More on Cooked Intelligence.

Or rather cooked reporting. Today's NYTimes has another front page story on Scooter's leak of the NIE on Iraqi wmd. The nut:

A review of the records and interviews conducted during and after the crucial period in June and July of 2003 also show that what the aide, I. Lewis Libby Jr., said he was authorized to portray as a "key judgment" by intelligence officers had in fact been given much less prominence in the most important assessment of Iraq's weapons capability.

Mr. Libby said he drew on that report, the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, when he spoke with the reporter. However, the conclusions about Mr. Hussein's search for uranium appear to have been buried deeper in the report in part because of doubts about their reliability.

So there's not much the blogosphere hadn't already sussed out here, is there? Libby et al. leaked cooked intelligence to cover up the fact that they were using cooked intelligence. But the story is interesting anyway. Not because of what it tells us about the way the Bush administration uses intelligence, but about the way the press covers this story.

First about Judith Miller, and haven't we heard enough about her already? A leak from Scooter outweighed all the counternews that was available to a reporter in her position. Of course, the ideology of the journalist-as-watchdog would suggest that the counternews would be given supreme value. Journalists are there to even the playing field, and have a natural suspicion of the powerful, and look for stories of conflict in governing institutions, and so forth. And that's the truth for a journalist like say, Sy Hersh, who was producing exactly those kinds of stories about the Iraq intelligence at the time.

Sy Hersh is the pretext for journalism as usual. If he didn't exist, it would be necessary for the news media to invent him. Probably Rupert Murdoch would see to this personally. How could you justify the false populism of the whole enterprise if you didn't occasionally give a Pulitzer to the Sy Hersh's of the world?

But meanwhile the top pros do exactly what Judith Miller did. They tuck their noses up the cracks of the highest placed available sources, and replay the exclusives they're granted. Most of them exercise a little more restraint than Miller, I'm sure.

Which brings us to the second interesting thing about today's story. It appears long after the blogosphere new all the news in it, and long after its real relevance would have warranted publication, because an appropriate institution manufactured it as a news story. It appears today because Patrick Fitzgerald's court filing makes it news.

So that's what it takes. That's also what it took during Watergate. And Vietnam. That plus the bodybags.