I knew I would soon be gritting my teeth when I sat down with my copy of the new TIME; the cover has a photo illustration of the vice president standing under a cloud. The cover headline promises to deliver “The Verdict on Cheney,” with “Cheney” in blood red.
The actual article could have offered a journalistically sound examination of the implications of the Scooter Libby verdict on Cheney and/or the Bush administration.
Instead, Michael Duffy launches directly into unsubstantiated opinion. Here’s how the story starts:
George Bush’s sense of humor has always run more to frat-house gag than art-house irony, so he may not have appreciated the poetic justice any more than the legal justice on display in the Libby verdict.
Or, to be more precise, the Cheney verdict.
Bush stumped just about everyone seven years ago when he tapped the safe and solid Dick Cheney to be his running mate. But Bush didn’t want any trouble. He didn’t want a Vice President who preened before the cameras. He didn’t want a policy sparring partner. And he didn’t want someone who would check out after five years and run for President himself. And because Bush got exactly the kind of partner he wanted, he now faces the very problem he tried to avoid. Cheney has become the Administration’s enemy within, the man whose single-minded pursuit of ideological goals, creaking political instincts and love of secrecy produced an independent operation inside the White House that has done more harm than good.
On an imaginary political balance sheet, Cheney is the Democrats’ most valuable asset. And reversing that situation is getting close to impossible.
Please excuse the lengthy quote, but I wanted you to know how much you must read before you reach the story’s first fact. That fact arrives in the next sentence: Cheney met with Senate Republicans March 6.
Later in the piece, Duffy offers his own analysis — it must be his, since there’s no sign of a source — of the Libby verdict:
So when the verdict against Libby came down, it was also a rebuke to that hermetic power-sharing arrangement at the top of the White House. The legal outcome was never in doubt. Federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald had been massing evidence of perjury for months and then unveiled it piece by piece until even the defendant chose not to testify in his own defense. Libby’s highly touted defense lawyers, meanwhile, seemed weak and scattered. Their promise to reveal how the White House had left Libby to be the fall guy for higher-ups was introduced and then abandoned. And it would have taken them down a road Libby steadfastly refused to travel: the one that led to the Vice President’s door.
From the start, the case was only marginally about Libby. What was really on trial was the whole culture of an Administration that treated the truth as a relative virtue, as something it could take or leave as it needed. Everyone knows now that Bush and Cheney took the country into a deadly, costly and open-ended war on flimsy evidence of weapons of mass destruction. Yes, Congress went along. And yes, the public on balance supported it. But no one was more responsible than the Vice President for pushing the limits of the prewar intelligence that did all the convincing. And when former ambassador Joseph Wilson questioned the credibility of that intelligence ? and the motives that helped polish it ? it was Cheney who led the fight to bring him down.
Readers should always question “news” that contains the following: opinion without attribution, value-laden adjectives, questionable similes and metaphors, and debatable assertions of fact.
When the article contains each of these elements in the span of two paragraphs, we should really worry.
