All Blog Posts from Public Eye

Upon arriving at the office today, this writer came upon a blog post about “CBS Sunday Morning” correspondent Rita Braver’s conversation with Lynne Cheney. The post began:

CBS News correspondent Rita Braver's brown-nose interview with Lynne Cheney on Sunday was reason number 1,342 why I am cynical toward and very distrustful of the mainstream corporate media.

The author of the post, Micheal Petrelis, took issue with two main points:

The lighter tone of the interview.

The fact that Rita Braver’s husband is the lawyer who represents Lynne Cheney with publishers. It's important to note that Braver disclosed this herself during the interview.

I began a conversation with Braver about this issue early today, before finding out the conversation had widened to a couple of letters on Jim Romenesko’s MediaNews – the go-to site for a daily climate check of MediaLand. (It’s so “go-to,” we direct you to go to it in the list to the right ----->.)

There I found a letter from David Fluhrer, a self-described "public relations consultant with a healthy respect for journalism," raising the same points as Petrelis -- where he called the interview "fawning." And another from Lee Rood at the Des Moines Register.

In order to get a sense of the decision-making process, I got in touch with Rand Morrison, the Executive Producer of “CBS Sunday Morning” and shared with him the concerns out there in the blogosphere.

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At the Politico recently, Mike Allen looked at the origins of the phrase "senior administration official," the now commonly used title for anonymously quoted, well, senior administration officials who give background briefings to reporters. The rules during those briefings are that reporters cannot identify the official who is answering questions by anything other than the relatively generic title.

Of course, sometimes it's quite simple – in fact, unavoidable -- for reporters to reveal the official without breaking the rules. Yesterday featured a particularly egregious example of this, and two blogs that pay very close attention to the goings-on in Washington politics took note of it.

"See if you can out this anonymous source, from an official White House press office transcript titled 'INTERVIEW OF A SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL, BY THE TRAVELING PRESS, Aboard Air Force Two, En Route Muscat, Oman,'" asks the Wall Street Journal's Washington Wire:

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: “Let me just make one editorial comment here. I’ve seen some press reporting says, ‘Cheney went in to beat up on them, threaten them.’ That’s not the way I work. I don’t know who writes that, or maybe somebody gets it from some source who doesn’t know what I’m doing, or isn’t involved in it. But the idea that I’d go in and threaten someone is an invalid misreading of the way I do business.

“I would describe my sessions both in Pakistan and Afghanistan as very productive. We’ve had notable successes in both places. I’ve often said before and I believe it’s still true that we’ve captured and killed more al Qaeda in Pakistan than anyplace else. And I think we’re making progress in Afghanistan.”

"Sometimes it’s difficult to figure out who the 'Senior Administration Official' is when the Bush administration says that’s the only way a senior administration official can be identified in print," writes the Atlanta Journal Constitution's Window On Washington. "Sometimes it’s not so difficult."

Ratings Up For Bush: Well, President Bush's numbers are up somewhere. The AP reports that viewership for the speech was up by 9 percent since last year. Who else saw a bump? "American Idol," whose numbers were up by 8 percent. The Bush speech – running on nine different networks – drew more viewers (about 45.5 million) than "Idol," which, on a single network, clocked in at about 32.6 million. As for Fox's airing of the Bush speech, 8.4 million people tuned in. But NBC won the day with 9.3 million viewers according to Nielsen research.

Rumble In The Situation Room: Another big public appearance from the Bush administration is eating up headlines: Vice President Dick Cheney's appearance on CNN's "The Situation Room." The interview was "turned increasingly contentious as it wore on," writes the Post in a front pager. (Wonkette's description: "In Which Dick Cheney Nearly Kills Wolf Blitzer With His Bare Hands.") Either way, check out the interview. Here's a media related snippet:

Wolf Blitzer: His number two, Ayman al Zawahiri is –

Vice President Dick Cheney: Zawahiri is much, much more visible. Yes.

Blitzer: I mean, he’s on television almost as much as I am.

