John Aravosis goes into Daily Howler mode today at his AMERICAblog and rips into the Washington Post for its GOP-leaning sloppiness (Washington Post. Sloppy Journalism. Stop it. Now. 03/15/06):
That's why liberal blogs are constantly berating the traditional media. Because the traditional media is made up of a growing number of increasingly sloppy children. And their sloppiness is now jeopardizing our democracy. It's gotten us into a war that's a disaster, and it's helped re-elect a president who isn't capable of managing our country. All because the traditional media let themselves be emasculated and lobotomized rather than simply doing their job.
To wit, this lead sentence from tomorrow's front-page Washington Post story on Senator Feingold's censure resolution:
"For months the Democrats have resisted calls from their liberal base to more aggressively challenge President Bush."
Calls from their "liberal base?" Really? Where did you get that from? Seriously. I want facts. How did the Washington Post determine that it was the "liberal base" of the Democratic party that has been the driving force calling for Dems to challenge President Bush?
Actual real-life surveys show that most Democrats, and most Independents, have had it with Bush. Not just liberal Democrats, but all Democrats, and even most Independents.
So, seriously, where did the Washington Post get the facts to justify the very first line of its front page story about Senator Feingold? Nowhere, that's where.
They just made it up. ...
It simply no longer passes the laugh test to label all opposition to George Bush as liberal, or fringe, or base, or being in the minority. The man is at 34% in the polls. Even his own base has had it with him. So spare us your sloppy bs about the Democratic base being the moving force behind public ire at the president.
This is part of a larger problem. Not just a larger problem of conservative bias in the mainstream media, a media that is simply terrified of doing its job in the shadow of George Bush. No, the larger problem we face is the attempt by the traditional media to marginalize its liberal critics. (my emphasis)
It's nice to see Aravosis directly challenge the mainstream press on their misleading coverage.
And I don't like to comma-dance over these things, especially when it's something on my "own side". But I'd have to say that I think he didn't correctly describe the way in which the statement could be misleading.
"For months the Democrats have resisted calls from their liberal base to more aggressively challenge President Bush," wrote Shailagh Murray in the Post article ( Senate Maverick Acts to Force an Issue: Democrat Feingold's Motion to Censure the President Roils Both Parties 03/15/06). And it was used as the lede, as Aravosis indicates.
Has the liberal base been pushing Dems to "more aggressively challenge President Bush"? Well, yes. And has been doing so since at least his State of the Union address in early 2002 when he announced the "axis of evil". And have the Democrats resisted these calls? To a large extent, yes.
It's not quite that simple. Some Dems have aggressively challenged Bush at times, e.g., Howard Dean, Robert Byrd, Ted Kennedy, Al Gore. And have won praise from the "liberal base" for doing so.
Arovosis does have a point; the opening paragraphs if the article do make it sound like Feingold's censure resolution is designed to respond to pressure coming essentially only from the most partisan liberal elements in the Party. But it doesn't actually say that. Here are the three opening paragraphs from Murray's article:
For months the Democrats have resisted calls from their liberal base to more aggressively challenge President Bush. Now a maverick Democratic senator from Wisconsin has forced his party and Congress to confront head-on the question of whether Bush should somehow be punished for secretly ordering warrantless wiretaps of U.S. citizens.
Sen. Russell Feingold's call this week to formally censure Bush for what some say was a clear violation of a federal statute regulating domestic surveillance has touched off a fierce debate on Capitol Hill that is likely to persist throughout the congressional campaign season.
GOP leaders who had been reeling from the impact of Republican political scandals, an unpopular war and Bush's mishandling of the port-security issue sensed that Feingold overplayed his hand and denounced the censure resolution as a political stunt by an ambitious lawmaker positioning himself to run for president in 2008. Many Democrats, while sympathetic to Feingold's maneuver, appeared to be distancing themselves from his resolution yesterday, wary of polls showing that a majority of Americans side with the president on wiretapping tactics.
The first paragraph is more-or-less true: the liberal base has been pushing for that, and at least in the perception of many liberal critics, mostof the Party officials and members of Congress have been resisting.
