Veteran CBS News reporter Mark Knoller interviewed Dick Cheney at the White House today. He asked few substantive questions and religiously refrained from following up on the vice president’s shallow responses to the ones he did ask. One question did stand out, though.

What do you make about the extent to which you and the President have been demonized and vilified over the strategy in Iraq? I’ve been in Washington some 30 years, I’ve rarely — I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like it.

Well. Really. What the hell.

Bush and Cheney are incorrigible liars who have cheerfully demonized and vilified anyone who dared voice a question or criticism about them or their marketing and conduct of the invasion and occupation. Even if Knoller slept through the 90s, when Republicans tried to unseat Bill Clinton while accusing him of everything from treason to murder to dope dealing, he’s clearly been present and at times conscious during this century. We can tell, because back in April he took it upon himself to defend his colleagues from charges that they failed their profession and their readers in covering the administration.

Knoller, you see, took exception to Bill Moyer’s show on the failure of the institutional press during the runup to the invasion, and was shocked at the response from readers when he said so on the CBS News blog. According to him, the institutional press “were not willing dupes of - or accomplices to - the President’s decision to go to war in Iraq.” His proof consisted of a few tentatively challenging questions posed by other White House reporters during that peculiar Bush news conference, a bit more than a week before the invasion, when an apparently heavily sedated president devoted most of his time to answering the infamous “is the Lord your Shepherd and what do you want” inquiry.

Both the New York Times and the Washington Post have apologized for their coverage, which ranged from credulous to stenographic to approving, of the administration’s case for war. So, somewhat obliquely, has Knoller’s former colleague, Dan Rather, who gave a vivid description of his own self-censorship in the wake of 911.

And so on. Moyers didn’t say that every reporter fell down: he singled some out for praise, and he placed a fair amount of blame on editors and publishers who killed or buried critical reporting, as the Post did to Walter Pincus and Thomas Ricks, and as the Times did to everyone except administration cheerleaders Judy Miller and Michael Gordon. But there really isn’t any doubt at all that the press as a whole, as an institution, failed miserably at covering the invasion during the year prior to it and, to an erratically diminishing extent, afterwards as well. And yet the hapless Knoller missed it.

Back to his “question” for Cheney. There is now near-universal agreement that the administration have collectively perpetrated the biggest national security fraud in modern history upon this country, and spent a half-trillion dollars doing it. They’re responsible for resuscitating al Qaeda; they’ve caused the needless deaths of more than 3,000 US troops and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. They’ve sent nearly 20% of that country’s population into exile, either internally or in neighboring countries. And they not only have no clue as to how to repair the damage, they don’t even want to repair it; they just want to survive it. The problem isn’t that they’re being demonized and vilified; it’s that they’re not being demonized and vilified nearly so much as circumstances demand.

Way to go, CBS: send a guy without a brain to interview a guy without a heart.

Like this post? Share it!