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"You can't make up anything anymore. The world itself is a satire. All you're doing is recording it."
- Art Buchwald

I bet you don't have a friend who's an acupuncturist

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Playing by the rules. You have to admire the way AP journalist Terence Hunt simultaneously obeys and (rightly) ridicules a press restriction in this story:

Mystery official briefs press on Cheney
By TERENCE HUNT, AP White House Correspondent
Tue Feb 27, 11:33 PM ET

The rules were simple. The official who briefed reporters on Vice President Dick Cheney's plane could be identified only as a senior administration official. But there were plenty of clues who was talking as Cheney wrapped up a trip with surprise stops in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

"The reason the president wanted me to come, obviously, is because of the continuing threat that exists in this part of the world on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistan border," the high-ranking person who spoke on condition of anonymity said Tuesday.

The White House distributed a text of the senior administration official's comments on Air Force Two as Cheney flew from Afghanistan to Oman before beginning his flight back to Washington. The transcript did not spell out why the official on Cheney's plane would not be quoted by name.

There had been reports in some newspapers that Cheney was going to tell Pakistan's president, Pervez Musharraf, that he needed to be more aggressive against al-Qaida operatives and Taliban fighters in the lawless border area between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

"Let me just make one editorial comment here," the official said. "I've seen some press reporting says, `Cheney went in to beat up on them, threaten them.' That's not the way I work. I don't know who writes that, or maybe somebody gets it from some source who doesn't know what I'm doing, or isn't involved in it. But the idea that I'd go in and threaten someone is an invalid misreading of the way I do business.

The story goes on in that vein for awhile longer, with Hunt dutifully quoting the "senior administration official." The press ought to do this more often, instead of letting politicians hide behind anonymity. (via The Politico)

Update: Howard Kurtz gets into the act:

The first-person pronoun gave away the game. But it also raised the question: Why did Cheney feel the need to speak on a not-for-attribution basis, and why did the seven journalists on the trip go along?

Lee Anne McBride, Cheney's press secretary, could not, under the ground rules, confirm the obvious. But, she said, "it was important to provide the press and public with briefings on these meetings, and it was determined that a more comprehensive readout could be provided on a background basis."

Administration officials concluded that, for diplomatic reasons, Cheney could not publicly discuss private conversations with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf and Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

Mark Silva, a Chicago Tribune reporter who made the trip, was among those pressing Cheney's staff for an on-the-record briefing, saying the vice president has been elected twice.

"At the start of our meeting with a senior administration official, in which he advised us that he insisted this talk be on background, we asked him, too, to go on the record," Silva said. Cheney agreed to be identified only while discussing the suicide bombing at Bagram air base in Afghanistan that occurred while he was there.

Silva credited the White House with releasing an accurate transcript despite numerous "I" references. "But it's also a measure of how absurd the entire business of speaking as an SAO is."

Labels: Cheney, journalism

posted by Paul Murray at 12:34 AM | permanent link |