By Patricia H. Kushlis
Why is it that former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan has been left to stand almost alone in defense of his memoir What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and the Culture of Washington Deception?
Pundits - especially on the right - are swarming to assure us that McClellan's memoir contains nothing new, that it's poorly written, and/or to remind us that McClellan’s just part of the Bush Texas loyalists – the home-town-gang-who-couldn’t-shoot–straight - who were out of their element once they hit the big time on the Potomac. Besides, these same political savvants tell us, McClellan was a terrible press secretary who did untold harm to Georgie Boy over the course of three years before being fired. Almost as if Georgie Boy's own delusional policy decisions and bad judgment were irrelevant.
Then there are others who criticize McClellan for jumping the gun and playing kiss-and-tell before the end of the Bush administration rather than waiting until the day after W leaves the White House to reveal all.
Come to think of it, why did no major publisher touch McClellan’s manuscript?
Their loss, as it turns out, this story that-won’t-go-away was at the top of Amazon's charts last week. Yet, McClellan must have pitched his book to the big commercial houses before settling on Public Affairs.
If so and the majors turned him down could it have been because the US media still refuses to own up to its role in scamming the American public in the lead-up to the Iraq invasion? Or are those in the commercial book publishing business just too close to the Republicans to want to see McClellan’s damaging memoirs in circulation before the November elections? Or was it simply a bad economic decision - one that backfired?
Or could the publishers been fed a Bush administration line that there was nothing in the book that wasn’t already in the public record– so why waste time, money and paper in printing something soon destined for the shredders? But isn't it in McClellan's case the source itself, as The Economist points out, that's most important here?
Strange too because an argument used vis-à-vis the elephantine redactions of text from Valerie Plame’s book Fair Game was that it was the whole that made her memoirs dangerous –not the individual bits of information they contained.
One of the most scathing insider accounts of the complicit media of which McClellan wrote comes from investigative reporter Jeff Cohen who worked as a senior producer of Phil Donahue’s MSNBC prime time show that MSNBC cancelled just three weeks before the Iraq invasion even though, Cohen tells us, it was the network’s most popular program at the time. Cohen, founder of the FAIR, the media organization devoted to fairness and accuracy in reporting, now teaches journalism at Ithaca College. Here are just a few of his observations:
“Trust me: too much skepticism over war claims was a punishable offense. I and all other Donahue producers were repeatedly ordered by top management to book panels that favored the pro-invasion side.
I watched a fellow producer get chewed out for booking a 50-50 show.
At MSNBC, I heard Scott Ritter smeared – on air and off – as a paid mouthpiece of Saddam Hussein. After we had war skeptic and former US Attorney Ramsey Clark on the show, we learned he was on some sort of network blacklist.”
Why is it that Cohen’s far lengthier article – from which this snippet came - appeared only in Robert Parry’s Consortium News, not front and center Op Ed in The New York Times or The Washington Post?
Instead, The New York Times devotes precious paper and ink to vapid stories like a recent one about the gaggle of Texas women who went to see “Sex and the City,” or worse, Edward Luttwack’s factually wrong, badly sourced anti-Obama diatribe which thankfully Clark Hoyt, Times Public Editor, called a mistake. Op Ed Editor David Shipley’s rejoinder to Hoyt (which Hoyt also published in his column) makes lie to the venerable newspaper's claims to objectivity and fact checking. Or maybe those characteristics are just restricted to the news pages – and Op Ed can indulge in any sort of off-the-wall fantasy that tickles its editors’ fancy?
But wait
Did anyone interview veteran AP correspondent Helen Thomas about McClellan's memoirs? She after all wrote about the same problem McClellan describes and was herself a victim. She had been ostracized by the White House Press Office – including McClellan – as she described in her 2006 book Watchdogs of Democracy (pp. 150-151). For refusing to be led around by the nose at the time by the press spokesman, Thomas was intentionally ignored when she raised her hand to ask a question. Yet the White House Press Office had time to respond to soft ball questions from the notorious Jeff Gannon who didn’t have press credentials and got in to the briefings on a wink and a nod.
The disappeared Karen Hughes
And whatever happened to Karen Hughes and the White House Iraq Group (WHIG) that created and implemented the media strategy that McClellan now attests led the country down the fatally flawed Iraq warpath. Our once-upon-a-time Public Diplomacy Czarina seems to have disappeared down some large rabbit hole in the Lone Star State and the much touted WHIG’s history shrouded in obscurity. After Hughes left the State Department last year, she wrote one column for Time Magazine. Otherwise, as far as I can tell, she hasn’t been heard of since. And the WHIG – does anyone remember them any more?
Silence is not golden
Was Hughes per chance involved in vetting McClellan’s manuscript pre-publication? Why wasn’t McClellan’s manuscript accorded the same vindictive treatment as Valerie Plame’s? Somebody in the White House, or close to the White House, must have given their silent blessing to much of what McClellan wrote – even though there were – we’re told – certain mysterious redactions that could be important in the Plame-Libby-Rove-Cheney affair.
McClellan was, after all, a Hughes protégé. She first hired him to work on Bush’s Texas gubernatorial campaign. If I remember correctly, the shadowy WHIG for which she became media guru during the run-up to the Iraq War based its sell-the-war campaign on W’s winning Texas election strategy. Indoctrinating the American media with war fever – and ostracizing those who opposed it – formed a core of the effort.
And what about others - including and especially - Republican moderates who were forced out in the 2006 elections wake? Why are they so quiet now? And why is the mainstream media still so silent?