Cheney: Well, I don’t know if anybody is on as much as you are, Wolf …

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Teflon AppleWhile Apple continues its reign as technological media darling, BusinessWeek's Arik Hesseldahl wonders why no one is paying too much attention to the elephant in the room: "recent revelations about the company's backdating of options and Chief Executive Steve Jobs' involvement in the matter." Apple has said that no current managers have been implicated and that it is conducting its own investigation along with the federal one. By the time the iPhone arrived, "concerns over the long-term impact of the options mess had already begun to abate," writes Hesseldahl, who notes that huge profits at Apple probably have something to do with the press and public's relative disinterest.

Last Weekend In Review: Another day, another assessment of Scott Pelley's interview with President Bush. Today's comes from Al Neuharth in USA Today , and this time, it isn't critical. Well, at least not of "60 Minutes." While Pelley "threw hardballs about Iraq" and Bush, writes Neuharth, Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace "tossed mostly softballs at Vice President Dick Cheney," who appeared on the program the same day the Bush interview aired.

How Do You Like That Pulitzer, Now?: Howard Kurtz reminds readers this morning that way back when the New York Times broke the story on the NSA's warrantless eavesdropping program, Vice President Dick Cheney said it was "doubly disturbing" that the paper got a Pulitzer for the scoop. "Now, not so much," writes Kurtz...

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A compendium of the week's finest quotations, from the nation's newspapers and beyond.

"The news media will find the story line irresistible, and Democrats around the country are eagerly anticipating the competition."
--The Washington Post, regarding the impending possibility of Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton as Democratic frontrunners in 2008.

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"A retired math teacher who moved here from North Carolina said he had no basis for judging the credibility of White House officials, including Cheney -- although he admitted that he was 'not sure I would like to go bird hunting with him, either.'"
--The Washington Post, describing one potential juror for the Libby trial.

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"The Chinese are telling the Pentagon that they don't own space. We can play this game, too, and we can play it dirtier than you."
--Security expert Michael Krepon, on the Chinese government's reason for testing an anti-satellite missile.

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Conservative media critics have their knickers in a bunch over this latest trend among prime-time television critics: labeling Fox's "24" as a conservative show. Or, more specifically, that "[d]epending on your perspective, '24' is either a neocon sex fantasy or the collective id of our nation unleashed," as Newsweek put it recently.

In a review of the season's opener, critic Devin Gordon writes that as President Bush "is squeezing our civil liberties to fight a war on terror, the writers of '24' have come up with a story that asks whether something could ever happen here in America that makes civil liberties a luxury we can no longer afford."

Time's James Poniewozik posed this question to readers this week: "Is 24 just a TV show or right-wing propaganda? Or, to turn Jack Bauer's frequent refrain on him: Who are you working for?" After all, John McCain has done a cameo and Vice President Dick Cheney "is a big fan" of the show. And the show's stars were recently honored with an appearance by Rush Limbaugh and "softball questions" from an audience at the conservative Heritage Foundation.

Eugene Kane of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, who cites the Heritage Foundation event as well, writes that Cheney and Limbaugh's affinity for the show "suggests there may be something more than just television going on here."

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The folks over at Editor & Publisher are puzzled about the Washington Post’s coverage of opening day in Washington:

The veteran Associated Press reporter Terence Hunt heard them. Reuters heard them. In fact, virtually every press account of opening day for the Washington Nationals baseball team at RFK Stadium this afternoon mentioned that when Vice President Dick Cheney was introduced to throw out the first pitch he was loudly booed or at the minimum received more jeers than cheers. A video of the event proves it.

But here's how David Nakumura of the hometown Washington Post described it:

"The first pitch of the Washington Nationals' second season at Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium was low and away, bouncing in the dirt before being scooped up by catcher Brian Schneider.

"For that, Vice President Cheney received a round of boos from the home crowd this afternoon. But the catcalls didn't last long before the fans cheered for the Nationals, who took the field in their white uniforms with red trim against the New York Mets."

No one else suggested that it was the quality of the pitch that set off the booing.

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Yesterday, the Hotline's Marc Ambinder wrote a blog post suggesting that, in the wake of Vice President Cheney's hunting accident, "major television networks and some print entities are trying to figure out a way to follow the Vice President during his weekend sojourns."

The post did not say that any media outlet had decided to change its strategy for covering Cheney, whose schedule, unlike that of the president, is often kept private, making it difficult for the press to keep tabs on him. But the headline claims that media outlets will "ramp up efforts to track Cheney," and the piece says that among the ideas being discussed by the networks is to establish "an informal pool to stake out the Naval Observatory and to exchange, on a limited basis, editorial information to facilitate that pool."

