorists that they might be under scrutiny," the newspaper reported in its Dec. 15 spying scoop.

But Alter concluded that because the Bush administration could not point to any specific details in the Times story that would compromise national security, the real reason "Bush was desperate to keep the Times from running this important story" was "because he knew that it would reveal him as a law-breaker."

[Moses]

What Else Don't We Know?


Submitted by editor on December 27, 2005 - 12:55pm.


By Justin Frank
Source: Yahoo News

In today’s Washington Post, Howard Kurtz reports that the White House actively pressures the editors of major newspapers to withhold stories that could damage the Bush administration’s image and reputation with American citizens.

The important question this revelation raises is, “What else don’t we know?” What other information, gathered by professional reporters and editors, has been kept from the American public. Kurtz has finally blown the whistle, revealing what he says, “may be the tip of a large and rather dirty iceberg.” It is incumbent upon those whose own stories have been suppressed to come forward and make their voices heard, starting with my own.

In June 2004, my book Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President described and predicted virtually everything that has now come to light about the outlaw nature of this administration. I am a respected medical doctor, a university professor and an acknowledged expert in the field of psychoanalysis. My publisher, ReganBooks, is not only mainstream, it is also part of the conservative-leaning News Corporation, which also owns Fox News. Nevertheless, no major U.S. newspaper reviewed my book. The New York Times, unable to ignore my work entirely, hired a well known psychiatric shill--a member of the Bush administration’s health advisory team--to dismiss it in the Health section of the paper. This same paper later gave full press coverage to the spurious Swift Boat book attacking Senator Kerry.

In the broadcast medium, it seemed that radio hosts had the courage to invite me to discuss my book. Only Tucker Carlson (an admitted conservative) and Tina Brown (an admitted liberal) dared interview me on television, and it was cable television at that. CNN’s Judy Woodruff, a personal friend, was too frightened of her Time Warner employers to even make the effort.

My book cannot be the only example of responsible information suppressed by the Times and the Post, as well as by television media. I think that killing stories critical of the administration is based on fear of reprisals, rather than shared beliefs that secrecy is a fundamental function of presenting the news.

I assume that people like New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller have more respect for the American public than that – just not enough guts to do the right thing. This is why I applaud reporters like Kurtz and Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter, but put my faith in The Huffington Post. Not only has corporate media betrayed the public trust; they have made themselves irrelevant at best, and enemies at worst, to the American people.

[Moses]

Telling It Like It Isn't


Submitted by editor on December 27, 2005 - 1:13pm.


By Robert Fisk
Source: LA Times

I first realized the enormous pressures on American journalists in the Middle East when I went some years ago to say goodbye to a colleague from the Boston Globe. I expressed my sorrow that he was leaving a region where he had obviously enjoyed reporting. I could save my sorrows for someone else, he said. One of the joys of leaving was that he would no longer have to alter the truth to suit his paper's more vociferous readers.

"I used to call the Israeli Likud Party 'right wing,' " he said. "But recently, my editors have been telling me not to use the phrase. A lot of our readers objected." And so now, I asked? "We just don't call it 'right wing' anymore."

Ouch. I knew at once that these "readers" were viewed at his newspaper as Israel's friends, but I also knew that the Likud under Benjamin Netanyahu was as right wing as it had ever been.

This is only the tip of the semantic iceberg that has crashed into American journalism in the Middle East. Illegal Jewish settlements for Jews and Jews only on Arab land are clearly "colonies," and we used to call them that. I cannot trace the moment when we started using the word "settlements." But I can remember the moment around two years ago when the word "settlements" was replaced by "Jewish neighborhoods" — or even, in some cases, "outposts."

Similarly, "occupied" Palestinian land was softened in many American media reports into "disputed" Palestinian land — just after then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, in 2001, instructed U.S. embassies in the Middle East to refer to the West Bank as "disputed" rather than "occupied" territory.

Then there is the "wall," the massive concrete obstruction whose purpose, according to the Israeli authorities, is to prevent Palestinian suicide bombers from killing innocent Israelis. In this, it seems to have had some success. But it does not follow the line of Israel's 1967 border and cuts deeply into Arab land. And all too often these days, journalists call it a "fence" rather than a "wall." Or a "security barrier," which is what Israel prefers them to say. For some of its length, we are told, it is not a wall at all — so we cannot call it a "wall," even though the vast snake of concrete and steel that runs east of Jerusalem is higher than the old Berlin Wall.

The semantic effect of this journalistic obfuscation is clear. If Palestinian land is not occupied but merely part of a legal dispute that might be resolved in law courts or discussions over tea, then a Palestinian child who throws a stone at an Israeli soldier in this territory is clearly acting insanely.

If a Jewish colony built illegally on Arab land is simply a nice friendly "neighborhood," then any Palestinian who attacks it must be carrying out a mindless terrorist act.

And surely there is no reason to protest a "fence" or a "security barrier" — words that conjure up the fence around a garden or the gate arm at the entrance to a private housing complex.

For Palestinians to object violently to any of these phenomena thus marks them as a generically vicious people. By our use of language, we condemn them.

We follow these unwritten rules elsewhere in the region. American journalists frequently used the words of U.S. officials in the early days of the Iraqi insurgency — referring to those who attacked American troops as "rebels" or "terrorists" or "remnants" of the former regime. The language of the second U.S. pro-consul in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer III, was taken up obediently — and grotesquely — by American journalists.

American television, meanwhile, continues to present war as a bloodless sandpit in which the horrors of conflict — the mutilated bodies of the victims of aerial bombing, torn apart in the desert by wild dogs — are kept off the screen. Editors in New York and London make sure that viewers' "sensitivities" don't suffer, that we don't indulge in the "pornography" of death (which is exactly what war is) or "dishonor" the dead whom we have just killed.

Our prudish video coverage makes war easier to support, and journalists long ago became complicit with governments in making conflict and death more acceptable to viewers. Television journalism has thus become a lethal adjunct to war.

Back in the old days, we used to believe — did we not? — that journalists should "tell it how it is." Read the great journalism of World War II and you'll see what I mean. The Ed Murrows and Richard Dimblebys, the Howard K. Smiths and Alan Moorheads didn't mince their words or change their descriptions or run mealy-mouthed from the truth because listeners or readers didn't want to know or preferred a different version.

So let's call a colony a colony, let's call occupation what it is, let's call a wall a wall. And maybe express the reality of war by showing that it represents not, primarily, victory or defeat, but the total failure of the human spirit.