Journalistic offal

I seriously tried to read this article until the end, but I stopped after page three.

My first clue that Daniel Flaidman, Stuart Taylor Jr, and Evan Thomas were dipping into the poison well with their pens was the title of this article: Palace Revolt.

For an article about the Bush Administration to use such a term is to imply that President Bush is in fact King George or some such potentate. They also call Vice President Cheney Prime Minister Cheney. I bet someone will say they were using a bit of artistic license. I call foul, this is supposed to be a news article, not an opinion piece. And this article gets even more foul the further in we read.

Supposedly a few lawyers inside the Bush Administration have quit in protest over such policy decisions as using strong persuasive measures to break down the resistence of detainees at Club Gitmo, which the authors call torture, and drag in Abu Gharib, bypassing of the bureaucratic maze to streamline terror prosecution, and of course that contentious case of NSA easedropping.

But the lawyers who supposedly lead this revolt in the ranks, well when these intrepid reporters asked Comey and Goldsmith to comment, refused to talk to the reporters. So the reporters are building their case on anonymous sources and attributing things to these two men as a result. Well I did get to page four and those unnamed sources say Addington got into confrontations with Goldsmith, but this is all hearsay since no one is willing to attach their name to these statements - Newsweek's writers cite sensitivity of the subject as to why no one is coming forward. If the subject is so sensitive, then why are these sources even talking about it? Can we say these sources are acting not in the best interst of this country? I can.

To me this story does not pass even Intro to Journalism criteria for a good story, but Newsweek is running with it. And strangely just before President Bush is supposed to give his State of the Union address, how serendipitous for Newsweek. This story is a skunk and Newsweek should be ashamed of itself.