spursncowboys
12-01-2009, 01:18 PM
http://images.politico.com/global/v3/homelogo.gif (http://www.politico.com/) Media follow W.H. script
By: Richard Benedetto
December 1, 2009 05:00 AM EST
Ever since Watergate hero Bob Woodward revealed a 66-page secret Pentagon report Sept. 22 in The Washington Post that revealed U.S. Gen. Stanley McChrystal was seeking an additional 40,000 American troops for Afghanistan, the White House has deftly controlled the message, shaped the narrative, crafted the president’s wartime image and kept the news media eating out of its hand as it made its way toward a final decision.
On the surface, it might appear that publication of the McChrystal report came as a surprise to President Barack Obama, forcing him to scramble to respond before he wanted to and triggering a slow, two-month-plus reassessment that has been criticized by former Vice President Dick Cheney as “dithering.”
But a detailed examination of news coverage of the reassessment issue in the major national newspapers, primarily The Washington Post and The New York Times, suggests that many angles and details of the stories were being carefully fed by White House aides to all-too-willing reporters who dressed it up as the inside dope. In reality, many reporters were steered into spinning the story exactly the way the White House wanted it told, with relatively little skepticism or criticism.
And now that a decision will be announced Tuesday night, here is how the media told it: Obama, faced with a difficult and agonizing decision, was wisely taking his time and deliberatively listening to all of the arguments, pro and con, including dissenters on his staff, pushing the military for more details about goals, tactics, cost in dollars, exit strategies and timetables.
In short, he was showing the public he was doing the job of managing a war in a serious, thoughtful and cautious way — and by implication, a job that his predecessor, President George W. Bush, who carried on such deliberations in a less public fashion, failed to do.
Overall, it was a common narrative — Obama good, Bush bad — that this White House has honed to a sharp edge since the Inauguration nearly 11 months ago.
And it worked. In a Nov. 25 Page One Washington Post analysis under the headline, “In His Slow Decision-Making, Obama Goes With Head, Not Gut,” Joel Achenbach wrote, “Obama’s handling of the Afghanistan conundrum has been a spectacle of deliberation unlike anything seen in the White House in recent memory.”
Continuing what could have been a spoon-fed Obama White House narrative, Achenbach quoted Lawrence Wilkerson, a chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, saying, “[Obama’s] establishing his decision-making process as being diametrically the opposite of the previous administration,” going on to say the Bush-Cheney style was “cowboy-like, typical Texas, typical Wyoming and extremely secretive.”
Clearly, the Obama White House was not blindsided by Woodward’s revelation of McChrystal’s report. In fact, it is very likely someone in the White House leaked it to the iconic Woodward to get the already-underway Obama reassessment into the public realm and begin orchestrating the story from their side. How do we know? There are clues:
Obama himself, on Sept. 20, only hours before the Woodward report was published on The Washington Post’s website, made the rounds of five Sunday TV talk shows, and in each dropped cautioning hints that an Afghanistan reassessment was coming.
Also, the day after the McChrystal report was made public, The New York Times ran a Page One story largely sourced to unnamed administration “officials” revealing that a “sweeping reassessment” and a possible “strategy shift” had been under way since Sept. 13. The article described the meeting in detail and underscored that Vice President Joe Biden had taken on the role of dissenter in calling for a scaling back of U.S. troops in Afghanistan.
That narrative, picked up by the media at large and now considered conventional wisdom, was reinforced by a Newsweek cover story in early October framing Biden as “An Inconvenient Truth Teller.”
The story was sprinkled with quotes from unnamed White House sources describing in detail the internal debate taking place in White House strategy meetings. Biden himself most likely was one of the sources.
In a post-Woodward, on-the-record interview with the Times, James Jones, the president’s national security adviser, polished the hearing-all-sides strategy by painting a picture for the public of Obama being open to dissenting views but still standing tall as commander in chief.
“Different people are going to have different opinions, and he wants to hear them. But at the end of the day, he’s going to do what he thinks is the right thing for the United States and most especially for the men and women who have to respond to his orders,” Jones said.
Meanwhile, with American troop deaths in Afghanistan reaching their highest levels in October, and Obama seeking, as he underwent the reassessment, to avoid projecting an image of a president being callous to the needs of the military, the White House was careful to place him in public situations where he showed respect for the fallen. Many newspapers ran Page One photos of the president’s Oct. 29 middle-of-the-night visit to Dover Air Force Base to salute the flag-draped casket of Sgt. Dale R. Griffin as it returned from Afghanistan.
On Nov. 12, the Post ran a Page One photo of a pensive Obama walking somberly among military graves at Arlington Cemetery during a Veterans Day visit. Under the headline “Feeling the Weight of War,” Achenbach emotionally wrote, “War and tragedy are putting President Obama through the most wrenching period of his young administration. Visibly thinner, admittedly skipping meals, he is learning every day the challenges of a wartime presidency.”
