Armies of the night

Laura Rozen of War and Piece has a very interesting comment from an 'editor friend' of hers about the Cheney article in the WaPo.

It starts:

A careful reading of the story of Cheney's coup against a feeble executive reveals that paragraphs 7 through 10 were written and inserted in haste by a powerful editorial hand. The banging of colliding metaphors in an otherwise carefully written piece is evidence of last-minute interpolations by a bad editor whom no one has the power to rewrite.

And concludes:

A key element of the coup is also ignored: the role of the press as revealed in the Libby scandal ... : Note in particular paragraph seven the phrase that Cheney's subversive roles "went undetected." The correct verb is "unreported."

This series is a landscape of an internal war. Parts of it are still smoking and some reputations are visibly dying--anonymously, for the moment. The journalistic graves registration people will go in later and tag the corpses.

So the 'bad editor' mushes up the point of the article, of which this is only part one of four, and the article was also delayed until the end of June when Washington has already fallen into its summertime snooze. I do think that is only part of the story, that the article was printed now is also a sign that elements are pushing back as strongly as they can to try to limit the power of Cheney at this juncture. The 'bad editor' must have been a last minute compromise.

To make sense of the signs of a press war, especially an internal one, is like trying to track a battle in the middle of the night. The last thing the press likes to do is report on itself, even less than on Dick Cheney.