Dan

Calabrese

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July 13, 2009

Another Tale of Cheney’s Maniacal Madness, Courtesy of Anonymous AP ‘Sources’

It’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry anymore when it comes to the muddled journalism of the once-respectable Associated Press.

Long trusted to report news fairly and honestly with its no-frills, just-the-facts style, the AP chucked that during the George W. Bush Administration at the behest of Washington bureau chief Ron Fournier, who decided it was time for the AP to practice “accountability journalism,” a thinly disguised method of editorializing in what pretends to be a straight news story.

And as we saw this past weekend, the AP continues to do what inspired Fournier to make this change in the first place. It is still holding the administration accountable. The Bush Administration, that is.

The AP breathlessly reports – try to follow this – that the Bush Administration was engaged in some sort of intelligence gathering about which we and Congress were not told, and the dark, maniacal Dick Cheney (cue evil laugh) was in charge!

What were they doing? The AP doesn’t know. How were they doing it? The AP doesn’t know. What kind of intelligence were they gathering? The AP doesn’t know. The AP knows nothing. It is the Sgt. Schultz of news services. It just knows that there was something going on, and it knows this because it heard it from sources.

And who are the AP’s sources? We don’t know! Because these days, you hardly ever know who the AP’s sources are. As in the case of this latest journalistic monstrosity, they are usually “officials with direct knowledge of the situation,” but they are not identified because they insisted on anonymity before talking.

Why? Well, you see, “All spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the program publicly.”

Wow. Such secrecy. It’s almost like the CIA.

When I was studying journalism in college, back in the 1980s, we were taught that it was essential to name your source unless there was an extraordinary reason to grant anonymity. Otherwise, your attribution of information to that source will lack credibility because no one will know if the unnamed source has any idea what he or she is talking about, let alone an agenda. I still work as a journalist, and I do not grant anonymity to sources. This policy has never stopped me from getting a story, but it has stopped me from getting some stories wrong.

But the use of anonymous sources is central to the AP’s effort to imply nefariousness on the part of public figures it does not like, particularly everyone in the Bush Administration, particularly Dick Cheney. That’s why the AP was willing to run an entire story that doesn’t name a single source, and doesn’t contain any concrete information. The story achieves the AP’s objective, which is to raise suspicion that something terrible was going on.

In fact, if you actually read the story, you’ll discover that the CIA launches intelligence-gathering initiatives all the time without informing Congress, either because the initiative may never go anywhere or – more likely – because if you tell too many members of Congress, one of them will blab it to the AP or the New York Times (anonymously, of course) and the whole thing will be blown.

But that concession is well buried underneath the innuendo of more dark, secret, sinister horribleness on the part of Cheney and his boss, whom the AP took to describing as “the unpopular Bush” throughout most of his second term.

All we know from this story is that the Bush Administration was doing more than we’ve previously been told to fight terrorism – shocker! – and they didn’t want these efforts ruined by telling congressional blabbermouths.

To give “credit” where due, if you want to look at it that way, the AP merely aped this story from the New York Times, whose willingness to reveal secrets, even at the expense of national security, is long-established. But while sloppy journalism and the Times go hand in hand, this is still a relatively recent development at the AP.

It’s a shame this once-respected news service has willingly turned itself into a propaganda organ. But Mr. Fournier was determined to keep the hot lights on the Bush Administration, and it is now clear that he and his crew intend to do so forever – even though Bush is long gone, almost as much so as the AP’s journalistic credibility.

© 2009 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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