Comments on: Yeow! Knoller Feels Readers' Wrath

[sanfelz]

Hats off to Knoller for his willingness to participate in a dialogue of sorts in this forum. But I think the whole point was not the questions asked at a press conference but the lack of follow-up independent investigations by the media of the claims made by the Bush administration.
Russert's responses were as simple minded as that chalkboard he brandishes.

[kevin-lyda]

Your White House reporter says at one point: "We%u2019re an irascible and unlikable bunch. I%u2019m one of us and I don%u2019t like us very much."

This is a symptom of a problem. We don't care if you're likable. Your job is to inform us. You're supposed to be journalists, not celebrities.

You get angry letters and take from that that you're "unlikable" - that's not the point. We don't respect you. That *is* the point.

What you should be aiming for is respect.

You have a job to do. If you do it well your professionalism will be respected. If you don't do it you'll lose our respect and you'll harm our country.

Jon Stewart wasn't just talking to Tucker Carlson that day. When will the people who call themselves journalists figure that out?

I will also say, those you are hearing from here are also those that have six *years* of frustration.

For six *years* I have had people explain to me that I was a paranoid left-wing idiot, because I could come up with strong evidence that the administration was lying, but only if I looked at the foreign press (And evidently, had I been looking, Knight-Ridder. Kudos to the people that got it right.)

I'm not smart enough to prove it myself, but the foreign press gave references, showed the UN reports where it proved they were making it up as they went along. I knew there were no connections between 9/11 and Saddam early on, but it didn't cross the ocean to the United States until it was far too late.

Peace Marches were underreported, people being arrested and tortured were ignored, and the administration continued on to further and further abuses because the American 'Free' Press NEVER CALLED THEM ON IT.

So yeah, we're pissed.

We're the lucky ones. 600,000 Iraqis are dead.

Jonnan

[ncmphoto43]

Moyers is right. Yes, collectively, apart from Helen Thomas, the White House press corps - and most TV "talking head" journalists and pundits - have given the admin a free ride since the war began.
The Bush admin has stated what are outright lies over and over and I've yet to see any members of our mainstream press call them out on it, whether it's Cheney's dogged paranoia, which gets airtime and polite head nodding from the TV pundits even now, or for example Bush stating, as he's done at least twice, that the reason the US attacked Iraq was that *Saddam Hussein kicked out the UN weapons inspectors*.
I saw him state that the first time on a live CNN press conference with Kofi Annan after his return from an African tour. The video may still be on the official gov website. He stated it and Kofi was hard-put to keep his diplomatic straight face but did anyone in the press correct him or contest his statement? No, not then and not in the next day's papers, with a very polite exception in the Washington Post, buried on page whatsit, mentioning that the President might have misspoken. He said it again some months back and again, nobody contested it. If the press swallows outright lies that it knows are lies, how can we not believe that, for whatever reasons, they are in collusion with the administration?

[war_on_peas]

Where%u2019s your skepticism? How is it possible that a veteran reporter, backed by the resources of CBS News, managed to completely miss the biggest story of the new century: Bush's use of phony intelligence, fear-mongering and appeals to misplaced patriotism to gain consensus for the invasion and occupation of a sovereign nation that posed no threat whatsoever to the US and had no ties to Al Qaeda.

In sharp contrast, millions of non-journalists with web access, Google and a bit of time and curiosity pieced together the story rather easily. From the 1998 Project for a New American Century letter to Clinton on Iraq to Downing Street to reports of the UN weapons inspectors to debunking the aluminum tubes and %u201Cmobile WMD labs%u201D fairy tales to letting leases to pump (and take all the money from) Iraqi oil reserves -- all the way to the current saber rattling over Iran.

The PNAC letter (see: http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm) advocating regime change is signed by, among others, Abrams, Armitage, Bolton, Kristol, Perle, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Woolsey. This was rather disturbing to many people on the web, but you apparently didn%u2019t bother to peek behind the curtain or maybe felt it safer to continue parroting administration lies.

Aren%u2019t you getting sick of being scooped constantly by non-US media and millions of amateurs on the web while you and your fellow beat writers remain committed to the official con?

