Making Waves

Wall Street Journal: "With the president's popularity flagging, the White House faces a real risk that opposition from the House and Senate leadership, fanned by the administration's Democratic adversaries, could lead to Congressional legislation blocking the deal."

The unnamed sources have their knives out: "Several Bush-administration security officials expressed concerns yesterday that terrorists could infiltrate seaports through a United Arab Emirates company that is vying to manage six U.S. ports," says the Washington Times .

Don't miss the Snow angle: "The administration signed off on the deal after it was approved by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, an interagency panel chaired by Treasury Secretary John Snow," says the Philadelphia Inquirer .

"Snow was chairman of CSX, a rail firm that, according to the New York Daily News, sold its own port operations to DP World for $1.15 billion in 2004, a year after Snow left to head Treasury."

The headline on this Jonathan Alter column in Newsweek might be "CHENEY TO MEDIA: DROP DEAD":

"Cheney believes in what might be called partisan accountability--you answer only to your own side, on your own terms, not to the jackals of the mainstream media . . .

"Fears of terrorism made his decision to go to an 'undisclosed location' understandable, but he has taken secrecy about his whereabouts to inexplicable lengths. News organizations went along with this partly to save money by not sending reporters to cover his trips. They rationalized it by explaining that Cheney never said anything to reporters anyway.

"His message to the Washington press corps is the same as the one he delivered to Sen. Patrick Leahy in the Senate cloakroom, when the Democrat had the temerity to criticize him: 'Go [blank] yourself.' By not holding a press conference since 2002, Cheney is telling the men and women assigned to cover the White House that they are irrelevant. No wonder they went crazy after learning of the shooting accident from a Texas paper . . .

"We'll see how Sean Hannity likes it when a future Democratic president or vice president gives interviews only to NPR and The Nation."

New Republic Editor Peter Beinart slams television coverage of Iraq, noting that "Jaafari's selection [as prime minister] sparked little discussion in the broadcast media. It made the front page of Monday's New York Times and Washington Post, but, in the mysterious alchemy that converts print news into network news, the Jaafari story almost disappeared. According to transcripts, it received less than a paragraph of text on ABC's 'World News Tonight Sunday' and 'Fox News Sunday.' And those were the responsible outlets. CBS's and NBC's Sunday evening broadcasts didn't mention Jaafari's selection at all.

"Americans deserve better. The argument about how fast and under what conditions to pull U.S. troops from Iraq has quieted for the moment, but it will return with a vengeance in the run-up to the 2006 elections. It's a highly partisan, ideologically freighted debate--but, as much as possible, it should be dictated by events on the ground in Iraq. The Bush administration obviously cannot be trusted to portray those events to the public in an honest way. That leaves the mass media, and the mass media is doing a lousy job."

That's are doing a lousy job.