The Daily Background

Okay, sorry to be trivial for a moment, but this bugged me. Transcript from the Situation Room yesterday, with Blitzer and White House correspondent Suzanne Malveaux discussing the DoJ’s letter to Specter:

MALVEAUX: The key line in this letter says, “One particular aspect of these activities and nothing more was publicly acknowledged by the president and described in December of 2005.” That is what Gonzales says was the Terrorist Surveillance Program.
[…]
So, what they’re saying is, everything else is secret, but — but what he was talking about specifically was the program, the terrorist surveillance program.

BLITZER: The warrantless wiretap program.

MALVEAUX: Right.

BLITZER: Because there are other aspects that were authorized in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, authorized by Congress, extended by the president every 45 days or so, that have never been publicly discussed, even though “The New York Times” had a very long article about it over the weekend, other details of this classified program that the administration has never publicly discussed.

MALVEAUX: Right.

ThinkProgress has video of the segment.

Okay, first of all, the name “Terrorist Surveillance Program/TSP” is a marketing name thought up by the Administration to make their unconstitutional program sound positive. To Blitzer’s credit, he called it the warrantless wiretapping program. But the two didn’t discuss the fact that many lawmakers consider the “TSP” to include both the data mining as well as the wiretapping. The two were disclosed together by the press, and described as part of a single effort from the very beginning. And members of Congress who were briefed on it say they were briefed on them at the same time in the same context that led them to believe the two were part of a single program.

But then Blitzer goes and says that these programs were authorized by Congress– a blatant falsehood. The truth is that only a very small handful of members of Congress (four in the House, four in the Senate) were briefed on the program. And many of the Democrats explicitly said they weren’t okay with the program and didn’t think it was legally okay but they were bound by secrecy not to say anything. That’s hardly the same as something being approved by Congress.

And Blitzer, that “very long article” in the New York Times? It wasn’t long at all, let alone “very” long. I remember reading it on Saturday night in about three minutes, with distractions. It was 1,361 words long (read it here). And everything in the article relating to the specifics of the program had already been reported by the Times in their original December 2005 James Risen/Eric Lichtblau article, which I remember reading back when it was published (and yes, Wolf, that one was pretty long).

This is the way CNN treats their viewers, and it isn’t just CNN of course. They expect that you don’t read print journalism, and they expect that you won’t know when they’re exaggerating, or misleading, or being sloppy with the facts in order to make their viewers think that they’re in on a “breaking” news story that’s “developing” in a very exciting way.

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