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A Lesson in "Creating" News
06/06/2003

Earlier today, Kathryn Jean Lopez pointed out the following from a New York Times press release:

The Company's core purpose is to enhance society by creating, collecting and distributing high-quality news, information and entertainment.

Throughout the day, some have wondered allowed (e.g., Rush Limbaugh) how it is that a newspaper — a conduit for the reporting of news — goes about creating news. Well, the AP has obliged with an example. The following title for this article is from the San Francisco Chronicle, but it's not but so extreme:

Pentagon's intelligence service reported no reliable evidence of Iraqi weapons last September

Oh, really? Here's paragraph number eight (emphasis added):

In its report last September, the Defense Intelligence Agency said it could find no reliable information to indicate that Iraq had any chemical weapons available for use on the battlefield. But the agency also said Iraq probably had stockpiles of banned chemical warfare agents.

The parsing goes on from there:

The existence of the DIA report was disclosed by U.S. News & World Report, and a classified summary was reported by Bloomberg News on Thursday. Two Pentagon officials who had read the summary confirmed Friday that it said DIA had no hard evidence of Iraqi chemical weapons.

So how is the AP defining "hard" evidence? And then here's paragraph twelve:

A senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said there was a National Intelligence Estimate published at nearly the same time as the DIA report -- and with DIA's concurrence -- that concluded Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.

And thus, ladies and gentlemen, is the "news" that President Bush lied is created. Particularly egregious is that paragraphs six and seven offer tangential information, as if to delay the contrasting evidence until further into the story to ensure that the desired message reached the greatest audience.

Posted by Justin Katz @ 09:56 PM EST