Glenn Greenwald: Journalists, McCain and the Iran/al-Qaida link

[babylonsister]

Journalists, McCain and the Iran/al-Qaida link


Isn't it self-evident that this is a very serious problem for political journalism -- from Chuck Todd yesterday on Meet the Press (C&L has the video of this exchange here):

MR. RUSSERT: McCain had some problems when he was in Jordan, he talked about al-Qaeda being trained by the Iranians.

MR. TODD: Mm-hmm.

MR. RUSSERT: And then, then Lindsey Graham, who he was with, and then Joe Lieberman both tried to say to him, al-Qaeda is Sunni, not trained by the Shiite Iranian government. Does that kind of stumble hurt a McCain candidacy?

MR. TODD: . . . You know, he's -- because of the age issue, he can't ever look like he's having a senior moment. So instead, he's better off going ahead and saying, you know, OK, so he misspoke. Even if he gets dinged on the experience stuff, "Oh, he says he's Mr. Experience. Doesn't he know the difference between this stuff?" He's got enough of that in the bank, at least with the media, that he can get away with it. I mean, the irony to this is had either Senator Clinton or Senator Obama misspoke like that, it'd have been on a running loop, and it would become a, a big problem for a couple of days for them.

That exchange came only after several minutes of discussions of Jeremiah Wright (complete with the 1,000th showing of the same video snippet of his 9/11 sermon), followed by a debate over whether Bill Clinton questioned Barack Obama's patriotism and whether that makes Bill Clinton like Joseph McCarthy, followed by an analysis of whether Hillary lied about her plane's landing in Bosnia -- and only then did they get to the matter of McCain falsely (and repeatedly) claiming a link between Iran and Al Qaeda. And even then, the McCain topic was confined to this one exchange with Todd -- tacked on at virtually at the end of the show.

But Todd's admission that journalists protect McCain because they're convinced he's a true expert in national security is nonetheless extraordinary because it is clearly what journalists -- by their own admission -- are doing. It echoes exactly what The Washington Post's Ruth Marcus said last week:

I thought that was an odd comment from Sen. McCain, and I do think that it would have gotten a lot more attention were it not coming from someone who is generally judged to have a lot of foreign policy expertise . . . . Probably won't break through the chatter, and I agree, would be a bigger deal if the speaker had been different.

And numerous other journalists last week acknowledged much the same thing, dismissing the importance of the story on the ground that this is John McCain we're talking about, so it just can't be that he was ignorant about the Middle East or being deceitful, no matter how clearly the facts proved that he was. Many of them, like both Russert and Todd here, went out of their way to describe falsely what McCain did, to make it seem as though it was a one-time "stumble" (Russert) or just McCain "misspeaking" (Todd -- though to Todd's credit, he pointed out that McCain had been using this false claim repeatedly as a "talking point").

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http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/

[Supersedeas]

1. the GoP Cable Media has a thing about Iraq -- they are accomplices, so McBush makes sense to them