A QUESTION OF TRUST[ING THE FOURTH ESTATE]

A Question Of Trust: The CIA's Tenet takes the fall for a flawed claim in the State of the Union, but has Bush's credibility taken an even greater hit? (MICHAEL DUFFY AND JAMES CARNEY, Jul. 13, 2003, TIME)

The State of the Union message is one of America's greatest inventions, conceived by the Founders to force a powerful Chief Executive to report to a public suspicious of kings. Delivered to a joint session of Congress in democracy's biggest cathedral, it is the most important speech a President gives each year, written and rewritten and then polished again.

This is appalling disinformation. For a hundred years, until Woodrow Wilson began going up to Congress to give a speech, the State of the Union had been a fairly pro forma affair, an actual written message that was dropped off on the Hill with little fanfare:

President Thomas Jefferson changed the procedure followed by his predecessors with his first annual message (December 8, 1801). His private secretary delivered copies of the message to both houses of Congress, to be read by clerks in the House and Senate. Jefferson's change was intended to simplify a ceremony that he believed to be an aristocratic imitation of the British monarch's "Speech from the Throne," and thus unsuitable to a republic. Furthermore, preparing a response in Congress consumed valuable time during short legislative sessions.

It's of course become a staged media event, nearly always devoid of substance and as crammed full of stuff and nonsense as one would expect from any political stump speech. That a major news outlet should so baldly mischaracterize it--when they must have, or should have, known their statement to be false--undermines their case and calls into question whether they can be trusted. There should be an immediate Congressional investigation to determine who knew these two sentences of this essay to be false and when they knew it.

Or, alternatively, like the uranium deal, it's a minor mistake with little bearing on anything, though one that should not have happened. Which view seems more fair and reasonable? Posted by Orrin Judd at July 13, 2003 4:43 PM