David Sirota, Christy Harvey and Judd Legum of the Center for American Progress criticize Ben Fritz and Brendan Nyhan's Jan. 30 and Feb. 2 posts in a letter to the editors. Fritz and Nyhan respond to their charges. (Read the whole exchange.)
By Ben Fritz, Bryan Keefer and Brendan Nyhan
Published in the Philadelphia Inquirer
Listening to the news, you could be forgiven for thinking that President Bush has a plan to cut the federal budget deficit in half in the next five years. But apparently, the only plan the President has is one to persuade the public his proposed budget will cut the deficit in half. (Read the first part of the article here.)
In addition, a prominent new liberal think tank and the campaign of Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts have recently misrepresented statements from their opponents. (Read the rest of the article here.)
(This article is part of Spinsanity's new publishing agreement with the Philadelphia Inquirer. Full details on the arrangement can be read here.)
Related links:
-Spinsanity on tax and budget issues
By Ben Fritz and Brendan Nyhan
A new myth is making its way through the media: that White House press secretary Scott McClellan said "This is about an imminent threat" about the Iraq war during a press briefing last February. This tall tale, first created by the liberal Center for American Progress, has been repeated several times by journalists who failed to check their facts.
As we showed last week, McClellan was actually talking about Iraq potentially posing an "imminent threat" to Turkey if a war started, which would justify invoking the NATO charter and allowing alliance members to help defend Turkey. But analysts at the Center for American Progress inaccurately claimed in their January 29 e-mail newsletter that McClellan made that statement as a reason why "NATO should go along with the Administration's Iraq war plan." (CAP has yet to correct the record.)
That inaccuracy was quickly picked up by The New Republic's blog &C. To his credit, however, writer Noam Scheiber promptly corrected his citation of CAP's dishonest portrayal of the quote and apologized to McClellan and the White House.
The next day, the quote appeared in two major media sources. Liberal co-host Paul Begala cited it on the January 30 edition of "Crossfire" on CNN. Discussing how Bush presented the case for war last year, Begala said, "And the White House press secretary, speaking for his boss, Scott McClellan, says, 'This is about an imminent threat.'"
In a column on the Washington Post's website, Dan Froomkin approvingly cited CAP's description of the McClellan quote. Discussing the debate over whether the White House said Iraq was an imminent threat, Froomkin wrote, "The researchers at the liberal Center for American Progress were having none of it. In a press release yesterday, they list 30 statements with variations on the theme, including this one from a McClellan news conference on Feb. 10, 2003: 'Mr. McClellan: This is about an imminent threat.'" (Froomkin corrected his error today.)
And on Saturday, Mark Matthews of the Baltimore Sun also got the quote wrong in a column about pressure for an independent inquiry into pre-war intelligence. "The administration used the arsenal to depict Iraq as a looming threat, and White House spokesman Scott McClellan referred last February to an 'imminent threat,'" he wrote, picking up on the misleading CAP quotation.
Journalists and pundits should not be relying on a partisan source for the proper context of a quote from a White House official that can be easily verified online. In the past, initially inaccurate reports that the National Education Association called on teachers not to blame September 11 on Al Qaeda and that former Enron CEO Ken Lay slept in the Lincoln Bedroom under President Clinton spread rapidly through the media until they were widely accepted as true. Let's hope that won't be the case here.
Update (2/2 8:55 PM EST): It is worth noting that CAP was responding to a somewhat misleading statement by McClellan. In a press briefing last Tuesday, he said, "I think some in the media have chosen to use the word 'imminent.' Those were not words ... Those were not words we used."
This is technically true. However, as we have previously written, while the Bush administration's case for war did not primarily rely on portraying Iraq as an imminent threat, the words were endorsed several times by administration officials in response to questions from the press. On May 7, 2003, in response to the question from a reporter, former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer was asked, "Well, we went to war, didn't we, to find these -- because we said that these weapons were a direct and imminent threat to the United States? Isn't that true?" He responded affirmatively, saying, "Absolutely." And on October 16, 2002, a reporter asked, "Ari, the President has been saying that the threat from Iraq is imminent, that we have to act now to disarm the country of its weapons of mass destruction, and that it has to allow the U.N. inspectors in, unfettered, no conditions, so forth." Fleischer replied by stating, "Yes." Finally, as Dana Milbank pointed out today in the Washington Post, White House communications director Dan Bartlett responded to a question asking if Saddam was "an imminent threat to U.S. interests" by saying, "Well, of course he is."
Correction (2/5 4:15 AM EST): The title of this post has been changed from "Misquote in imminent danger of hardening into fact," as CAP did not misquote McClellan. In addition, the original version of this post inadvertently left the last word out of a quote from the CAP newsletter that read, "NATO should go along with the Administration's Iraq war plan." We regret both errors.