With “Straight Talk” on screen, ABC's World News led Wednesday night by touting as momentous the news that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, in a quote cited in the middle of a newspaper column, said “I don't know” when asked whether invading Iraq was a good idea. “Three little words,” a delighted Charles Gibson announced about dissension in the ranks, “three little words that you rarely hear from the Bush administration when it comes to the war in Iraq: 'I don't know.' That's what Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said when asked if the Iraq invasion was a good idea. Gates' words are in stark contrast to the surety often expressed by the President.” Reporter Jonathan Karl trumpeted how “Gates' stunningly candid answer came in an interview with New York Times columnist David Brooks.” Repeating the “I don't know” reply, Karl urged: “Compare that to the words of President Bush, who has said consistently and forcefully the invasion was the right thing to do.” Viewers then saw three Bush soundbites. Karl concluded with how Gates disagrees with Bush “on what might just be the most important question of the Bush presidency.”
ABC seems to apply the approving “straight talk” label to those expressing the media's consensus liberal view.
For instance, back on the April 14, 2006 World News Tonight, anchor Elizabeth Vargas set up a story on fears that John McCain was moving to the right, by recalling how “during his 2000 campaign, McCain gathered support as a straight-talking maverick by attacking some members of his party's base. Now it appears he's on a very different course.” Reporter Dan Harris then reminisced about how in 2000 McCain's “straight talk included taking on powerful Christian conservatives like Jerry Falwell, whom he called an 'agent of intolerance.'” (NewsBusters item)
Neither the CBS Evening News nor NBC Nightly News found the Gates quote inside a newspaper column so momentous and didn't utter a word about it Wednesday night.
Karl's quotation of Gates did not match the column he cited. Karl asserted:
Secretary Gates' stunningly candid answer came in an interview with New York Times columnist David Brooks. Asked if the invasion of Iraq was worth doing, Gates first rephrased the question: "If I'd known then what I know now, would I have done the same? I think the answer is 'I don't know.'"
On screen, ABC displaced this text next to a picture of Gates:
If I'd known then what I know now, would I have done the same? I think the answer is "I don't know."
But in the September 19 column, “The Education of Robert Gates,” Brooks included (in both online and printed editions) only this shorter quotation of Gates answering his question:
I asked him whether invading Iraq was a good idea, knowing what we know now. He looked at me for a bit and said, “I don’t know.”
Maybe the Times posted audio somewhere, but it's not on the page with the Brooks column.
The MRC's Brad Wilmouth corrected the closed-captioning against the video for the September 19 lead story on ABC's World News:
CHARLES GIBSON, IN OPENING TEASER: Welcome to World News. Tonight, the U.S. Secretary of Defense says he doesn't know whether invading Iraq was the right thing to do. Do the White House and the Pentagon disagree?...
GIBSON: Good evening. Three little words, three little words that you rarely hear from the Bush administration when it comes to the war in Iraq: "I don't know." That's what Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said when asked if the Iraq invasion was a good idea. Gates' words are in stark contrast to the surety often expressed by the President, though Gates was quick to add, on the issue of troop levels needed in Iraq, the White House and Pentagon are in total agreement. Jonathan Karl is at the Pentagon tonight. John?
JONATHAN KARL: Charlie, it has been an article of faith for the Bush administration that invading Iraq was the right thing to do. Now, the man in charge of running the war says he's not so sure. Secretary Gates' stunningly candid answer came in an interview with New York Times columnist David Brooks. Asked if the invasion of Iraq was worth doing, Gates first rephrased the question: "If I'd known then what I know now, would I have done the same? I think the answer is 'I don't know.'" Compare that to the words of President Bush, who has said consistently and forcefully the invasion was the right thing to do.
GEORGE W. BUSH, MAY 25, 2006: I strongly believe we did and are doing the right thing.
BUSH, APRIL 6, 2006: Removing Saddam Hussein was the right thing for world peace and the security of our country.
BUSH, JULY 12, 2007: It is a necessary war to secure our peace.
LEE HAMILTON, IRAQ STUDY GROUP: Well, it's just a stark contrast. You couldn't get a greater contrast.
KARL: Lee Hamilton is the co-author of the Iraq Study Group report.
HAMILTON: It's refreshing to me to see a Secretary of Defense who has an appreciation of military power, but also an appreciation of the limitations of military power.
KARL: Secretary Gates supports the President's strategy on the so-called "surge," but he has a starkly different view on what can be accomplished in Iraq. In another interview today, he told the Wall Street Journal he is focused on bringing, quote, "a long-term stabilizing presence." Absent in the interview, any talk of spreading democracy, once the centerpiece of the Bush administration's foreign policy.
BUSH, from the January 2005 Inauguration: -with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.
KARL: Gates, in a speech this week, sought to scale that back.
ROBERT GATES: We must be realists and recognize that the institutions that underpin an enduring and free society can only take root over time.
DAVID GERGEN, FORMER PRESIDENTIAL ADVISOR: The President's, you know, vow in his second inaugural was to spread democracy around the world. Bob Gates is coming and saying, "Hey, wait a minute. This takes a long time. Let's be patient. We're not on a crusade. Let's do the best we can."
KARL: Asked to clarify Secretary Gates' comments on the war, the Pentagon referred back to his confirmation hearing in December when he said it was, quote, "too early to tell" if invading Iraq was the right decision. So, Charlie, now on two different occasions, the Secretary of Defense has passed up on an opportunity to agree with the Commander-in-Chief on what might just be the most important question of the Bush presidency.
