Never before in history has a superpower lost control of such vast amounts of such sensitive information — data that can help paint a picture of the foundation upon which US foreign policy is built. Never before has the trust America’s partners have in the country been as badly shaken.
I’m currently reading Gray Lady Down, an interesting look at the domino effect on journalism starting with one-time flagship, the NYT. Of course, the book’s author and I (during my interview with him for my daily show) disagree on the premise that the NYT practices what one could consider “objective journalism” without chuckling, but it’s an interesting look at numerous examples of how the NYT dropped the ball, changed up its newsrooms, and how other newspapers followed suit.
This is why I found the NYT piece on President Obama and the latest Wikileaks treason so fascinating. Despite this massively embarrassing information leak embroiling the administration in a foreign policy scandal (one in which officials not only created not-so-flattering nicknames for foreign leaders, but wrote them down), the NYT still managed glowing words about their champion.
When Mr. Obama took office, many allies feared that his offers of engagement would make him appear weak to the Iranians. But the cables show how Mr. Obama’s aides quickly countered those worries by rolling out a plan to encircle Iran with economic sanctions and antimissile defenses. In essence, the administration expected its outreach to fail, but believed that it had to make a bona fide attempt in order to build support for tougher measures.
The article spends several paragraphs setting up Iran, one of Obama’s current difficulties, as the result of a Bush blunder. When your administration appears wholly incompetent due to repeated massive information leaks, always trust the lapdog for the government to drag out the Blame Bush defense. The newspaper could barely choke back their contempt for Bush when discussing his new book:
There was something jarring about suddenly seeing George W. Bush on screen again and it wasn’t just déjà vu. It was more like running into a former spouse after many years: no matter how bitter or amicable the separation, that first reunion is disconcerting — the ex seems both eerily the same and weirdly diminished. Two years ago he left office with two wars raging and an economy in free fall, an embattled commander in chief with the lowest approval ratings of any modern president. Now Mr. Bush is offering himself up as a chatty president emeritus, sometimes defiant and other times cheerful, on a media blitz to promote his memoir, “Decision Points.”
Not surprising when you consider how the NYT reacted dramatically to the news of Valerie Plame’s outing (even though the beltway reportedly always knew due to Joe Wilson’s loose lips), dogged the previous administration, and perpetuated the story of the fabricated damaged it caused:
And now we know just how far he was willing to go with these smear tactics: as part of the effort to discredit Joseph Wilson IV, Mr. Rove leaked the fact that Mr. Wilson’s wife worked for the C.I.A. I don’t know whether Mr. Rove can be convicted of a crime, but there’s no question that he damaged national security for partisan advantage. If a Democrat had done that, Republicans would call it treason.
The New York Times has standards, after all, situational standards, that is. They’re only applicable when a Democrat is in office.