DKos Diary: Is WaPo at War Over Cheney? (Interesting)

[Hissyspit]

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/6/24/214027/649

Is WaPo at war over Cheney?
by mcjoan
Sun Jun 24, 2007 at 06:43:13 PM PDT

Laura Rozen has a fascinating insight from a reader and newspaper editor friend in response to the Post's Cheney piece:

A careful reading of the story of Cheney's coup against a feeble executive reveals that paragraphs 7 through 10 were written and inserted in haste by a powerful editorial hand. The banging of colliding metaphors in an otherwise carefully written piece is evidence of last-minute interpolations by a bad editor whom no one has the power to rewrite....

That in turn suggests that this piece has been ready to run for some time. Insertions like the one about the veep's office not being part of the executive branch and seriatim "softenings" show that jamming it into the paper at the end of June, when only cats and the homeless are around the read the paper, was made at the last minute....

This series is a landscape of an internal war. Parts of it are still smoking and some reputations are visibly dying--anonymously, for the moment. The journalistic graves registration people will go in later and tag the corpses.

Re-read those first dozen paragraphs with this analysis in mind, and the differences are glaring. Could this be another case like the NYT's Keller holding the Risen/Lichblau NSA eavesdropping bombshell? Of course, in that case the Bush administration asked the NYT to hold the story on national security grounds. This one seems to have been held back on embarrassment grounds.

That's even worse. Rozen's editor friend suggests that maybe Len Downie or "someone at the top" was holding this back. To me it looks like another of the paper's top editors. One of the most profound principles of newspapers is the sacrosanct wall between the news and the opinion pages. Was the wall breached in the handling of this story? Are Fred Hiatt's fingerprints on this one?

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[Olney Blue]

1. K/R

[pacalo]

2. Part 2 of the Gellman article is now up...

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/cheney/chapters/pushing_the_enevelope_on_presi/

[mod mom]

3. these are paragraphs 7-10 @ the WaPo article:

"Two articles, today and tomorrow, recount Cheney's campaign to magnify presidential war-making authority, arguably his most important legacy. Articles to follow will describe a span of influence that extends far beyond his well-known interests in energy and national defense.

In roles that have gone largely undetected, Cheney has served as gatekeeper for Supreme Court nominees, referee of Cabinet turf disputes, arbiter of budget appeals, editor of tax proposals and regulator in chief of water flows in his native West. On some subjects, officials said, he has displayed a strong pragmatic streak. On others he has served as enforcer of ideological principle, come what may.

Cheney is not, by nearly every inside account, the shadow president of popular lore. Bush has set his own course, not always in directions Cheney preferred. The president seized the helm when his No. 2 steered toward trouble, as Bush did, in time, on military commissions. Their one-on-one relationship is opaque, a vital unknown in assessing Cheney's impact on events. The two men speak of it seldom, if ever, with others. But officials who see them together often, not all of them admirers of the vice president, detect a strong sense of mutual confidence that Cheney is serving Bush's aims.

The vice president's reputation and, some say, his influence, have suffered in the past year and a half. Cheney lost his closest aide, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, to a perjury conviction, and his onetime mentor, Donald H. Rumsfeld, in a Cabinet purge. A shooting accident in Texas, and increasing gaps between his rhetoric and events in Iraq, have exposed him to ridicule and approval ratings in the teens. Cheney expresses indifference, in public and private, to any verdict but history's, and those close to him say he means it."

off to the new article!

[Hissyspit]

4. Thanks. n/t