It’s Sad That I Know More Than CNN
It’s incredibly frustrating to watch news stories that are accurate but are also woefully incomplete. That’s par for the course in this Presidential campaign. Watching “News Now” on CNN tonight, they covered the Kerry-Rumsfeld flap over troop levels in Iraq. They showed a clip of Kerry saying that General Shinseki “was retired early” because he predicted we would need a lot more troops in Iraq than Rumsfeld was saying, and Rumsfeld wasn’t too happy when Shinseki shared those higher numbers with Congress. Today Rumsfeld responded by saying Shinseki was not forced out, and that Kerry’s accusation was false and completely inaccurate. The reporter closed the story with a vindication of Rumsfeld, saying that the facts were on his side. This conclusion is at once both accurate and misleading. It’s accurate in that Shinseki did serve out his term as Army Chief of Staff. Even though he was not appointed to a second term, it’s a real stretch for Kerry to say he “was retired” (Kerry said this in such a way as to imply that Shinseki was forced out early). But Rumsfeld and CNN are also misleading by omission: CNN neglected to report that Rumsfeld was so angry at Shinseki that he announced his replacement a full 18 months in advance. This was an unprecedented move that made Shinseki a lame duck and badly undercut his authority. See here and here.
I happened to catch this one because I had followed the Shinseki story when it was unfolding at the start of the Iraq war. What am I missing in all the other stories that I don’t have the time to follow quite so closely? It’s no wonder blogs have exploded in popularity – folks are realizing they can’t count on the news media to tell accurate and complete stories anymore (the CBS scandal over the fake memos being the latest and most damaging example). Of course the problem there is blogs don’t even make a pretense of being objective, which means we may have more information, but we still have a lot of work to do sorting out fact from fiction (or, more to the point, tracking down the missing but highly relevant facts).
