by MzNicky
If the Vice-President shoots a crony in the woods and no reporter is around to see it, did it really happen? We now have the answer to this classic philosophical question, and according to the White House, the answer is “No.”
At least, that’s what the WH wanted the answer to be. After sending his hunting pal, Harry Whittington, to the hospital via a shotgun blast during a “hunting” expedition this past Saturday, in which beer was apparently involved (MSNBC’s online page contained a quote to that effect at one point; the beer references have now been “scrubbed”), and then sitting down to dinner, and, oh yeah, around 8:00 pm or so alerting the President, it occurred to someone that this might be the sort of thing the public would want to know about. Thus the next morning, Mr. Cheney’s hostess-with-the-mostest became the designated public-affairs spokesperson for the incident. Apparently out of her keen sense of civic duty, Ms. Armstrong phoned a pal at the Corpus Christi, Texas, newspaper to tell her all about her wild-and-crazy weekend.
It was nearly 24 hours later that the American public was informed that the Vice President had shot a man.
For those not among the cognoscenti regarding media routines, here’s how it works: One important way reporters find out what’s going on is from what’s known as “official sources.” Journalists depend greatly upon the public-affairs offices of our elected representatives and other authorities to keep us informed. Reporters then fill in the many blanks and questions that are left unaddressed by talking to others involved in these events and researching the details—named parties, eyewitnesses, police reports, and so forth.
Contrary to public perception, the goings-on of public officials do not magically fall like manna from on high for reporters to pick up, distort with their own preconceived bias, and then rush into print without checking and double-checking the facts. This is why the arrogant refusal of the Vice President’s office to even acknowledge the shooting of Mr. Whittington, and in fact leaving the decision of its media dissemination to the discretion of an attendant private citizen, is perhaps the most unbelievably supercilious indication yet of the contempt this administration, and particularly this vice president, have for the American people.
This is why the WH press corps is hopping mad. It’s on behalf of us. We, the people. Even as Faux News and other administration apologists use this whole sorry story as the latest excuse to flog the “liberal” media for “making a mountain out of a molehill,” former Republican-administration press secretaries Marlin Fitzwater and even Bush’s own Ari Fleischer have weighed in with their horror and disbelief over how the WH has handled this incident.
Tin-eared attempts to joke the whole thing away were rather quickly abandoned when Mr. Whittington unfortunately suffered a “minor heart attack” as a result of the shooting. That Scott McClellan was aware of this downturn in Whittington’s condition apparently didn’t compel him to mention it as he faced the WH press corps on Tuesday, nor did it thwart his marching orders to kid about his orange tie (to signal Cheney that he wasn’t a target, he joshed) before testily commanding reporters to take their nosy questions elsewhere, like, to Ms. Armstrong, or the VP’s sphinx-like PR office.
The Vice President has yet to show his face in public since Saturday’s shooting, but then, we’re used to his lurking-in-the-shadows persona. Perhaps this is why he’s gotten away with not only not addressing the incident publicly, but also with his tomb-silent press office issuing only one brief written statement three days after the fact.
And oh, by the way, on the subject of our government and what its decides we deserve to know: Last night Australian network TV broadcast the latest photos from the 2003 Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal. You know, the ones the Pentagon filed suit to suppress in the US, and which we the people are only now seeing because Reuters picked up the broadcast. From Australia.
Cheney VP Shoots Man Dick Cheney Cheney Hunting Cheney Got a Gun Bush Abu Ghraib Photos
posted by egalia for MzNicky
