How the press skews perception

Yesterday the NY Times reported that the intelligence behind the recent terror alerts was "old". (I discussed the issue in Is This REALLY News?). Today the Times published a followup article. Had it not been for yesterday's slant on the terror alerts, this followup article wouldn't even have been needed.

In essence, what the Times did was force the administration to provide additional details about the terror alert to obviate the objection that the alert was politically motivated. That allegation was implied in the Times article, picked up by WaPo and LAT and then rippled through the Democratic ranks as reporters kept asking, "Do you think this was politically motivated?"

Even Bill Clinton was asked the question on the Letterman show. To his credit, he answered no, and suggested people needed to take heed of the warnings. I have to believe that's because Clinton saw the alerts when he was in office and knows full well the nature and extent of the threat that al Qaeda poses. Clinton may be a lot of things, but he's not a fool, and he understands the times we are in. (Hillary has also been resistant to the Howard Dean strain of attack on terror alerts.)

But even when printing the additional information, the Times just couldn't resist taking a few pokes at the administration.

The officials disclosed the information a day after the Bush administration acknowledged for the first time that much of the surveillance activity cited last weekend by Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge to justify the latest, specific warnings had been at least three years old.

Note the use of the word "acknowledged". It implies that the administration hid something, the reporters uncovered it, and they were then forced to admit it was true.

Remember, officials had already used words like "alarming" and "disturbing" with reference to the "specificity" of the information that they had obtained, yet the Times felt it necessary to question the motivation behind the alert due to the age of the information.

The language used by senior administration officials on Tuesday in warning of a possible attack was at least as strong as that Mr. Ridge used in announcing the alert on Sunday, and much stronger than the language used on Monday, when the officials acknowledged that the reconnaissance reports dated back to the period surrounding the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Among other things, one official disclosed on Tuesday that one intelligence report had pointed to a possible attack "in August or September.''

That shifting tone may prove frustrating to the public, providing little guidance for assessing the gravity of threat information whose details remain shrouded in intelligence reports not available to anyone outside the highest ranks of the government

What "shifting tone"? This is nothing less than editorializing in the middle of what purports to be straight reporting.

Again the use of "acknowledged" lends an air of culpability to the annoucement. Then the accusing nature of the "shifting tone" phraseology makes it appear as if the administration is changing their story. Yet the truth is, they're having to reveal further details, some of which they really didn't want to reveal,

A senior White House official who mentioned the new stream of intelligence in an interview refused to say anything more about its source or content. The official said it had not been publicly disclosed out of concern that such a step could compromise intelligence and law enforcement operations in the United States and around the world. Officials would not describe those operations but said they were meant to disrupt a possible plot.

to combat the false notion that there was something political about the annoucement to begin with.And who first made that accusation? "Reporters" for the Times. Perhaps the first lady is even more right than she realized when she told Bill O'Reilly

"I think that a lot of times the media sensationalize or magnify things that aren't _that really shouldn't be," she said.

"I do think there's a big move away from actual reporting, trying to report facts," the first lady said. "It's in newspapers and everything you read — that a lot more is opinion."

When her interviewer suggested that journalists were out of sync with most of the country, she said with a laugh: "You just gave me a really great idea. Maybe it is the media that has us divided."

Divided indeed. The media gins up controversy and then milks it for all it's worth. Cases in point, Abu Ghraib. Joe Wilson. Huge stories when they were negative for the administration. No story at all when convictions begin rolling in and evidence of Sadaam's atrocities surface or when Wilson is proven to be a bald-faced liar.