Media Monitor Calls for ABC to Apologize re: 'Embellished' Report on the Prez
by Chad Groening
April 24, 2006
(AgapePress) - - A conservative media watchdog group is calling on ABC News to publicly apologize to the White House and ABC viewers for accusing President Bush of knowingly misleading the public about weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in Iraq. The Media Research Center says Charles Gibson, host of the ABC News program Good Morning America, embellished a story published in the Washington Post. The newspaper story hinted that the White House intentionally lied to the public in 2003 when it insisted that some trailers discovered in Iraq were mobile laboratories used to manufacture biological weapons -- even though intelligence officials possessed powerful evidence it was not true.
MRC spokesman Tim Graham says ABC's Gibson enhanced the story to the point it sounded like an outright accusation. Graham contends ABC has "a story they want to tell" -- and that it does not matter "whether they have enough facts or not."
"Whether the story's actually new or whether the story's actually regurgitated and recycled from three years ago doesn't matter," he insists, "they have a message-of-the-day they want to put out -- and they will put it out."
The Post story is a case in point, he says. "The Washington Post has a story which basically suggested that the president should have known, if he didn't know, that these mobile bio-weapons labs they were assuming were part of Saddam Hussein's machinery were actually not bio-weapons labs," Graham explains. "Well, ABC then takes up this Washington Post story and Charlie Gibson says explicitly, 'The Post has a story today that the president knew at the time that that was not true.'"
According to the MRC spokesman, that amounted to a report that President Bush "basically ... was lying intentionally." Adds Graham: "Obviously ABC blew that one."
Graham says ABC has not issued a public or on-air apology for its mistake -- even though outgoing White House press secretary Scott McClellan told a White House briefing that one network has expressed their apologies to the White House. "ABC did no such thing," he says, noting only that "the White House reporter basically said that she wasn't getting enough information out of the White House -- no apologies, no regrets."
Graham says both the Post and ABC omitted evidence that indicates the White House based its WMD contention on the best information available at the time.
Chad Groening, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is a reporter for American Family Radio News, which can be heard online.
