Cheney’s staff, and a useful press

IT wasn’t what anybody intended, but this week Vice President Dick Cheney and some of his former aides gave the rest of us a rather instructive seminar in the symbiotic contempt that links the Bush administration and self-serving members of the Washington press corps.

The lesson began in the courtroom, where Cheney’s former chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, is on trial for perjury, charged with lying to a grand jury about whether he told reporters that Valerie Plame -- the wife of a prominent administration critic, former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV -- was a CIA agent. Libby’s defense turns, in part, on assertions that the White House “sacrificed” him to protect Karl Rove, President Bush’s chief political advisor, and that Libby and Rove had been instructed to manipulate the press in ways that discredited Wilson.

Wilson had been sent by the CIA to the African country of Niger to investigate reports that Saddam Hussein had been trying to obtain yellow cake uranium mined there as part of his alleged nuclear weapon program. Wilson reported that nothing of the sort had occurred and went public with that fact when Bush and other members of the administration falsely alleged otherwise in making the case for war against Iraq.

Hussein, it turned out, had no program to develop weapons of mass destruction, and, depending on how you view things, the war in Iraq began with either lies or delusions.

Either could have been abetted by the sort of cynical media manipulation described this week when the vice president’s former communications director, Catherine J. Martin, testified in Libby’s trial. She described how Cheney was obsessed with Wilson’s criticism, particularly after publication of an op-ed piece in the New York Times and how the vice president ordered a counteroffensive in parts of the press deemed receptive to whatever the administration wanted to dish out concerning the former diplomat. One of the options she recommended to Cheney was an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” because the program’s host, Tim Russert, would allow the vice president to “control the message.” (Russert, along with a number of reporters whom Libby attempted to make conduits of misinformation, will be testifying later in the trial.)

She also told the court that she suggested that the vice president’s office “leak” information that seemed to undercut Wilson’s credibility to carefully selected reporters at the New York Times and Washington Post, arranged a lunch for Cheney with right-wing commentators and advised him to avoid the New York Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Nicholas Kristof because he had “attacked the administration fairly regularly.” Other witnesses this week testified that Libby had been assigned to contact selected reporters deemed receptive to information that might discredit Wilson as a critic and to plant with them anonymously sourced stories.

Martin called the word “leak,” which appeared in her notes as a “term of art” and testified, “If you give it to one reporter, they’re likelier to write the story.”

She has that about right, though the “art” she has in mind is deception.

The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank had the best summation of Martin’s testimony: “The trial has already pulled back the curtain on the White House’s PR techniques and confirmed some of the darkest suspicions of the reporters upon whom they are used. Relatively junior White House aides run roughshod over members of the president’s Cabinet. Bush aides charged with speaking to the public and the media are kept out of the loop on some of the most important issues. And bad news is dumped before the weekend for the sole purpose of burying it.”

It’s such an amateurish approach to news management, in fact, that you have to wonder how the Bush administration and, particularly, Cheney’s office, got away with it for as long as they did. If you recall that there always are a certain number of high-level Washington journalists willing to play ball with any form of transparently self-interested deceit for the sake of a Page 1 byline or a few minutes of prime airtime, you don’t have to wonder very long.

To get a firsthand look at this brutally cynical contempt for the public and its right to know in action, all you had to do was watch Cheney’s own appearance on CNN’s “Situation Room” this week. The vice president sat there straight-faced and told the show’s host, Wolf Blitzer, that the media have been ignoring all the “enormous successes” in Iraq and are “eager to write off this effort or declare it a failure.”

When Blitzer asked if “blunders and the failures” on the ground in Iraq had undercut the administration’s ability to make its case for its policies, the vice president flatly asserted, “I simply don’t accept the premise of your question. I just think it’s hogwash.”

When Blitzer said there is a terrible situation in Iraq, Cheney replied, “No there is not. There is not. There’s problems -- ongoing problems -- but we have in fact accomplished our objectives.”

As Blitzer pressed a mild series of questions about the war’s conduct, Cheney snapped, “What you’re recommending is, or at least what you seem to believe the right course is, is to bail out.”

“I’m just asking,” Blitzer interjected.

“No, you’re not asking,” the vice president replied.

This week, the nonpartisan Pew Research Center reported that “just 37% [of Americans] believe that America’s security from terrorist attacks depends on our success in Iraq -- a fundamental part of President Bush’s case for the additional troops” he now wishes to send to Baghdad. Pew also found that 51% of Americans now believe that the decision to go to war in Iraq was wrong.

Cheney’s demonstrated proclivity for rhetorical bullying aside, dismissing legitimate questions growing out of such views in the fashion aired by CNN this week is an expression of contempt for public opinion itself.

There’s no particular reason why malfeasant members of the press or those who merely are incompetent shouldn’t be held in contempt. The news media, after all, are like every American institution, home to its share of idiots, poseurs, slothful time-markers and self-interested time servers. The problem is that Cheney and his former aides aren’t simply contemptuous of the individual reporters or even of the press itself. They’re contemptuous of the principle under which the free press operates -- which is the American people’s right to have a reasonable account of what the government does in their name.

The lesson to take away from this week’s unintended seminar in contemporary journalism is that the vice president and his staff, acting on behalf of the Bush administration, believe that truth is a malleable adjunct to their ambitions and that they have a well-founded confidence that some members of the Washington press corps will cynically accommodate that belief for the sake of their careers.

It’s a sick little arrangement in which the parties clearly have one thing in common: a profound indifference to both the common good and to their obligation to act in its service.

timothy.rutten@latimes.com