Septenthians -- If We Were Only So Lucky

"John Harwood made the observation that news and editorial staffs were not always of the same mind, and that his own institution (the Wall Street Journal) was split over the issue. Most of the news department was in agreement with the New York Times, while the Wall Street Journal's editorial staff tended to think exposing the SWIFT program was rather irresponsible. Harwood used this as evidence that mainstream media isn't monolithic, but he missed the larger point that the WSJ's editorial attitude, probably stemming from a Socrates-like recognition that the epitome of wisdom is to know the devastating extent of your own ignorance, was simply incapable of staying the Times's destructive thrust.

Dana Priest's rather preposterous line of defense was that the Times "slant" on such questions emerges from its principled opposition to the President's Iraq policy "on a strategic level". I assume that what she meant is that they don't see the need for our intervention in the Middle East. But that's not so much a strategic opposition as a failure to perceive or comprehend strategy in the first place. If they had demonstrated any comprehension of Iraqi Freedom, rather than simply choosing to see it as a "mess" from their vantage behind the Green Zone boundary, she might have had a case. But the "strategy" they favor can be summed up with the simple term: "9-10". [ I prefer "Septenthian. But unfortunately, that's too kind a term for traitors -- witless or not. -ed. ]

There's also an institutional aspect to the problem that many commentators fixated on bias haven't mentioned. Our mainstream press establishment is so captivated with the compulsions of the "gotcha game", the winner of which tends to be awarded the Pullitzer, that they wouldn't recognize a strategy if it bit them "somewhere beyond the sun's jurisdiction". The whole expose' of the SWIFT intelligence operation was about "gotcha", rather than about some fundamental-and-deeply-contemplated disagreement over strategy. No one on the Times's editorial board or its news staff has the slightest inkling of how the SWIFT operation fit into any strategy, because they're essentially "strategy blind"."