Critics Question Cheney's Need to Be Identified in Briefing as 'Senior Administration Official'

[maddezmom]

Cheney's Trip Renews Debate Over Attribution in News Accounts
Critics Question His Need to Be Identified in Briefing as 'Senior Administration Official'

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 1, 2007; Page A02

The reporters traveling with Vice President Cheney as he flew from Afghanistan to Oman yesterday were granted an interview with someone who would be identified only as a "senior administration official." But the official's identity would not remain a state secret for long.

~snip~

Administration officials concluded that, for diplomatic reasons, Cheney could not publicly discuss private conversations with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf and Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

~snip~

At the start of our meeting with a senior administration official, in which he advised us that he insisted this talk be on background, we asked him, too, to go on the record," Silva said. Cheney agreed to be identified only while discussing the suicide bombing at Bagram air base in Afghanistan that occurred while he was there.

Silva credited the White House with releasing an accurate transcript despite numerous "I" references. "But it's also a measure of how absurd the entire business of speaking as an SAO is."

more:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/28/AR2007022802021.html

Cheney's Rules for the Press
By Dan Froomkin

~snip~

Cheney's insistence on being identified as a "senior administration official" -- even when the transcript shows he spoke in the first person -- is in some ways laughably trivial.

But in other ways, the vice president's decision to extort reporters into a ridiculous agreement reflects the contempt Cheney has for the press corps.

Chicago Tribune reporter Mark Silva, for instance, filed a slew of informative, detailed and richly textured pool reports about the trip -- most of them reposted on the Tribune's Washington-bureau blog, The Swamp.

In one pool report last week, Silva slapped down as absurd rumors in the blogosphere that an earlier briefing he described as being from an administration official had actually been from Cheney himself. "I do not use that term when describing the vice president," Silva wrote.

more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2007/02/28/BL2007022801191.html


read it all...it's so freaking absurd

[Bucky]

1. A senior DU source was reported to have snorted in amusement

until he remembered all the people who are dead because of one SAO's compulsively dishonest nature.