Verb-- 1. When a member of mainstream media who, after collecting a few hours worth of video, sound bites, and interviews, "Picks" the "Sweetest" 1% that best tells the story the reporter wants to sell. 2. The choosing of specific facts, irrespective of context, to piece together a story that serves a desired or preferred outcome. 3. The act of picking cherries.
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Source: The man in charge of intelligence on Iraq until last year, Paul Pillar. He said Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney made it clear what results they wanted and heeded only the analysts who produced them. Incredibly, Mr. Pillar said, the president never asked for an assessment on the consequences of invading Iraq until a year after the invasion. He said the intelligence community did that analysis on its own and forecast a deeply divided society ripe for civil war.
When the administration did finally ask for an intelligence assessment, Mr. Pillar led the effort, which concluded in August 2004 that Iraq was on the brink of disaster. Officials then leaked his authorship to the columnist Robert Novak and to The Washington Times. The idea was that Mr. Pillar was not to be trusted because he dissented from the party line. Somehow, this sounds like a story we have heard before.
One source doesn't prove your point.
As for my point... I work in news, and I see reporters do it every day.
As for sources for the notion that the decision to invade Iraq had already been made, and that the administration presented only the intelligence that supported that decision, there are many. Start with Richard Clarke. Look at WH meetings just after 9/11 where there was a debate whether to "hit" Iraq first, or Afghanistan. I don't consider the Downing Street memo to be "proof" of anything, but it is illustrative of where the administration was long before the war started. They were obsessed with SH.
As for relying on one source, there's no better example of this than the White House basing so much of their intel on a single source--Curveball--who had been pretty thoroughly discredited before the war's start. Funny how they jump all over Newsweek for relying on a single source for a story, when they relied so heavily on a single (discredited) source for much of the intel used to justify their invasion plans.
So, what's the solution then?
There's your trouble right there... you can't differentiate punditry [Hannity, O'Reilly] from news presentation. And while you point the finger at FOX you fail to see the same in Olbermann, and Matthews.
Olberman, O'Reilly, Hannity, Matthews, are paid to be polarizing... that's they're appeal. News presentation however is a different matter. On the whole, FOX is fair and balanced in news presentation... the affiliate I work for [CBS] is not. Neither is ABC, NBC, CNN, or MSNBC or the NYT, or NPR, or the LA Times, or......
At least with FOX I don't have to wade through bullshit and opinion to get to the heart of a story.
Uh huh. As long as the "story" is about Michael Jackson, some attractive girl who has been abducted, or a murder on a cruise ship. It's all hype and garbage.
Plus, look at the number of right wing pundits (Gibson, Hume, Thomas, O'Reilly, Hannity, North, etc etc etc) on FOX vs. the one lame & ineffectual Colmes on the left.
If there were a liberal version of FOX, the right wing would be apoplectic.
And MSNBC is almost as bad. BTW, last I checked, Matthews was not exactly a liberal.