All Blog Posts from Public Eye

It’s been two weeks now since General Petraeus offered his assessment of the success of the “surge” in Iraq. And have we been discussing his testimony? Ehhhhh, not so much. Well, maybe a little, but with nowhere near the volume or depth that we’ve discussed that MoveOn ad. In this writer’s eyes, the story/debate/controversy hit its pinnacle when President Bush assailed
assailed the ad in his Thursday press conference, conflating the ad’s message with insulting America’s soldiers on the ground in Iraq, saying “"I felt like the ad was an attack, not only on Gen. Petraeus, but on the U.S. military.”

And yesterday the New York Times Public Editor Clark Hoyt came out with a stinging rebuke of the Times accepting the MoveOn ad – as well as the discounted rate the interest group received:

For nearly two weeks, The New York Times has been defending a political advertisement that critics say was an unfair shot at the American commander in Iraq.

But I think the ad violated The Times’s own written standards, and the paper now says that the advertiser got a price break it was not entitled to…
By the end of last week the ad appeared to have backfired on both MoveOn.org and fellow opponents of the war in Iraq — and on The Times. It gave the Bush administration and its allies an opportunity to change the subject from questions about an unpopular war to defense of a respected general with nine rows of ribbons on his chest, including a Bronze Star with a V for valor. And it gave fresh ammunition to a cottage industry that loves to bash The Times as a bastion of the “liberal media.”

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You remember those Bugs Bunny cartoons where he'd stick a cork or something in Elmer Fudd's rifle and it would backfire into Fudd's face? We've seen the political version of that in Washington, DC this week.

In the three days since they originally took out a full-page ad in the New York Times deriding General David "Betray Us?" Petraeus, MoveOn.org is still the big media story of the week, nearly eclipsing the General's testimony. (Simply while writing this post, it's been covered on two of the three cable nets.)

It's a textbook case of media blowback, with the ad having given supporters of the "surge" a certain amount of rhetorical cover, or at least an opportunity to shift the focus of the discussion from the streets of Baghdad to the well-known activist group and bugaboo of the right.

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Grassroots movements ain’t what they used to be. In the old days, an issue or cause would cause a spark somewhere in the country and it would spread from person to person, community to community, until the heat became too hot for the politicians or media to ignore. At least that was the idea.



These days, it’s more like astroturf with the pyramid reversed. The fires are started at the top and flow down, only to be sent back as some sort of organic expression of outrage. One really good example of this hit our inboxes today. You may remember the flap kicked up over the “60 Minutes” interview with former FBI Director Louis Freeh last weekend. Well, someone thinks there are issues that remain unsettled.

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