Top Bush Aide Admits Altering Article

UPDATE: Top Bush Aide Admits Altering Article
By E&P Staff
Published: May 31, 2006 2:55 PM ET updated Wednesday

Karl Zinsmeister, the new chief domestic adviser to President Bush, while embedded as a reporter with the 82nd Airborne in Kuwait in 2003, declared that "many of the journalists observable in this war theater are bursting with knee-jerk suspicions and antagonisms for the warriors all around them. A significant number are whiny and appallingly soft."

Zinsmeister, editor-in-chief of the American Enterprise Institute's magazine, wrote the article for the National Review, and it appeared on March 28, 2003. He was appointed to the top adviser post last week.

On Tuesday, in a separate matter, The Washington Post revealed that Zinsmeister now acknowledges that he erred in taking a newspaper profile of himself, altering quotes and text, and then re-posting it on another Web site without noting the changes or asking for approval.

Today, the Post carried an editorial on the incident, quipping that the White House only wishes it could do what its latest hire did: take a pencil to newspaper copy. "Imagine how convenient it would be for the administration if it could do this with all reporting," the Post mused.

It also coined a new word: Zinsmeistered.

"Looking back, this is foolish," Zinsmeister told the Post earlier, referring to his revisions. The New York Sun's Josh Gerstein had revealed on Friday that after the weekly Syracuse New Times published a profile of the local man in August 2004, Zinsmeister posted an altered copy on the Web site of the American Enterprise Institute magazine. One of his quotes he changed was originally published as: "People in Washington are morally repugnant, cheating, shifty human beings."

It was this comment by Zinsmeister that touched off an extended exchange between White House Press Secretary Tony Snow and reporter Helen Thomas at a briefing on Tuesday (see below).

The writer of the New Times, profile, Justin Park provided the New York Sun with a laudatory e-mail he received from Zinsmeister shortly after the profile appeared, now obtained by E&P. Zinsmeister thanked him for "an extremely fair and thoughtful treatment.... I really appreciate your professionalism and kindness. You wrote it straight up, which is the best and hardest kind of journalism. Let me know when I can next help out your journalism."

He then proceeded to take Park's "journalism" -- and alter it in posting it to his own site.

In that profile, for example, Park quoted Zinsmeister saying, "I can't think of one Iraqi I met that I'm confident never lied to me." In Zinsmeister's revised version he attributes this view to a military officer.

Zinsmeister's critical 2003 comments on embedded reporters appear to be at odds with the overwhelming support for the program and praise for the journalists involved that has come from the Pentagon and military commanders.

With the deaths of two CBS media workers on Monday, more journalists have died in covering the Iraq war, 71, than in all of World War II.

In that 2003 article, Zinsmeister wrote that reporters considered soldiers "from another species. Typical reporters know little about a fighting life. They show scant respect for the fighter's virtues. Precious few could ever be referred to as fighting men themselves. The journalists embedded among U.S. forces that I've crossed paths with are fish out of water here, and show their discomfort clearly as they hide together in the press tents, fantasizing about expensive restaurants at home and plush hotels in Kuwait City, fondling keyboards and satellite phones with pale fingers, clinging to their world of offices and tattle and chatter where they feel less ineffective, less testosterone deficient, more influential.

"It's amusing on one level. But reporters are the interpreters for the rest of America of what's real and what's important in the world. And the vast politico-cultural gulf that separates most of them from martial ideals often produces portrayals of military work that are twisted in one fashion or another."

Zinsmeister went on to write two books about his embedding experience. He offered strong criticism of Iraq coverage in a 2004 article for National Review, ripping the "reflexively alarmist and often incomplete reporting. ... Many factors have skewed our Iraq reporting. Deadline pressure, sensationalism, and sometimes just laziness create a negative bias."

He added that "getting the full picture in a guerilla war requires more than just showing up for the explosions; you need to study and then describe the deeper, glacial changes taking place in society, the public temperament, the tactics of the terrorists, etc. Alas, few reporters show the appetite, endurance, or creativity for this slower style of reporting."

In another article, this one at the American Enterprise Institute's Web site on June 20, 2005, Zinsmeister, after another period as an embed, wrote, "What the establishment media covering Iraq have utterly failed to make clear today is this central reality: With the exception of periodic flare-ups in isolated corners, our struggle in Iraq as warfare is over....Contrary to the impression given by most newspaper headlines, the United States has won the day in Iraq.... the battle of Iraq is no longer one of war fighting?-but of policing and politics."

The article is titled, "The War Is Over, and We Won."

While Zinsmeister raps reporters for not being "fighting men," he appears never to have served in the military himself. He is a graduate of Yale University and did further studies at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland. During college he claims, in official bios, that he won national rowing championships in both the U.S. and Ireland.

In a 2004 review in The New York Times, Dapid Lipsky noted that Zinsmeister's "Dawn Over Baghdad" carried an endorsement from Karl Rove, who revealed that when he finished the author's previous Iraq book, ''I wept.'' Lipsky, who once spent four years at West Point researching a book, comments: "Well, when I finished 'Dawn Over Baghdad,' I wept too. It could be the worst military book I've ever read."

At the White House briefing today, Helen Thomas referred to the key quote Zinsmeister altered in the New Times profile, sparking this exchange with Snow.

THOMAS: Why did the president pick a man who is so contemptible of the public servants in Washington to be his domestic adviser, saying, 'People in Washington are morally repugnant, cheating, shifty human beings.' Why did he ...

SNOW: Apparently an opinion that's ...

THOMAS: Why would he pick such a man to be a domestic adviser?

SNOW: You meant contemptuous as opposed to contemptible I think.

THOMAS: Pure contempt.

SNOW: I'm not sure it's pure contempt. I know Karl Zinsmeister pretty well and he is somebody who expresses himself with a certain amount of piquancy. You're perhaps familiar with that, aren't you, Helen?

(LAUGHTER)

And so, as a consequence from time to time, he's going to say -- he'll have some sharp elbows.

THOMAS: His attitude toward public servants ...

SNOW: I don't think it is his attitude toward public servants. It may have been toward the press. Just kidding.

(LAUGHTER)

No, look if, you look at the bulk of what Karl Zinsmeister has done at the American Enterprise and elsewhere, I think you're going to find somebody who's done some pretty meaty and interesting research on a variety of topics. ...

THOMAS: So what is the attitude toward --

SNOW: The attitude is we're glad to have a guy on board who has breadth of knowledge, who has breadth of interest and of experience, and is going to bring --

THOMAS: No tolerance for other human beings.

SNOW: Helen, tell you what, why don't you get to know Karl, because I think you're going to find out that to judge somebody --

THOMAS: Bring him on. (Laughter.)

SNOW: -- on the basis of one sentence is probably a little unfair.

THOMAS: How could it be unfair?

SNOW: He'll charm you.