Fleischer Defends the Media

What a spectacle: Former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer jumping to the defense of members of the White House press corps against the charge by his successor, Scott McClellan, that they were "complicit enablers" in the run-up to the Iraq war.

There was undeniably something twisted about McClellan -- he of the robotic stonewall -- criticizing the journalists he had so ardently stymied for so long. But it's even more disturbing to see Fleischer try to make the case that the media did a really good job.

Not surprisingly, Fleischer was able to fish out a few examples of aggressive questioning from the voluminous press-briefing archives for his Washington Post op-ed on Sunday. But his argument ultimately boils down to an unpersuasive exercise in self-pity.

Fleischer cites McClellan's charge that the press "failed to aggressively question the rationale for war," and responds: "As someone whose duty it was to assume the position of a human piñata every day in the briefing room, I only wish Scott were right. . . .

"At the risk of agreeing with one of my toughest protagonists in the briefing room -- NBC's David Gregory-- the press was tough, plenty tough. I have the scars -- and the transcripts -- to prove it. . . .

"'I often returned to my office beaten down from the clashes in the briefing room.'"

As an example, Fleischer writes that "as soon as Bush indicated that he was even considering using force against Saddam Hussein, the press challenged the White House.

"'Is the president willing to prepare to sacrifice American and Iraqi innocent lives to take out Saddam Hussein,' Helen Thomas asked in early September 2002, more than six months before the war began.

"That month, one reporter (the transcript doesn't say who) asked at the daily briefing, 'Do we have new evidence, even if you're not going to detail it to us now, that suggests the threat is getting worse?'"

That latter question? Not exactly blistering. And a question from Helen Thomas -- the Hearst columnist who has been by far the most critical inquisitor in the briefing room for six years now -- is hardly representative.

Incidentally, neither Thomas nor anyone else was able to knock Fleischer out of spin mode. His response to Thomas's question that day: "The President is prepared to protect innocent lives. And that is why the President has said that Iraq is part of the axis of evil."

Here's the climax of Fleischer's op-ed: "In early December 2002, after weapons inspectors came up empty-handed after visits to Iraqi sites that we thought contained weapons of mass destruction, I was asked, 'Does it undermine the president's credibility at all [that] these sites were pointed to by him and Prime Minister Blair as very suspicious, and inspectors . . . didn't seem to find anything?' That doesn't sound like complicit enabling to me. . . .