—Brent Baker is Vice President for Research and Publications at the Media Research Center
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Comments Policy
Gates is a complete
September 19, 2007 - 20:52 ET by TEGates is a complete disaster. Why the hell did Bush decide to nominate Gates as secretary of defense?
Gates Answer
September 19, 2007 - 23:07 ET by Lame CherryThere are several reasons why Gates is Sec of Defense, but more importantly is the reason of the banking cartels with Russia and the Islamocommunists who so with American liberals inflamed the Iraq policy that it appeared as a failure when it was a success under Rumsfeld...........because Iraq was supposed to be a terrorist kill zone.
Gates is a company man in the mould of pop Bush and Scowcroft. He knows the hidden bones in the Middle East closet in how to deal with the cartel, patricians, communists, European socialists and Muslims.
The living large reason though Gates was placed where he was by pop Bush was to aid George 43 in pulling the trigger in the Middle East. People do not remember that Gates was the one who wanted to hit Nicaragua with military force. When the time comes for the Bush/Cheney doctrine on Iran..........Gates will pull the trigger with more force and follow up any Islamocommunist counter attacks with nuclear options without batting an eye. Gates was chosen, because this guy knows only one way to unload a locked and loaded system and that is to fire it.
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Welcome to Iraq, the reality
September 19, 2007 - 21:20 ET by Lame CherryI personally in numerous posted articles have attempted to explain "what Iraq really is". Certainly, Iraq was about Bush 43 taking out the mistake of Bush 41 listening to Colin Powell in leaving Saddam in power, but Iraq which George Bush will never "come clean on" as it will bring down the United States political system and start the advent of a nuclear war are facts which he deems the truths must be forever hidden.
What really to use a French pardon, pisses me off are the millionaire excrement orifices in using Iraq as an implement in their war to bring down the United States government to further their New World Order agendas at the behest of the narco mafia banking cartels.
Iraq is a mission which has many purposes. It was a kill zone lure for terrorists to slaughter them there. It IS part of the containment ridge against communist Russia and China which in a coming world war has a battlefield in south central Asian steppes as a slaughter field where America can employ massive nuclear and Star Wars firepower to destroy a 200 million man army there. It was part of the keeping of the dollar as world currency as Saddam was buying the Euro which would have destroyed the American economy. It was part of ending Saddam's bribing the western corrupt socialist from Clinton to Chirac. It was about getting back 2 tons of weapons grade Nigerian uranium which Franch refined for Saddam. It was about stopping the use of WMD's by Saddam in Darfur to what consistantly points to terror attacks by Saddam's intel from Oklahoma City in leauge with al Qaeda and the seeding of West Nile in America.
Iraq was about all of the above and more. It was about America taking out Iraq before the Israeli state vaporized it and most of the Middle East leaving only Putin with a viable oil supply.
Iraq was a first step in fighting not just terror wars, but a world war started by Eurasians in Eurasian steppes instead of on Alaskan shores into Canada and into the gut of Europe in Prague, Bohemia and Bavaria. The socialists now have set in motion by moving the Iraq policy of a kill zone into a safe zone a warfare of WMD's which will now in an 90% probability bring war to the most populated areas of Europe.
It is of no matter if the dick heads Gibson and Karl comprehend any of the Iraq policies, but what is of matter these excrement orifices know completely they are skewing the news to bring down a sitting President for the benefactors they have sold their souls to for the expressed purpose of their benefit.
That is disgusting..........but there is not going to be any satisfaction in their payback when in the years ahead this all blows up into a cauldron of bio and chemical weapon wed hybrids with nuclear vaporizations as all of us are going to be stuck on the same planet with nowhere to go........and no one to ask if the air is fit to breathe because that is all there is to breathe.
If these anarchists and socialists had just backed America in Iraq instead of Dan Rather turning the American dolt against their own victory none of this would have happened. Now the best America can hope for is when we loose a city or cities from nuclear terrorism that the nuclear response actually kills and disrupts enough of the Islamocommunists they will not be able to reorganize to be a tool of the Russian Bolsheviks and Chicoms in the world war..........and that the America use of nuclear weapons so scares the Eurasians that nowhere in the coming World War III they do not retaliate on America with nuclear strikes when the United States comes to the last defense of a realing western Europe from Russian, Chicom and Islamic invasion.
Perhaps if it is New York which is struck Gibson might sizzle long enough to know what doomsday he helped hatch, but that is small comfort with what the living Americans will have to deal with because then the real trouble begins for the entire world.
Here am I content though that I will never understand people like Charles Gibson so filled with cowardly loathesomeness that he will not commit suicide to end his self hatred, but instead spends his entire existence trying to kill the one thing he will kill and that is his own people and nation, the United States of America.
.......and they pay him millions to do this.
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Three little words we never hear the MSM say:
September 20, 2007 - 06:57 ET by Six String SpiffThese MSM snobs really piss me off to no end. Why is it when one watches these 'news' programs, you never hear "Those are FACTS". Nope. Instead we have nothing but talking heads that somehow got to be known as 'anchors' who do NOTHING, absolutely NOTHING, but read the teleprompter, and inject their own OPINIONS. Opinions do not belong in the news. The news is about facts. We don't hear facts anymore. We hear about the latest moronic celbrity BS. There is ONE exception to my rant. And his name is Paul Harvey. These MSM snobs need to take a lesson from him. He reads the FACTS over the radio, and one is actually left to decide for their own what to think about them. IMAGINE THAT?
The American Revolution Continued
How deep is that hole? "I dont know"?
September 20, 2007 - 09:14 ET by general companyIs it still "Straight talk" if he suggest we are winning?
Sure you could, amazing how liberals can get solace in the most benign of comments. Saying "I dont know" isn't disagreeing.