A Town Running Hot and Cold

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, December 11, 2006

Washington is awash in leaks these days, giving us a rare glimpse of what really goes on behind the carefully manicured landscape of official statements.

Goodness gracious, when even Donald Rumsfeld is saying privately that the Iraq war strategy "is not working well enough or fast enough" -- and someone furnishes his memo to the New York Times -- it is clear that the administration's once-legendary discipline has broken down.

What is also clear is that the private doubts of top officials are closer to the media's dark portrait of the war than to the "absolutely, we're winning" rhetoric of President Bush. That is especially noteworthy in light of all the criticism that administration officials have heaped on correspondents in Iraq for focusing too heavily on violence and ignoring signs of progress.

The reigning assumption of reporters -- that they're not always getting the full story from government officials -- seemed vindicated by twin leaks to the Times, involving the Rumsfeld memo and a classified assessment by national security adviser Stephen Hadley that was critical of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. The disclosures also underscored how a single Deep Throat, by slipping someone a piece of paper, can transform coverage of even the most important events. From the Pentagon Papers to the outing of Valerie Plame, this has been a well-trafficked route.

A similar phenomenon was at work with the Baker-Hamilton commission, where multiple sources dribbled out most of the panel's main recommendations on Iraq well before the findings were made public last Wednesday. In fact, the group headed by former secretary of state James Baker was such a sieve that by the time the members formally unveiled their report, it seemed like old news. An entire debate took place before any member of the group had made an on-the-record utterance.

The Hadley memo -- devastatingly leaked as Bush was about to meet with Maliki in Jordan -- said that "the reality on the streets of Baghdad suggests Maliki is either ignorant of what is going on, misrepresenting his intentions, or that his capabilities are not yet sufficient to turn his good intentions into action.'' A senior administration official told reporters that the memo was merely about "building better capabilities with the Maliki government."

Bush and Vice President Cheney have excoriated news organizations, especially the Times, for publishing national security secrets, but not this time. "I guess it's easier to rally the faithful with a cry of 'national security' than with a complaint that 'this is really embarrassing,' " Times Editor Bill Keller told the New York Observer.

But White House counselor Dan Bartlett says officials are indeed upset: "I haven't seen a more egregious leak in my time in government, timed to influence a very important meeting with a head of state."

David Greenberg, a professor of journalism and history at Rutgers University, says that "you see this kind of breakdown in an administration's unitary facade when there's a lot more internal dissension. As a rule, leaking occurs when people in an administration feel there's some kind of advantage to be gained in mobilizing public pressure, and journalistic pressure, against someone else on the inside."

The Rumsfeld memo, dated the day before the midterm elections, laid out a series of options on Iraq, including "withdraw U.S. forces from vulnerable positions" and move them to an "assistance" role, based in Kuwait and some parts of Iraq.

When asked by NBC's David Gregory why the president wasn't "saying publicly what top members of this administration who were running the war were saying privately," press secretary Tony Snow said Bush had made clear that "things are not getting well enough fast enough."

Snow also accused Gregory of being "partisan" last week after a question in which the correspondent merely summarized the recommendations of the Baker group and quoted co-chairman Lee Hamilton. Snow was arguing that the report was not a rejection of the president's Iraq policy, as it was depicted by nearly all news organizations.

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."