Dowd spawns Bush media myth (updated 6/16)

The New York Times columnist's distorted quotation of President Bush has spread throughout the national and international press.
By Brendan Nyhan

An outrageous new falsehood is circulating about President Bush. Last week, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd misrepresented a Bush statement to imply that he said the Al Qaeda terrorist network is "not a problem anymore," and the distorted quotation has since been repeated by MSNBC "Buchanan and Press" co-host Bill Press, CNN's Miles O'Brien and others, including numerous foreign press outlets. At a time when the New York Times is under fire for its conduct in the Jayson Blair scandal, Dowd's creation of an exploding media myth is cause for serious concern. (Read the whole column.)

5/22/2003 10:34:41 AM EST |

Award of Distinction in Mongerson competition (5/21)

Spinsanity's Brendan Nyhan received an Award of Distinction today in the 2003 Paul Mongerson Prize for Investigative Reporting on News Coverage competition. The award, given by the Center for Media and Public Affairs, honored Nyhan's September 2002 columns debunking the myth that the National Education Association urged teachers not to blame al-Qaida for the Sept. 11 attacks, which were first published on Salon.com. The judges for the competition were Stephen Hess of the Brookings Institution, Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia, Mort Kondracke of Roll Call and Ken Bode of the Medill School of Journalism.

The Associated Press piece on the award announcements was picked up by The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Times-Picayaune in New Orleans.

In honor of the award, we are re-posting the two columns below:

The big NEA-Sept. 11 lie (9/5/02)
Over the last few weeks, the National Education Association, the nation's largest teachers' union, has been widely denounced for supposedly calling on educators not to blame the Sept. 11 attacks on al-Qaida. But this is a manufactured falsehood created by a kind of assembly line for political myths. The story is familiar: A distorted claim is fed into the echo chamber, where it is increasingly twisted as it is repeated over and over until it becomes conventional wisdom.

The big NEA-Sept. 11 lie, cont'd. (9/18/02)
The myth that the National Educational Association told teachers not to blame Sept. 11 on al-Qaida continues to unravel. It's now clear that Washington Times reporter Ellen Sorokin based her original myth-creating article on a preliminary NEA Web site that clearly wasn't complete, misconstruing quotations from a recommended sample essay allegedly written by a professor named Brian Lippincott and attributing them to the NEA. Even worse, the essay in question, published by the National Association of School Psychologists on Sept. 15, 2001, was meant to preach tolerance toward Arab and Muslim Americans -- not al-Qaida. And Lippincott, contrary to what has been widely reported, did not even write it. Yet the myth still continues to spread in Op-Ed columns, on TV and even in a comic strip.

Correction (5/22 5:10 PM): This post has been corrected to include the fourth judge in the Mongerson Prize competition, Ken Bode of the Medill School of Journalism.

5/21/2003 07:38:46 PM EST |

Ari Fleischer retrospective (5/20)

By Bryan Keefer

White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer announced Monday that he will be leaving the White House for the private sector later this summer. During his tenure, Fleischer went beyond simply serving as the President's messenger to the press. His disciplined style - even in the face of facts contradicting his message - earned him a reputation as one of the most relentless and aggressive press secretaries in recent memory.

As President Bush's emissary to the media, Fleischer was at the forefront of promulgating a number of myths and falsehoods, as Slate's Tim Noah and Salon's Jake Tapper showed today. We've compiled our own list from the Spinsanity archives. In his first days as press secretary, Feischer helped fan the flames of a story that Clinton and his staffers had vandalized the White House on their way out, as well as suggesting, falsely, that a number of rules which went into effect in the final days of the Clinton administration had been "left unaddressed for eight years of the previous administration." In early 2002, Fleischer helped confuse the press about the facts of a dispute between Vice President Dick Cheney and the General Accounting Office over records of Cheney's meetings to formulate energy policy. More recently, he invented a blatantly false story to defend Bush's assertion that Iraq was "six months away" from acquiring nuclear weapons when inspectors left the country in 1998; repeated a number of misleading statistics about the average benefits of Bush's proposed tax cut; and claimed that the administration had repeatedly suggested that the war would be difficult despite a number of statements to the contrary. (Jonathan Chait's cover story in The New Republic last year covers Fleischer's tactics in great detail.)

Fleischer's most damaging legacy, however, is his pattern of attacks on the legitimacy of criticism of the administration. While he usually stayed away from direct criticism of political opponents, Fleischer helped pioneer the frameworks that other pundits and politicians adopted over time. In the early days of the Bush administration, for example, Fleischer often dismissed criticism with the claim that Bush had come to Washington in order to "change the tone" of debate. Late last year, he tried to shut down Democratic criticism of the President over national security issues by suggesting that "Any candidate who suggests that when the enemy attacks, the blame lies with the United States and not with the enemy does so at great peril to their own political future." And he has also suggested that criticism of Bush's economic plans amounted to "class warfare."

Fleischer's discipline and devotion to the Bush administration is to be admired. However, his suspect relationship with the truth open serious questions about the administration's commitment to honest and rational debate. We can only hope Fleischer's successor gives us fewer myths and falsehoods from the briefing room podium.

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Related links:
-Spinsanity on Ari Fleischer

5/20/2003 08:40:41 PM EST |

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