The Cable Gamer thinks that Scott McClellan has a perfect right to publish his book, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception, in which he tells his side of the story as he saw it--or as he imagines it, since it's pretty clear that he wasn't in most of the big meetings.
But at the same time, it's naive to not point out two things to fellow Cable Gamers:
First, McClellan will sell a lot more books this way. As Newsbusters' Rich Noyes astutely pointed out, the MSM mostly ignored Ari Fleischer's pro-Bush book three years ago.
Second, as Newsmax's Ron Kessler observed, McClellan's book reads like it could have been copied from the editorial page of any liberal newspaper, since What Happened is full of accusations that President George W. Bush led a "political propaganda campaign" aimed at "manipulating sources of public opinion."
With those two points out of the way, The Cable Gamer herself will stick to commenting on the cable coverage. Newsbusters' Matthew Balan caught this item, for example, in which CNN's John Roberts told The Politico's Mike Allen that McClellan "articulates what we all came to believe." Now who is this "we"? And isn't "all" a pretty strong statement! Are the media really that unanimous?
Here's Roberts this morning:
He claims that President Bush used 'propaganda to sell the war.' Let's look at what he says in the book. 'And his advisers confused the propaganda campaign with the high level of candor and honesty so fundamentally needed to build and then sustain public support during a time of war.' He finally articulates what we all came to believe, Mike, and further goes on to say that this war was unnecessary.
Now in truth, surely not "all" reporters came to believe that Bush is the Deceiver -in-Chief. But surely most do.
And yet at the same time, aren't reporters supposed to be, you know, fair and balanced? Or at least keep their opinions to themselves?
But The Cable Gamer figures that Roberts is taking no risk in saying what he said. The liberal culture of CNN isn't going to criticize Roberts--they will praise him.
As for viewers, well, they're a different story. Who knows how they'll react. But the first priority of any MSM reporter is to keep up appearances in the newsroom. And that means throwing around the "royal we," and its companion, the "royal all."
And throwing them around liberally.
