April 11, 2006--Below the Fold

"Below the fold" in full-size newspapers such as the NY Times refers to stories printed on the bottom half of the page. In other words, stories less important in the eyes of the editors than those above the fold. But when articles appear below the fold and on pages such as A6 and A14, they are more than below, they are for all intents and purposes buried.

Two articles found yesterday on those very pages and in that location not only deserve to be above the fold but also on the front page. I will opine about that in a moment. But first, in case you missed them, they are about General Newbold’s article in this week’s Time Magazine in which he joins the growing list of staff officers calling for Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation; and the second is the piece on page A16 about the Associated Press’ report that a “senior administration official” confirmed for the first time that President Bush himself had “declassified parts” of a prewar intelligence paper in an effort to rebut critics who claimed that the administration had exaggerated Iraq’s nuclear potential and thus “sexed up” the evidence to justify preemptively invading Iraq.

General Newbold writes about how military leaders who have doubts about the strategic purpose of a mission do not raise objections because they are “willing to sacrifice their lives for their country but not their careers.” Even more devastating is Newbold’s contention that the decision to engage in war with Iraq “was done with a casualness and swagger that are the special province of those who have never had to execute those missions—or bury the results.” Recall, that neither Rumsfeld nor Chaney ever served (Chaney secured five deferments during the Vietnam War because he “had other priorities”) and President Bush was a version of AWOL for some of his time in the Air Force National Guard.

The second buried story, which avoids the word “leak” even though as you can see from the NY Times Website link to the article that the address includes it, is about how the White House is splitting hairs about the President’s role in authorizing the sharing of some of the intelligence that got Scooter Libby indicted. Since the president is legally incapable of leaking secret information (by authorizing it to be whispered to reporters he by definition declassifies it; you know—“it depends on what your definition of ‘is’ is”), Libby can have his legal defense cake and eat his pardon too.

Now why were these important stories buried? It must have been because there was no space on the front page for them and the one about the New York State Cheese Museum (I’m not making this up, you can find it right there on page A1). Complicated choices had to be made—presidential leaking or Cheese Museum . . . ?

I suspect that these stories were deep-sixed because they were derived from Time and the Associated Press. The Cheese Museum story, on the other hand, was pure NY Times.