‘Most secretive administration ever’

I pulled out this portion of an Al Jazeera America interview with Jill Abramson, executive editor of the New York Times. I thought it was interesting, particularly the journalmalism that still has her making excuses and refusing to acknowledge that the Bush administration deliberately mislead the country in its march to war:

Let me move on to another topic in the Obama administration. How would you grade this administration, compared to others, when it comes to its relationship with the media?

Well, I would slightly like to interpret the question as “How secretive is this White House?” which I think is the most important question. I would say it is the most secretive White House that I have ever been involved in covering, and that includes — I spent 22 years of my career in Washington and covered presidents from President Reagan on up through now, and I was Washington bureau chief of the Times during George W. Bush’s first term.

I dealt directly with the Bush White House when they had concerns that stories we were about to run put the national security under threat. But, you know, they were not pursuing criminal leak investigations. The Obama administration has had seven criminal leak investigations. That is more than twice the number of any previous administration in our history. It’s on a scale never seen before. This is the most secretive White House that, at least as a journalist, I have ever dealt with.

And do you think this comes directly from the president?

I would think that it would have to. I don’t know that, but certainly enough attention has been focused on this issue that, if he departed from the policies of his government, I think we’d know that at this point.

So it makes it more difficult for The New York Times to do its job.

Absolutely.

The White House does?

The White House does. And in the case of specific journalists, I would talk for a minute about Jim Risen, who is one of my most valued colleagues. In 2005, he is the reporter who, along with Eric Lichtblau, broke the story about the NSA’s warrantless eavesdropping, which was, in a way, the first view we had into the world of the NSA’s collection of data and communications. He has had this leak investigation hanging over his head for years now.

You were in Washington during at least the first term of George W. Bush. Was the media or The New York Times misled by the Bush administration when it came to the Iraq War?

Yes, we were.

Were we fooled?

There’s no doubt about that. We were, I think, not diligent enough. I don’t know if we were purposefully fooled. I think that there was a terrible echo chamber where unreliable Iraqi defectors were speaking both to members of the media and to intelligence officials and high officials in the Bush administration, and that an echo effect took hold, where, like, all the information was coming from one set of bad sources, but it seemed that multiple sources were confirming the information. And it created a kind of perfect storm. I’m not excusing it at all. I’m not excusing the Times’ role in running some very seriously flawed stories, based on —

Judy Miller?

She was not alone. It was not only Judy Miller. There were, I think 10 or 12 stories that we ended up in an editor’s note saying we had, you know, concerns about. And so I’m not, you know, minimizing that at all. But I don’t think we know for certain that there was a purposeful, “Let’s, you know, fool everyone” scheme hatched inside the Bush White House. But there’s a serious lack of diligence and an unwillingness, I think, because the prevailing view in Washington was that there was intelligence supporting the idea that Saddam Hussein had an active WMD (weapons of mass destruction) program. There were dissenters inside the government. There were analysts at the CIA who thought, “This is flimsy, flimsy evidence to support that.” But it’s kind of — journalists were not listening as closely to them or trying hard enough to find those sources, and instead, you know, in a boom effect, were carrying these baseless stories from other sources.