Libby Case Shows How D.C. Runs

March 6, 2007 — -- I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby lost today, and the Bush administration comes out of his trial looking venal and vindictive, but some say the real loser in the investigation into who leaked the name of CIA officer Valerie Plame is the media -- specifically, the Washington, D.C., media.

"The media looks sloppy. It looks kind of confused, and it looks, in some cases, like stenographers to the administration," says Slate.com political correspondent John Dickerson.

To understand Dickerson's charge, go back to 2002 and 2003.

During the buildup to the Iraq War, critics say, the mainstream media failed to aggressively question the evidence the administration presented -- since proved erroneous -- about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.

And for many media critics, the Libby trial raised the question of whether the cozy relationship between reporters and the policymakers they cover was to blame.

"Washington is a city in which you have the public message and then you have the hidden agenda. And almost everybody in Washington has some kind of hidden agenda," Dickerson said. "It doesn't need to be nefarious, but there is always another story line, and it's the reporter's job to find out what the real story line is. And sometimes, to get the real story line, you need a conversation that's a little more gossipy than something that's very formal."

Gossipy interaction over cocktails, information about Wilson's wife casually dropped over cocktails or a coffee, here and there, hither and yon. Part of the zeitgeist's indictment of the media is that reporters have been too close with the administration, a friendliness perhaps seen most glaringly in the relationship between Libby and former New York Times reporter Judy Miller, whose front page reporting helped the administration make the public case about Iraq's WMDs.

Asked during his grand jury testimony whether there was a reason Libby met Miller at her hotel rather than his office, Libby said having less formal meetings was part of the nature of his job.

"Part of my job to talk to the press about different sorts of things and one of the types of things we do when we talk to them is, you know, here's how the administration generally is thinking about Iraq … usually as an off-the-record discussion over lunch just to orient them to how we think about a problem," he said.