Howling at the Plame case

I've been a big fan of Bob "the Daily Howler" Somerby, and I've referred to him often.  He practices "close reading" of the print news and "close listening" on TV news.  His contrarian style and his analytical skills make him provocative and insightful.  He's can also be very entertaining.  He's a comedian in his day job.

During the last year or so, Somerby has been focusing much more on liberal bloggers and journalists.  (He hasn't dinged Old Hickory's Weblog so far!) 

And what he has had to say in that context is often on point.  He has focused on how liberal bloggers and journalists are often reluctant to criticize the conduct of the press corps itself.  His items on Ariana Huffington, in particular, have made me read her columns much more critically.  And one of his favorite themes is the way the mainstream press was and is relentlessly hostile to Al Gore.  He argues, rightly, that many liberal writers fail to mention that by-no-means-trivial problem.

But I've mentioned before that it seems to me that he's not as sure-footed in dealing with blogging as with mainstream journalism.  After all, political blogging does have a different kind of focus.  It's often partisan and/or ideological.  Bloggers indulge more freely in speculation about alternate possibilities than would be appropriate in a news article.

A big benefit of blogging is that it moves the analysis of news events forward much more quickly.  For one thing, it speeds the circulation of information as bloggers link to a variety of information sources from all over the world.  And it allows blog writers to connect various strands of information to enhance understanding of events.

It should go without saying, of course, that some bloggers are much better at these things than others.

But the Plame outing case seems to have stuck in Somerby's throat like a fish bone.  He makes some good points about the news coverage with his close reading.  Bush's 2003 State of the Union message talked about a British report that Iraq had sought uranium in Africa.  Joe Wilson's now-legendary visit to Niger, investigating a particular report about alleged Iraqi uranium seeking, found that it was highly unlikely that such a transaction had taken placewith Niger.

Using "close reading" on this, Wilson's findings didn't refute literally what Bush said in the 2003 SOTU speech.  Bush said there had been a report from Britain about Iraqi attempts to get uranium from Africa.  He didn't literally claim that Iraq had purchased uranium from Niger.  In fact, he didn't even mention Niger.

Somerby caught several journalists carelessly referring to how Bush had referred to "uranium from Niger" in that speech.  And it's one more example where, even on something important, the mainstream press can be very sloppy.

But he seems to be stuck on this hair-splitting point, that Wilson's report didn't literally contradict the exact words in Bush's SOTU.  And because of that, he seems to regard the whole Plame controversy as a sort of tempest in a teapot.

Which may just prove that there is a distinct difference between "close reading" of news reports and making reasonable inferences from them.

Even before Bush's 2003 SOTU, there were reports floating around about uranium from Niger.  We know now that a reference to the uranium from Africa had been taken out of the text of a Bush speech in late 2002 because of the thinness of the evidence.  We know that the reference in the SOTU to the British report was intended to distance Bush and the US in a small way from information they knew was shaky.  Somerby seems to have fallen for that trick - hook, line and sinker.

We also know - and we will soon hear many more details on this - that Dark Lord Cheney and Karl Rove, among others, took Wilson's criticism of the SOTU as very threatening.  And the administration even admitted, after Wilson's famous op-ed was published, that the sentence about uranium from Africa should never have been in the SOTU.

The White House's reaction to Wilson's public dissent has led to Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation, whose effects are already unfolding.

I must admit to being baffled by Somerby's reaction.  He has explained that he considers not just the "uranium from Niger" mis-quote but the press' general attitude toward Wilson as being examples of press carelessness and tendency to settle on conventional "scripts," which then get in the way of critical reporting.  Somerby has cited other instances in which Wilson's statements about the case deserved closer scrutiny than the press seemed inclined to give them.

But there's also such a thing as missing the forest for the trees.  Bush's 2003 SOTU was dishonest and made a case for a preventive warof choice based on claims about WMDs that were false.  The claims of Saddam's nuclear program were the most alarming to Congress and the public, and by any normal sense of the word, the reference to uranium in Africa was deceptive, outrageously so.

Wilson's op-ed shot a hole in that claim, even though it didn't precisely refute the exact wording of Bush's speech.  And the outing of Valerie Plame has set off a series of events that has already given the public a more accurate view of the gigantic scam the administration used to justify the Iraq War.

Somerby on this issue seems to have fallen into something that's not much different from conservative comma-dancing.  And it's a shame.  Because Judy Miller's role in the WMD scam and the Plame case has jolted even some reluctant liberals into taking a hard look at the dysfunctional nature of the country's leading newspaper.  But Somerby doesn't seem to be as happy as one might expect that his years-long effort to encourage more serious critical thinking about the leading lights of the mainstream media has just gotten a big boost from events.

It looks almost like a case of not being able to take "yes" for an answer.

His most recent post on this is from today's (10/18/05) Howler.

He does make one of his better points about the Plame case in this one: why hasn't the press shown more interest in the question of just how much actual damage was done to the operations with which Plame was associated by her exposure?

The nature of such things makes them especially hard for the press to investigate.  But shouldn't there be a little more obvious curiosity on the point?  Even if asking the question may momentarily play into the Republican partisan meme of "we don't really know if any actual harm was done"?  Somerby observes, "As always with our mainstream press, the most obvious questions of all never quite come into range."