A Town Running Hot and Cold

At the very least, the Rumsfeld memo -- which some think was leaked by allies of the soon-to-be-former Pentagon chief to burnish his image -- clashes with his dogged public defense of the war policy and repeated accusations that reporters are getting things wrong.

"While you expect internal memos to be more wide-ranging and candid, I don't think there's as big a disconnect as is being suggested," Bartlett says. "I don't think it is the role of the secretary of defense to throw out a whole range of options for the public to chew on." Journalists have "selectively quoted the president," he says, setting up a false contrast by ignoring some of Bush's more sobering comments about Iraq.

One tidbit from the Rumsfeld memo shows the importance of the PR war: He says the administration should "go minimalist" by announcing any new policy on a "trial basis" so it can readjust if necessary -- "and therefore not 'lose.' "

While many leakers do their thing for policy reasons, they may also act out of pettiness, revenge or the ego trip of manipulating the media. Since the Times offered no clues about the sources' motivation, we can only speculate. But leaks, at least those that don't truly jeopardize national security, can be an important safety valve in a system where public pronouncements are carefully calibrated to reveal almost nothing. And journalists, of course, lap them up.

If this gusher of leaks shows that the Bush team is staunchly defending policies about which it harbors severe doubts, that has probably been true of every administration. But when the issue is a long, drawn-out, bloody war in which Americans are dying every week, the contrast between public and private comments seems more dramatic.

Beyond Pajamas

Roger L. Simon has 90 bloggers affiliated with his Pajamas Media site, but now he's come up with a new wrinkle: "We're actually getting them to go report stuff."

Toward that end, the playwright and screenwriter was pleased when his servers crashed a week ago -- because a hot story was attracting a big crowd. Simon's new Washington editor, conservative journalist Richard Miniter, obtained a police report charging that six imams who had been removed from a US Airways flight in Minneapolis had been acting suspiciously.

"They were coming to us because we broke stories, not because someone said 'I don't like Don Rumsfeld,' " says Simon, who has written movies for the likes of Woody Allen, Ron Silver and Anjelica Huston. "The challenge for us is to fact-check. We're learning how to do this by the seat of our pants. I'm scared a lot of the time. . . . If you put something on a blog that's inaccurate, you will hear back in five minutes. No institution could afford that kind of fact-checking."

This thing called "reporting" could be the new cyberflavor of the month. The liberal Huffington Post also plans to get into original reporting and has hired Melinda Henneberger, formerly of Newsweek and the New York Times, as political editor. Josh Marshall, who runs the liberal Talking Points Memo, has hired two reporters for his TPM Muckraker spinoff.

The year-old Pajamas Media, which compensates its bloggers by placing ads on their Web sites, has leaned heavily to the right. Its stars include Fox News commentator Michelle Malkin and Instapundit's Glenn Reynolds, along with a few liberals such as the Nation's David Corn. But Simon, who describes himself as conservative on foreign affairs but socially liberal, says he plans more balance on the site.

His most "idiotic" move? Briefly changing the name from Pajamas to Open Source Media on grounds that the image of bloggers in their PJs was insufficiently serious.

Switching Sides

Less than four weeks ago, Joseph Cannon was chairman of the Utah Republican Party. On Friday, he was named editor of the Deseret Morning News.

How could this be? Well, it didn't hurt that Cannon's grandfather and great-grandfather had edited the Salt Lake City paper, which is owned by the Mormon Church. But doesn't the naming of Cannon, a former Reagan administration official and Republican Senate candidate, make the paper look like a subsidiary of the GOP? Cannon told the Salt Lake Tribune that he would initially avoid handling local political stories and is "pretty comfortable being nonpartisan."