A Reporter's View From The War Zone

When Engel did an on-camera interview with Bush late last month, he asked whether the president had been referring to Barack Obama in saying that those who would negotiate with Iran were guilty of appeasement. As aired on "NBC Nightly News," the interview showed Bush saying that his policies regarding the nation's adversaries hadn't changed, but deleted part of the answer in which Bush told Engel, "You didn't get it exactly right, either" in covering his speech. Also dropped was Bush's explanation that he was talking about al-Qaeda, Hezbollah and Hamas as well as Iran. The truncation prompted White House counselor Ed Gillespie, in a letter to NBC, to accuse the network of "deceitful editing to further a media-manufactured storyline."

Engel is puzzled by the charge, noting that the full exchange had aired the previous day on the "Today" show. "If we were trying to hide this from the public, why would we have put it online before anyone asked us to? Frankly, I didn't get it."

In his book, though, Engel may have handed his critics ammunition by essentially declaring the war a mistake. "The problem was that the U.S. invaded the wrong country, destroying an odious government that was not responsible for 9/11," he writes. "I don't know how you recover from invading the wrong country, no matter how you spin it."

Fox News host Bill O'Reilly has repeatedly attacked Engel as an antiwar advocate who has understated U.S. military progress in Iraq. Engel has described himself as a "pacifist" but says that it hasn't affected his reporting and that he has credited Bush's surge with greatly reducing violence in the country.

"War does horrible things to human beings, to societies," he says. "It brings out the best, but most often the worst, in our human nature."

These days, the debate over whether to withdraw from Iraq is getting more attention than the war itself. Coverage of the conflict has dropped dramatically in the past year, especially on television. Engel says the story has stagnated and that TV executives prefer domestic politics at the moment, but he concedes there is a broader reason as well.

"The public is tired of it," he says. "When I came home a year or two ago, I couldn't have a conversation that wasn't about Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds, what is the troop strategy. People don't ask me anymore."

A Question of Credit

Jeffrey Toobin spent weeks on his 7,000-word New Yorker profile of Republican consultant Roger Stone, even visiting a Florida swingers' club with him (and putting it on his expense account).

The piece covered some of the same ground as a Matt Labash profile in the Weekly Standard last fall, such as reciting "Stone's Rules" ("Admit nothing, deny everything, launch counterattack") and a photo of a shirtless Stone revealing the Nixon tattoo on his back.

After columnist Kathleen Parker wrote on National Review Online that Toobin owed Labash a nod of recognition, Toobin sent him a note of apology.

Says Labash: "I don't think Jeff should take it on the chin for plagiarism, because it wasn't -- he pinched some of my rhetorical devices and had a lot of the same info." Since his Standard piece was "utterly exhaustive," if another journalist follows a similar path and ends up borrowing material, "that usually warrants a hat tip."

Toobin, a CNN commentator, readily admits he read the Labash article, "and it would have been nice if I'd mentioned I read it. There is no allegation that I copied anything." He apologized, he says, because "it's important to be a mensch rather than just legally within your rights."

Howard Kurtz hosts CNN's weekly media program, "Reliable Sources."