The second paragraph is more questionable. She adopts one of the favorite FOX News terms, "some say", when she writes that Feingold's resolution is aimed at "what some say was a clear violation of a federal statute". Actually, that "some" includes virtually everyone who's not a partisan Republican who has looked at this. The administration doesn't dispute that the warrantless NSA spying program violates the FISA law. They've made two arguments about the legality of the warrantless spying: the authorization-of-force resolution passed by Congress in response to the 9/11 attacks authorized it; and (2) that under their "unitary Executive theory", the President is free to violate any law or any other Constitutional provision he chooses as long as he claims, on his own authority and without review from the legislative or judicial branches, that he's breaking the law in the name of "national security".
Especially since the warrantless spying program reportedly started in 2001 before the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent authorization-of-force resolution, there's really no question that the Bush administration violated the FISA law, even if we were to entertain the entirely frivolous argument about the authorization-of-force resolution. And, as John Dean puts it (George W. Bush as the New Richard M. Nixon: Both Wiretapped Illegally, and Impeachably Findlaw.com 12/30/05):
Bush has given one legal explanation for his actions which borders on the laughable: He claims that implicit in Congress' authorization of his use of force against the Taliban in Afghanistan, following the 9/11 attack, was an exemption from FISA.
No sane member of Congress believes that the Authorization of Military Force provided such an authorization. No first year law student would mistakenly make such a claim. It is not merely a stretch; it is ludicrous.
A more factually problematic claim in Murray's article quoted above is her statement that Beltway Dems "wary of polls showing that a majority of Americans side with the president on wiretapping tactics". At best, this is a one-sided (GOP-leaning) interpretation. In polls where the question is worded so that the real issue, the warrantless wiretapping of Americans, is called out specifically, the results show that there is great public concern about that, probably even a majority opposed to it. Frank Newport summarizes the results of a late February Gallup poll:
A review of questions asked about the Bush administration's wiretapping program over the last month suggests that while there is some variation in public opinion on the issue based on how survey questions are worded, such variation is not as large as might be expected. The data show that the American public is roughly divided on the wiretapping issue, with the most recent survey results suggesting a slight tilt toward approval of the program.
A Zogby poll in January found, as summarized by Bob Fertik at Democrats.com on 01/16/06:
By a margin of 52% to 43%, Americans want Congress to consider impeaching President Bush if he wiretapped American citizens without a judge's approval, according to a new poll commissioned by AfterDowningStreet.org, a grassroots coalition that supports a Congressional investigation of President Bush's decision to invade Iraq in 2003. (my emphasis)
The real problem in the opening of Murray's article is not that her comment about the "liberal base" is wrong. The problem is that by using the lazy "this side says/the other side says" method to give the story "balance", it allows the Republicans to introduce a spin point about the polls that is highly misleading, at best. While in describing Feingold's position, she used a vague "some say" to talk about Bush breaking the law, when it would have been more accurate to say that it's painfully obvious to most anyone that Bush broke the FISA law, and he even admits it in public.
[UPDATE 03/16/06: I see that Media Matters was already banging on this point, though not in relation to the AMERICAblog post: Wash. Post falsely reported that Americans approve of Bush's "wiretapping tactics" 03/15/06. They write of the GOP claim on the wiretap polls that Murray cheerfully passed on to her readers:
In fact, most polls show the opposite. A Quinnipiac University poll conducted February 21-28 found that while 79 percent of "American voters say the government should continue monitoring phone calls or e-mail between suspected terrorists in other countries and people in the U.S.," 55 percent say "that the government should get court orders for this surveillance." A CBS News poll conducted February 22-26 asked respondents: "Regardless of whether you approve of the President authorizing the wiretaps, do you think the President has the legal authority to authorize wiretaps without a court warrant in order to fight terrorism, or doesn't he?" Fifty-one percent said the president does not have the legal authority to do so. A CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll from February 9-12 reported that 50 percent of respondents believed the Bush administration was "wrong" to wiretap "conversations without a court order," while 47 percent said it was "right."
Murray appears to have conflated public approval of spying on suspected terrorists with approval of the means through which the Bush administration has conducted the eavesdropping. Approving of the surveillance and approving of the tactics are two very different things. As the polls show, one can believe the president should conduct surveillance on suspected terrorists and at the same time believe that he should obey the law in doing so.]
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