Wampum

Karl Rove recently criticized the media in a speech in Chestertown, Maryland. A portion of the AP story on the speech reads:

The media have started applying the horse race style of campaign coverage to daily reporting on government, leading to adversarial reporting that can obscure the truth just to create conflict, President Bush's chief political strategist said Monday…

Naming specific reporters and news organizations, Rove said the media unfairly created the impression that President Bush's No Child Left Behind Act, introduced early in his first term, was stalled in Congress at every step before its passage.

But the legislation was passed by the House and Senate with wide margins and was signed by Bush less than a year after it was introduced, Rove said. He said the media have taken a similar approach to the current debate over Social Security.

Apparently, Rove singled out a headline in the Atlanta Journal Constitution and argued that headline left the incorrect impression that NCLB legislation was stalled. Tom Baxter and Jim Galloway, who write the Political Insider column for the AJC report:

According to a story in The Washington Post, the White House strategist used coverage of the passage of President Bush's "No Child Left Behind" education plan in 2001 to make his point. Among other examples, he cited an AJC headline, "Bush plan to face more challenges," over a story about a House vote on an amendment to the bill.

If the first rule of reporting is to get the story right, then the first rule of media criticism should be to make sure that the media got the story wrong. Rove, but not the AJC, broke the first rule. Baxter and Galloway continue:

[W]e went back to look at that AJC headline for ourselves.

Turns out the headline over the story was "House keeps tests in education bill." The line which offended Rove was a subhead, in smaller type, over a lead paragraph by Scott Shepard that said: "President Bush's education reform plan easily weathered a challenge Tuesday when the House defeated an attempt to remove student-testing requirements."

If that is the best example that Karl Rove can come up with to show that the media has treated his guy poorly, then he really should stay far, far away from the issue.

Indeed, I will leave it to you to decide whether it was the AJC or Karl Rove who used “adversarial reporting” and “unfairly created … (an) impression” that obscured “the truth just to create conflict.”