In reading the news this morning, I was quite curious about an AP news story about how the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs issued a report “ripp[ing] the Bush administration” on their behavior during Hurricane Katrina. Problem was, after the first couple of paragraphs, the story was all about how the report was very critical of other parts of the government, particularly FEMA. This piqued my curiosity, so I looked up the Committee’s reports on Hurricane Katrina. It turns out that President Bush is mentioned only once in the investigation’s conclusions, and that mention is about his “unusual step” of declaring an emergency for the area in advance. In fact, President Bush and the White House appear rarely (if at all) in most of the Investigation Report… with the exception of an addendum by Senator Lieberman (who is the committee’s ranking member — its most powerful Democrat). I do not know if Lieberman’s “Additional Views” constitute an actual part of the report or not, but I do believe that it is fair to say that the report as a whole is no more than slightly critical in passing of President Bush, and even includes various good things that the administration did during the disaster. Lieberman’s addendum, though it may well contain some valid points, should be seen for what it is — a partisan addition to the report.
In fact, it appears that that is the way the story handled them. The placement of the paragraphs about Bush at the top of the article and the titling of the article for something that only receives a passing mention in the article’s body indicates that somewhere along the line at the AP, the story got spun. Whether this was a move to make the story more sensational (hearing about the failings of yet another government bureaucracy is less entertaining than hearing someone ripping the President), or with an intentional partisan twist (the Democrats are pushing to make Bush’s ‘failings’ during Hurricane Katrina a campaign issue) is something known only to whoever did it.