[jdunne4]

I have heard many times, various memebers of the washington press comment "why cover old ground" concerning the lead up to the war or outing a CIA agent, the downing street memo... etc etc.. etc..... Its not old news to the public. Its only old news to you insiders. What the public heard and was forced feed by you were confusing and contrictory postions.. Isn't there something called objective facts? While not everyting is black and white.. Many are... YOu do not server the public good be just giving 2 sides of a story. THere is something called the thruth.

On a scale of 1 - 10 (10 is good) you guys get a 3 for even investigative, tenatious, fact checkers and giving the public the real informations they need to make informative decisions.

Do you job, do some research vs going to press dinners. Why even bother going to the press briefing? They are simply BS talking points chatter.... Your time would be better spend doing real journalism..

I will make you a offer, I can go to the press breifning. I will set down my recorder and hit record... then I can play it back to you... Basically like what the press is doing to us now.....

Joe Dunne

[blonderdog]

Who cares what questions you asked?

What matters is what you printed when you reported the answers.

When you got answers full of lies, you should have printed the facts involved.

It's disingenuous to ask the public to come up with better questions. As you have pointed out, the questions were OK. The reportage of the answers is what's broken.

If you interview the President and ask him about his military service, and he replies that "he did his duty," you print his quote followed by the INDISPUTABLE FACT THAT HE WAS AWOL FOR A YEAR.

[jdunne4]

What would I ask?

This train of thoughtto me shows your lack of undersanding or tolerance for why the public holds you, the washington press corp, in contempt...

This is not about "what question" to ask... Its not about gatcha journalism. No matter what "question" you ask. The "answer" is going to be suberfuge and frankly LIEs...

Your job is/should be to filter out the subterfuge and give the facts. If they lie, say it.....

You do not need to just rush out and reguratate the latest talking points every hour. Take your time do a littel research if you need it and then tell us what is true or false. If the president says "Clinton did it too", you should clearly comment on the exact validity of this statement. not just get a "oposing view"

When Cheney speaks half truths and or lies... You should point this fact out vs repeat Cheneys position and assume the public will understand the facts...

[peterbaldwin-2009]

Knoller's contempt for the people is palpable. He is a spineless sycophant who, like the other press corps sheep, have blood on their hands.

All this whinging by progressive bloggers is of scant value though. Knoller will never admit he is but a goose stepping Bush Nazi and all the progressive response does is bring him closer to his Fuhrer.

Those of us who oppose these lap dogs, must look to how the neocons deal with dissidents. McCain doesn't like what Jon Stewart has been doing so he tells Stewart to his face that he wants to put an EID under his desk. Someone needs to "joke" about putting an EID under Knoller's desk. Suddenly the laughter wll stop.

[vastleft]

Please note that the two halves of my posts are appearing in reverse order.

[vastleft]

(continued from above)

On 2/5/03, the latter nude dude spoke at the UN, and the media got the story as wrong as a story has ever been gotten. See http://dayofshame.blogspot.com, which commemorates that unholy holiday.

With the war pending, I kept sending these questions to a Republican friend:

1. In your opinion, what good evidence did Bush or Powell provide that Saddam has WMD?

2. How can one justify a pre-emptive war absent strong evidence of either a clear and present threat or a violation of UN sanctions?

3. If evidence doesn't matter, why did we urge the UN to resume the inspection regimes?

4. What justified our trumping the UN's inspection efforts (which, again, were resumed at our urging), at a substantial cost to us in international good will?

5. Why are we optimistic that regime change will be effective, given the tragic history of blowback and no U.S. good deed going unpunished in the Middle East?

He never answered them, as he finessed the debate with imagery of mushroom-cloud gunsmoke. Outside of Charles Hanley, the Knight Ridder guys, and very few others, no one in the media asked such questions. Certainly no one in the White House Press Corps did.

In the years since, as far as I know, Helen Thomas is the only person who has asked the biggest elephant-in-the-room question in American history. If you'll pardon my French, or in the parlance of the day, my "Freedom": http://vastleft.blogspot.com/2006/11/wtfawii.html

[vastleft]

I was shocked by your response to Bill Moyers's "Buying the War," both in earnest and in the Claude Rains sense.

