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Times Watch for
October 27, 2004
Blowback from the
Times' "Explosives" Scoop
In one of three follow-up stories on the Times' conveniently timed Monday scoop about missing explosives in Iraq, Wednesday's story from David Halbfinger, "Kerry Attacks Bush Over Loss of Explosives," enlists Tom Brokaw in defense of its story.
Halbfinger, with John Kerry in Las Vegas, begins: "Senator John Kerry lambasted President Bush on Tuesday over the disappearance in Iraq of a huge cache of powerful explosives, saying the president's response to devastating facts' about the explosives called into question his competence as commander in chief. Mr. Kerry said the White House had first tried to conceal those facts until after Election Day, then minimized them when they emerged and finally denied them."
The Times pats itself on the back for "roiling" the Bush campaign: "The disappearance of the explosives has roiled the presidential campaign since the report on Monday, by The New York Times and CBS News, that some of them may have been removed from an ammunition dump after American troops passed by and failed to secure the area. Officials from the International Atomic Energy Agency had warned American officials before the war began that nearly 380 tons of high explosives were hidden at the stockpile called Al Qaqaa."
Then the paper uses NBC to defend its scoop against White House rebuttals: "Republican officials have sought to discredit the initial reports and seized on an NBC News account, broadcast Monday night, that said when troops from the 101st Airborne arrived at the vast site on April 10, 2003, they found conventional weapons but none of the extremely powerful high explosives, HMX and RDX, which can be used to set off a nuclear weapon. In an e-mail message sent to reporters on Monday evening, Scott Stanzel, a spokesman for the Bush campaign, said, 'The weapons were not there when the military arrived, making John Kerry's latest ripped-from-the-headlines attack baseless and false.' But Tuesday evening, NBC again reported on the issue."
Halbfinger helpfully relays anchor Tom Brokaw's attempt to neutralize the White House rebuttal of the NYT: "Last night on this broadcast we reported that the 101st Airborne never found the nearly 380 tons of HMX and RDX explosives. We did not conclude the explosives were missing or had vanished, nor did we say they missed the explosives. We simply reported that the 101st did not find them. For its part, the Bush campaign immediately pointed to our report as conclusive proof that the weapons had been removed before the Americans arrived. That is possible, but that is not what we reported."
But there are other reports from news archives to bolster Bush administration claims that the Al Qaqaa site had been looted before the war. The Army Third Infantry Division was there on April 3, a week before the 101st Airborne -- the forces cited by NBC reporter Jim Miklaszewski Monday night. According to contemporaneous accounts, the Third Infantry Division appeared to do a thorough search and also found no HMX or RDX explosives.
As the well-informed Captains Quarters blogger summarizes: "The contemporaneous CBS report showed that the [Army's Third Infantry Division] knew what they had at Al Qaqaa and did more than just a cursory look around the joint to go sightseeing….From the description that CBS gave at the time, the Army took a very close look at the materiel at Al Qaqaa….The idea that various Army units showed up at the weapons facility and strolled around a few minutes before moving up the road to Baghdad, leaving the lights on and the front door unlocked, looks more and more ridiculous. The Army knew very well what it had found, and it searched the bunkers carefully looking for the most dangerous and high-priority items."
For the rest of Halbfinger with Kerry (and the explosives scoop), click here.
• Campaign 2004 | Explosives | David Halbfinger | Iraq War | Sen. John Kerry
"Explosive" Scoop: Firecracker or Fizzle?
Jim Dwyer and David Sanger follow up on the NYT's iffy, conveniently timed "missing explosives"
story in Wednesday's "No Check of Bunker, Unit Commander Says."
They begin: "White House officials reasserted yesterday that 380 tons of powerful explosives may have disappeared from a vast Iraqi military complex while Saddam Hussein controlled Iraq, saying a brigade of American soldiers did not find the explosives when they visited the complex on April 10, 2003, the day after Baghdad fell. But the unit's commander said in an interview yesterday that his troops had not searched the site and had merely stopped there overnight. The commander, Col. Joseph Anderson, of the Second Brigade of the Army's 101st Airborne Division, said he did not learn until this week that the site, Al Qaqaa, was considered sensitive, or that international inspectors had visited it before the war began in 2003 to inspect explosives that they had tagged during a decade of monitoring."
Dwyer and Sanger elaborate on the back and forth between the media and the Bush White House: "What had been, for the colonel and his troops, an unremarkable moment during the sweep to Baghdad took on new significance this week, after The New York Times, working with the CBS News program '60 Minutes,' reported that the explosives at Al Qaqaa, mainly HMX and RDX, had disappeared since the invasion. Earlier this month, officials of the interim Iraqi government informed the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency that the explosives disappeared sometime after the fall of Mr. Hussein on April 9, 2003. Al Qaqaa, which has been unguarded since the American invasion, was looted in the spring of 2003, and looters were seen there as recently as Sunday. President Bush's aides told reporters that because the soldiers had found no trace of the missing explosives on April 10, they could have been removed before the invasion. They based their assertions on a report broadcast by NBC News on Monday night that showed video images of the 101st arriving at Al Qaqaa. By yesterday afternoon Mr. Bush's aides had moderated their view, saying it was a 'mystery' when the explosives disappeared and that Mr. Bush did not want to comment on the matter until the facts were known."
