White House Gets Sub-Headline Correction

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Victory! Or not quite. The White House’s public freak-out over the New York Times has won them… a correction to the Times‘ sub-headline:

Catherine Mathis, senior vice president of corporate communications for the newspaper, stated that the sub-headline has been changed, adding that a correction would be printed. However, Mathis also pointed out that the White House did not challenge the contents of the article.

A TPM Reader runs through how the Times might phrase that correction:

The White House statement on the CIA tapes is interesting. It’s extremely unusual to focus on a sub-head in attacking a story – Perino is perfectly well aware that sub-heads are written by editors, not reporters, and typically oversimplify the story that follows.

Looking closely at the NYTimes story itelf, it makes a subtly different claim than the subhead. The story states that “the involvement of White House officials” was “more extensive than Bush administration officials have acknowledged.” Not, mind you, that the White House itself had downplayed its involvement. I’m no expert on anonymous attributions, but those strike me as
two different categories. An attribution to the White House would imply, to me at least, that it came from someone in a position to speak for the institution – a spokesman, for example. A “White House official” or “senior administration official,” by contrast, is one of a small coterie of
extremely senior staff, mostly of cabinet rank or with West Wing offices.

But the more generic “Bush administration officials” encompasses a much wider array of sources, including the sorts of officials cited in earlier Times stories. All the story itself claims is that some members of this last group were misleading in earlier conversations.

So concerning the sub-head, Perino would seem to have a semi-legitimate gripe. The sub-head suggests that the White House as an institution attempted to mislead reporters on the issue; the Times certainly fails to marshal evidence in support of that claim. But on the main substance, she’s being deliberately duplicitous. The Times reporters have been speaking to
anonymous administration sources for two weeks, and clearly feel that officials deliberately misled them about the role the White House played. If Perino felt that past stories were erroneous, or that the officials to whom the Times was speaking had mischaracterized the White House role, she was welcome to speak up at any point. Her silence could reasonably be construed as tacit approval; as she demonstrates today, even when there’s a formal ‘no comment’ policy in place, the White House is eager to speak up to correct what it sees as misleading stories. So Perino’s hitting back hard because she’s eager to change the topic, and focusing on an irrelevancy – a non-reported, non-sourced sub-head. I hope the Times runs a correction tomorrow (“A headline claimed “White House Role Wider Than It Said.” In
fact, White House spokesmen have repeatedly declined to comment on the extent to which White House officials obstructed justice; it was an array of administration officials who misled reporters into believing that the White House had abided by the law in this matter. We regret the error.) so that we can all shift the focus back to where it belongs – to what the White House
did, not what it now claims to have done.

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