The toothlessness, nay obsequiousness, of the media in the run-up to the Iraq War affected me profoundly.

Years ago, I was a journalist. My heroes were those who reported unflinchingly on civil rights, Vietnam, and Watergate. To me, they were inspiring and sustaining examples of truth getting the best of power, the finest of American traditions.

That the MSM had grown Right-leaning and vapidly commercial since Reagan took office was obvious to anyone not drunk on Beltway-party cocktails. Still, few of us recognized how truly debased the Fourth Estate had become.

Simply put:

* The media's most important job is to help us understand how to participate in our democracy
* Because you didn't do your job, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and thousands of young Americans are dead. We're on track to waste $2 trillion (per a Harvard study) destabilizing the Middle East and making our country a pariah.

As Lynyrd Skynyrd once asked "Can't you smell that smell?" And as Laura Petrie once said, "If you don't care enough to know, I'm not going to tell you." Pick up a copy of Eric Boehlert's "Lapdogs." He'll tell you.

Like many Americans (remember those massive protests the MSM barely covered?), I could smell the Iraq War as a phony a mile away. I kept waiting for the media to drop a dime on the naked emperor and naked Secretary of State. It didn't happen.

(continued below)

[p_lukasiak]

We all know that the President is not going to give you answers to tough questions, regardless of how they are phrased.

This REAL issue is how/what you REPORT -- what gets written in the paper, and what you say to the audience when reporting on the White House.
And its not about one press conference. Its the failure to REPORT THE FACT in the run up to the Iraq war that

1) Every claim regarding WMDs made by the Bushco that could be has turned out to be false.

2) Any attempt to tie Iraq to al Qaeda or 9/11 is without any subtantial factual basis.

3) The administration has consistently exaggerated the data in the public record such as the 1998 final report of the UN inspectors.

Your job is not merely to ask "tough questions" or repeat what the President said, but to tell us whether what he says is true. Its that simple.

Did you read the 1998 UNSCOM report? Were you reading the foreign press coverage of WMD issues? Did you read the reports filed by El Baradei or Blix? Or did you simply rely on "beltway wisdom" which allowed you to ignore a fact that was obvious to millions of people around the world by March 6 -- that BUSH WAS LYING!

did it ever occur to you that the million people who gathered in Hyde Park on 2/13/2003, might know something you didn't because THE BRITISH PRESS WAS TELLING THE TRUTH ABOUT THE CASE FOR WAR? Or were these people just "dirty f**king hippies" to you?

[thy1138]

The US National Archives, now a un-federalized organization, published a journal article about the history of "White House Press Secretary". In the article, it asserts, George B. Cortelyou, former NYC steno teacher, Chairman of the Republican Party, who held three Cabinet posts under presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt (remember him? They made him VP so we wouldn't have to hear from him its alleged) was first to "invite" the press into the White House, most except a few perhaps before relegated to outside the fence at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. He updated the press on the condition of McKinley who, shot by an anarchist in Buffalo, NY, lived on for 8 days, and had been expected to recover.

The article, for whatever reasons, left out the then recent White House Press Secretary, Dee Dee Myers, who left that position to get married, after three years, the first and only woman to now to hold it. The others, back to George B. Cortelyou (as Secretary of the Treasury said to avert an economic depression, though bread went from a nickel to a dime, and later Postmaster General under President Theodore Roosevelt) were included in the article.

The history of the "corps" has been to dutifully report what they are told. I find that since "only Congress will have the power to declare war" in the US Constitution, therein lies the plot to bring us to war and the press just part of the solution.

[lizinga]

I could probably forgive Knoller's rationalization (pitifully lame excuse) for his and his fellow stenographers' incompetence (sorry-a$$ laziness) except for one thing: he and the rest of the so-called journalists did all they could to ridicule, mock, and heap scorn on those of us who opposed the war. We were un-American; we were un-patriotic; we were weak. Because of their callow 4th-grade crush on Bush, thousands have died and our democracy is now on life support. I thumb my nose at these propagandists for the Bush administration. 14th Street hookers have more professionalism, more integrity, more honesty. Like Esau, they have sold our democratic heritage for a bowl of grits.