I spoke to Janet Leissner, the CBS News vice president and Washington bureau chief, about whether CBS News and the rest of the media was considering covering Cheney differently. Leissner, who presently chairs the network pool, told me that there is no serious discussion taking place about forming a pool to stake out the Naval Observatory. She also said that she doesn't believe that the vice president will be covered differently in the future than he was prior to the hunting accident.

"This isn't a question of resources, this is a question of access," she says. "When we have access to public figures, we send reporters and producers and camera crews to cover them. But the vice president was on private property. It doesn't make sense to stand five miles down the road from a ranch where the vice president might be quail hunting with all the resources in the world if you can't get in there."

Both Leissner and Ambinder, who I also spoke to for this post, say it would be impractical to stake out the Naval Observatory for multiple reasons, among them the facility's multiple entrances and the fact that the vice president is often not there. But Ambinder says that there are serious discussions taking place within media organizations about how better to cover Cheney, and maintains that staking out the Naval Observatory is under discussion, at least at some outlets.

Ambinder, who notes that Leissner is "a very well respected news manager," also says he finds it "a little bit depressing" that she believes that Cheney cannot be covered more effectively. "If she says it can't be done, then it probably can't be done. But the vice president is the second most powerful person in the world, and that to me at least warrants the old college try to do more," he says. "This incident does seem to call for a more aggressive approach to reporting on the vice president's activities, particularly as they relate to out of state travel."

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We’ve seen that there are a host of restrictions on how much networks other than NBC – which owns the rights to the coverage – can broadcast of the Olympic Games. There’s also a reason why on the evening news broadcasts on Wednesday night, you only caught a few clips of Brit Hume’s interview with Vice President Dick Cheney. To see the entire interview, you’d have to be watching Fox News. Of course, the same standard was true of Bob Schieffer’s interview with President Bush a few weeks back – if you wanted to see the whole thing, you had to watch it on CBS. These programs are considered the property of their respective networks, so they’re subject to copyright laws.

When it comes to news material (among other things), however, something called “fair use” applies. I’m not going to get too deep into the weeds because, well, I’m not a lawyer and you’d likely fall asleep at your keyboard. (For those interested, there’s a good overview here.) Instead, I’ll offer just a bit of insight about how and why these interviews appear as they do.

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How do you solve a problem like trying to prove a negative? While it used to be that rumors, innuendo and speculative detective work on news events would sort of roll around the backyard fence or water cooler, grow and morph until it all resembled a kind of conspiracy theory or urban legend – tales largely considered untrue yet still containing some shred of believability. A couple of the lasting examples are the assassination of President Kennedy and the fabled UFO landing in Roswell, New Mexico. Who among us hasn’t from time to time wondered about the real truth behind those stories?

In 2006, of course, these stories can pop up in a matter of hours and spread from one end of the Internet to the other almost instantaneously. Speculation surrounding the shooting of a fellow hunter by Vice President Cheney has illustrated this point rather dramatically. The assertion has been raised about whether or not Cheney had been under the influence of alcohol at the time of the shooting, whether that is why it took so long for the story to be told to the media or why Cheney did not meet with local authorities until the next morning.

Well, mystery solved – sort of. Appearing on the Fox News Channel this afternoon, anchor Brit Hume talked about his just-taped interview with Cheney, the first he’s given since the shooting. Here’s how Hume characterized that issue:

He said he’d had a beer at lunch and that had been many hours earlier. It was dusk, around 5:00 p.m., when this incident happened, and he said that they had lunch out in the field, a barbecue, he had a beer. But he said you don't hunt with people who were drinking, he said no one was drinking. He said they went back to the ranch afterward, took a break after that and went back out about 3:00 and so you're four or five hours distanced from the last alcohol that he consumed and he said nobody was drinking, not he, not anybody else.

Well, that clears that up. Or does it? Do you really believe everyone will just say, one beer? Okay, nothing to see here, move along. That is certainly unlikely to happen, especially given the fact that many outlets have printed statement from Katharine Armstrong, owner of the ranch where the shooting occurred, denying any alcohol use at all.

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