Categorical Aperitif

I made the mistake of watching ABC World News with Charles Gibson again last night. I was curious to see that they had a segment with Martha Raddatz reporting on former White House press secretary Scott McClellan's "scathing" new book What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception. Having seen the Politico story on the book, I was also curious to see whether ABC would mention this aspect of McClellan's charges:

He says the White House press corps was too easy on the administration during the run-up to the war.

I mean, jeez, even Elizabeth Bumiller at the New York Times managed to squeeze this into her story on McClellan's book—in the next-to-last paragraph, anyway:

Mr. McClellan does not exempt himself from failings — “I fell far short of living up to the kind of public servant I wanted to be” — and calls the news media “complicit enablers” in the White House’s “carefully orchestrated campaign to shape and manipulate sources of public approval” in the march to the Iraq war in 2002 and 2003.

Surely the World News story would mention McClellan's charges about the news media along with his other important claims, right? Well, no. Nowhere in the segment last night did Raddatz or Gibson bring up what McClellan had to say about their own profession's complicity in the Iraq debacle. I can't find the video from last night, but this other segment with Raddatz is representative. Nor do McClellan's remarks on the media come up in either of these stories on ABC's website. Gibson did find the time last night to tut-tut about the belatedness of McClellan's revelations and to ask Raddatz something like, "If he felt that way, why didn't he quit?" Oh, he seemed shocked, shocked, to find that lying might be going on the White House. Or that somebody from the White House would actually have the temerity to say so in public. Or something.

Like the Howler has shown time and again, there's nothing the corporate media covers like their own tracks.