[sncreducer]

What a ridiculous, childish response.

"You think YOU can do better?"

No, we think YOU, as trained journalists operating in the highest circle of power in the country, SHOULD have done better.

You and the rest of the WHPC may not have been "willing" dupes or accomplices, but you were dupes and accomplices nonetheless. The evidence that the case for war was a lie was out there - it's just that you, and most of your colleagues, failed to follow the most basic credo in the SPJ code of ethics:

"Seek truth and report it."

How is it that Knight-Ridder could have found that so much of the evidence against Iraq was so wrong, and yet CBS and almost every other major news outlet couldn't find and report the same evidence?

If you're going to claim that you did report those contradictions, why weren't you shouting it from the rooftops at every opportunity? Factual claims are either true or they're not, Mark - and if the POTUS is using a faulty argument to take the nation to war, members of the Fourth Estate have a DUTY to do everything in their power to make sure that the public is aware.

I have no doubt that it hurts you deeply to be dressed down publicly for having failed at your job so miserably. But at the end of the day, you, and the rest of the Washington press corps, have no one to blame but yourselves. Stop with the childish counterattacks on Moyers - and on the American people, who are finally starting to realize that they just can't trust you with matters of life and death anymore.

[memekiller]

From Alterman's article in Oct. 2002 ( http://www.thenation.com/doc/20021007/alterman
):

Why did the Bush national security team ignore the Al Qaeda briefing it received from President Clinton's National Security Adviser, Sandy Berger, in the fall of 2000?

Why did the President ignore the August 2001 intelligence briefing warning him of the likelihood of an Al Qaeda hijacking?

How did Bush decide on war with Iraq without consulting the uniformed military, the intelligence agencies, the UN, NATO, the Republican national security establishment--including both of his dad's secretaries of state and his National Security Adviser--the Republican Party in Congress, the Democratic majority or just about anyone who did not already want to go to war with Iraq?

Why was it OK for Iraq to use nerve gas when we were helping it fight the Iranians during the Reagan Administration? Wasn't Richard Perle in the Defense Department back then? Didn't Reagan send Rumsfeld over there to suck up to the guy? Well, what did they know and when did they know it?

Got any real evidence about those nukes Saddam is building? Got any real evidence regarding his CBW and WMD delivery capabilities? Why is he not deterrable again?

About this pre-emptive war stuff, who gets to go next? China against Taiwan? India against Pakistan? Or is it just a white guy thing?

What happens with Iran if Iraq collapses?

[dawnisis]

Please allow me to summarize all of the other posts:

We don't need you anymore.

You are a bunch of glorified stenographers.

On behalf of the American people you are fired!

The "main stream media" is over. You have ruined it and the American people will NEVER trust you again! Thank God for the internet. Throw your tv's away America and burn your newspapers! A new day dawns.

[yote78]

It seems, to me at least, to be a rather juvenile response to say, in effect, "You ask the questions if you think you can do any better. Neah, neah, neah."

Hey, buddy. That's why you went to JOURNALISM school. You and your fellow White House press corps JOURNALISTS are the ones who are supposed to be asking the deep, probing and uncomfortable questions on our behalf. I (and I'm sure many others) will be happy to come up with the questions if you and your colleagues promise to ask them. But why should we? It's what you've been trained to do, not us. So why aren't you doing it as often and as well as you should? You can't expect to be thought of as anything other than cheerleaders and flacks if you're not willing to stick your neck out for us once in a while.

[vinnyfromin]

One thing is clear, being a White House reporter during the reign of King George the Lesser was a piece of cake. Show up, watch the show, write down the highlights, get paid.

You and many of your bretheren have failed America miserably and repeatedly during Bush's reign. I think all Americans should watch the video clip of the White House Correspondents Dinner when a video of Bush was shown depicting him searching around his office for WMD's. The assembled crowd of "journalists" howled and applauded the President's antics. This was after the war had begun and thousands of Iraqis and hundreds of Ameicans had died because the President insisted the threat from such weapons required nothing short of invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Were you laughing as well Mr. Knoller?