White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel couldn’t have written it any better.
By: Richard Benedetto
December 1, 2009 05:00 AM EST
Ever since Watergate hero Bob Woodward revealed a 66-page secret Pentagon report Sept. 22 in The Washington Post that revealed U.S. Gen. Stanley McChrystal was seeking an additional 40,000 American troops for Afghanistan, the White House has deftly controlled the message, shaped the narrative, crafted the president’s wartime image and kept the news media eating out of its hand as it made its way toward a final decision.
On the surface, it might appear that publication of the McChrystal report came as a surprise to President Barack Obama, forcing him to scramble to respond before he wanted to and triggering a slow, two-month-plus reassessment that has been criticized by former Vice President Dick Cheney as “dithering.”
But a detailed examination of news coverage of the reassessment issue in the major national newspapers, primarily The Washington Post and The New York Times, suggests that many angles and details of the stories were being carefully fed by White House aides to all-too-willing reporters who dressed it up as the inside dope. In reality, many reporters were steered into spinning the story exactly the way the White House wanted it told, with relatively little skepticism or criticism.
And now that a decision will be announced Tuesday night, here is how the media told it: Obama, faced with a difficult and agonizing decision, was wisely taking his time and deliberatively listening to all of the arguments, pro and con, including dissenters on his staff, pushing the military for more details about goals, tactics, cost in dollars, exit strategies and timetables.
In short, he was showing the public he was doing the job of managing a war in a serious, thoughtful and cautious way — and by implication, a job that his predecessor, President George W. Bush, who carried on such deliberations in a less public fashion, failed to do.
Overall, it was a common narrative — Obama good, Bush bad — that this White House has honed to a sharp edge since the Inauguration nearly 11 months ago.
And it worked. In a Nov. 25 Page One Washington Post analysis under the headline, “In His Slow Decision-Making, Obama Goes With Head, Not Gut,” Joel Achenbach wrote, “Obama’s handling of the Afghanistan conundrum has been a spectacle of deliberation unlike anything seen in the White House in recent memory.”
Continuing what could have been a spoon-fed Obama White House narrative, Achenbach quoted Lawrence Wilkerson, a chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, saying, “[Obama’s] establishing his decision-making process as being diametrically the opposite of the previous administration,” going on to say the Bush-Cheney style was “cowboy-like, typical Texas, typical Wyoming and extremely secretive.”
Clearly, the Obama White House was not blindsided by Woodward’s revelation of McChrystal’s report. In fact, it is very likely someone in the White House leaked it to the iconic Woodward to get the already-underway Obama reassessment into the public realm and begin orchestrating the story from their side. How do we know? There are clues:
Obama himself, on Sept. 20, only hours before the Woodward report was published on The Washington Post’s website, made the rounds of five Sunday TV talk shows, and in each dropped cautioning hints that an Afghanistan reassessment was coming.
Also, the day after the McChrystal report was made public, The New York Times ran a Page One story largely sourced to unnamed administration “officials” revealing that a “sweeping reassessment” and a possible “strategy shift” had been under way since Sept. 13. The article described the meeting in detail and underscored that Vice President Joe Biden had taken on the role of dissenter in calling for a scaling back of U.S. troops in Afghanistan.
That narrative, picked up by the media at large and now considered conventional wisdom, was reinforced by a Newsweek cover story in early October framing Biden as “An Inconvenient Truth Teller.”
The story was sprinkled with quotes from unnamed White House sources describing in detail the internal debate taking place in White House strategy meetings. Biden himself most likely was one of the sources.
In a post-Woodward, on-the-record interview with the Times, James Jones, the president’s national security adviser, polished the hearing-all-sides strategy by painting a picture for the public of Obama being open to dissenting views but still standing tall as commander in chief.
“Different people are going to have different opinions, and he wants to hear them. But at the end of the day, he’s going to do what he thinks is the right thing for the United States and most especially for the men and women who have to respond to his orders,” Jones said.
Meanwhile, with American troop deaths in Afghanistan reaching their highest levels in October, and Obama seeking, as he underwent the reassessment, to avoid projecting an image of a president being callous to the needs of the military, the White House was careful to place him in public situations where he showed respect for the fallen. Many newspapers ran Page One photos of the president’s Oct. 29 middle-of-the-night visit to Dover Air Force Base to salute the flag-draped casket of Sgt. Dale R. Griffin as it returned from Afghanistan.
On Nov. 12, the Post ran a Page One photo of a pensive Obama walking somberly among military graves at Arlington Cemetery during a Veterans Day visit. Under the headline “Feeling the Weight of War,” Achenbach emotionally wrote, “War and tragedy are putting President Obama through the most wrenching period of his young administration. Visibly thinner, admittedly skipping meals, he is learning every day the challenges of a wartime presidency.”
White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel couldn’t have written it any better.