Media Views

And yet this is how America’s leading news organizations covered this exchange: the Washington Post and the New York Times didn’t quote this part of their exchange at all. The Los Angeles Times said Mr. Rumsfeld “issued a point-by-point defense and insisted that he had not been overly positive about Iraq.” The Associated Press and NBC Nightly News ended their stories with Mr. Rumsfeld’s denial and offered no rebuttal of it. The CBS Evening News noted that Mr. Rumsfeld “disputed” Clinton’s contention that he had painted an overly rosy picture. Chris Wallace reported on Fox News that “Rumsfeld gave as good as he got.” Now it took me five minutes and three Google searches to produce a slew of evidence that the Defense Secretary was telling a whopper. Senator Clinton...inserted into the record her own list to prove her point.... These included such memorable lines the following: “I can’t tell you if the use of force in Iraq would last five days, or five weeks, or five months, but it certainly isn’t going to last any longer than that.”... But none of the leading newspapers or networks offered a single one of these examples in their stories about the day’s hearing—or even mentioned the fact that Senator Clinton had submitted such a list.