Did I help motivate Scott McClellan to write his book blasting the Bush White House as a den of disingenuousness?
Over the weekend, Politico published McClellan’s original proposal for his book. (Hat tip to Ryan Grim, who’s written for Mother Jones, for snatching this scoop.) In the proposal McClellan promised, “I will look at what is behind the media hostility toward the President and his Administration, and how much of it is rooted in a liberal bias.”
Yes, that ol’ “liberal bias.” McClellan promised to skewer the media for being run by out-of-touch left-leaning journalists:
Fairness is defined by the establishment media within the left-of-center boundaries they set. They defend their reporting as fair because both sides are covered. But, how fair can it be when it is within the context of the liberal slant of the reporting? And, while the reporting of the establishment media may be based on true statements and facts, is it an accurate picture of what is really happening? And, how much influence do the New York Times and Washington Post have in shaping the coverage? And, why does the media do such a poor job of holding itself to account, or acknowledging their own mistakes?
But, McClellan said in the proposal he would go beyond an examination of the MSMers:
In addition to covering the above issues and questions, I will get into the influence of activist liberal reporters, like Keith Olbermann, Nation editor David Corn, and Washington Post blogger Dan Froomkin, and activist liberal media personalities, like Cindy Sheehan, Michael Moore, Al Franken, Bill Maher, and Arianna Huffington.
Well, in the end, it seems that I might have had some influence on McClellan, whom I tangled with at the White House. In two books, The Lies of George W. Bush and Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War (the latter co-written with Michael Isikoff on Newsweek), I documented how the Bush administration wielded false information and half-truths (at best) as part of a PR campaign to win public support for the invasion of Iraq. That is exactly what McClellan describes and criticizes in his own book. By the way, the subtitle of my first Bush book was “Mastering the Politics of Deception.” What’s McClellan’s subtitle? “Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception.”
So what happened to that “liberal bias.” Once outside of the White House bubble, McClellan seems to have discovered that–guess what?–it was closer to the truth than his own press briefings.