The Times belatedly and obliquely lays out an alternative view, pointing out that the Army's Third Infantry Division had been to Al Qaqaa earlier and apparently found no heavy explosives, suggesting the site had been looted before U.S. forces arrived: "The [Pentagon] official suggested that the material could have vanished while Mr. Hussein was still in power, sometime between mid-March, when the international inspectors left, and April 3, when members of the Army's Third Infantry Division fought with Iraqis inside Al Qaqaa. At the time, it was reported that those soldiers found a white powder that was tentatively identified as explosives. The site was left unguarded, the official said. The 101st Airborne Division arrived April 10 and left the next day. The next recorded visit by Americans came on May 27, when Task Force 75 inspected Al Qaqaa, but did not find the large quantities of explosives that had been seen in mid-March by the international inspectors. By then, Al Qaqaa had plainly been looted."
For the rest of Dwyer and Sanger on the explosives, click here.
• George W. Bush | Campaign 2004 | Explosives | David Halbfinger | Iraq War
Sanger Still Pushing Explosives Scoop
David Sanger tails Bush through the Midwest for Wednesday's "In Rural Tour, Bush Asks Democrats for Their Vote" and manages to work in his "explosives"
scoop from Monday.
After a jaunty assessment of Bush's interaction with supporters ("At each stop, Mr. Bush looked energetic and almost ebullient, playfully joking with crowds that sometimes seemed larger than his margin of defeat [in Wisconsin] -- 5,708 -- four years ago") Sanger returns to the Times' questionable story on missing explosives in Iraq: "Reporters traveling with him twice shouted questions about the missing high explosives in Iraq, an issue Mr. Kerry was discussing at length today. Both times, Mr. Bush declined to answer."
Sanger delivers this odd anti-Bush scuttlebutt: "While Mr. Bush was clearly enjoying himself, the tension within his staff was evident to reporters. Part of the reason was the dispute over the missing high explosives in Iraq, which Mr. Bush's aides continued to say was old news only now coming to light in a last-minute effort to create an issue for Mr. Kerry. Vice President Dick Cheney, speaking in Florida on Tuesday, said, 'It is not at all clear that those explosives were even at the weapons facility when our troops arrived in the area of Baghdad.' By later in the day, Mr. Bush's aides seemed to moderate some of their criticism, saying a full investigation of the disappearance had to be completed before the president could comment on the issue, and that would not be likely to happen in the week before the election."
For the rest of Sanger on the trail with Bush, click here.
• George W. Bush | Campaign 2004 | Explosives | Iraq War | David Sanger
Kerry's Not That Liberal, Part II
Todd Purdum concludes his four-part profile of John Kerry with a front-page look at Kerry's Senate record in "2 Kerry Votes on War and Peace Underline a Political Evolution."
Purdum makes the same "Kerry's-not-that-liberal" argument that he made in the Times' biased voter guide: "Mr. Kerry's entire Senate career has been equally complicated. While The National Journal ranked Mr. Kerry the Senate's most liberal member based on his roll-call votes in 2003, his career voting -- and speaking -- record is more eclectic and less predictable than that rating would imply. Mr. Kerry has been a reliable advocate of environmental regulation, gay rights and gun control, but he also joined with Republicans to press for reduction of the federal deficit in the mid-1980's, long before that was popular with most other Democrats."
Of course, tax hikes are often sold as a way to cut the deficit, so that's not necessarily a conservative position. To his credit, Purdum then sifts Kerry's confusing statements on the current war in Iraq and compares them to his stark opposition to the 1991 Gulf War.
For the rest of Purdum on Kerry, click here.
• Campaign 2004 | Sen. John Kerry | Gulf War | Iraq War | Labeling Bias | Todd Purdum
The
NYT's "Base" Instincts
Richard Stevenson analyzes Bush's boilerplate campaign speech in Wednesday's "Bush's Talks May Vary, but Always a Reminder: Sept. 11."
"Before getting on with his withering assault on Mr. Kerry, the president tries to establish an emotional connection with his audience by making clear his deep affection for Laura Bush, his wife of almost 27 years. Then it is on to an expression of loyalty to Vice President Dick Cheney, a lightning rod for the administration's critics but a hero to conservatives like those who wait hours in arenas and on ball fields and in parking lots to hear Mr. Bush speak….In nearly all its incarnations, the speech mixes glimpses of his warmth toward his family with calculated signals to his conservative base, references to his religious faith, flashes of his wisecracking humor, policy prescriptions, succinct explanations of his worldview and a gauzy sense of his basic optimism."
The story isn't bad but suffers from a common Times' tic -- labeling bias. How often does the NYT emphasize Kerry's attempts to appeal to his "liberal base"?
Over the last six months, the term "liberal base" as a description by a reporter has, according to a Nexis search, cropped up just twice in stories on the Kerry campaign. By contrast, there have been 18 instances of "conservative base" used by reporters in Bush-related stories (seven of those written by Stevenson himself).
For the rest of Stevenson on Bush's standard speech, click here.
• George W. Bush | Campaign 2004 | Labeling Bias | Richard Stevenson
No Liberals in the Battleground States
Not even the NYT's Voter Guide analysis of polls in battleground states is immune from bias. Alan Greenblatt, a writer at Governing Magazine, has a rundown of the races in 12 competitive states. Greenblatt finds "conservative transplants" in Colorado, "socially conservative voters" in Michigan, and plain old "conservatives in Ohio and Florida.
How about the liberal side? Well, there are none, because Greenblatt avoids the loaded term in favor of softer words. He finds a "dovish tradition" in Wisconsin, voters "progressive on issues like abortion, the environment and gun control" in Pennsylvania, and a "generally progressive tilt on social issues" in New Hampshire (Note: New Hampshire is strangely absent from the online version of this story).
For the full review of the battleground states, click here.
• Campaign 2004 | Alan Greenblatt | Labeling Bias | Polls
E-mail TimesWatch Director, Clay Waters, with TimesWatch feedback at cwaters@mediaresearch.org