David Ignatius’s love letter to Jim Jones

By Will Inboden

On the theme raised by Peter and Chris below about media bias and distorted coverage, for yet more evidence see David Ignatius’s column this week on National Security Advisor Jim Jones. Ignatius is usually an informed, insightful, and probing writer, which makes his credulous profile of Jones all the more puzzling. Jones (like almost any policymaker) not surprisingly will use the media to enhance his standing and advance his agenda. What is surprising is how a willing media plays along.

Whereas a few months ago Jones was eager to assert his authority to his cabinet rivals, er, colleagues, now the agenda seems to be broadcasting a smooth and collegial management style with a balanced airing of views and decision-making consensus. Perhaps the biggest eyebrow-raiser was this sentence purporting to announce a new organizational innovation: "…and he’s building a new strategic planning cell that can ‘look beyond the horizon to see what’s coming at us.’"

Which is a curious claim, considering that Bush national security advisor Steve Hadley created just such a cell (which, in full disclosure, Peter Feaver and I helped staff for its first two years), and even codified its interagency function with a National Security Policy Directive in August 2008 that is presumably still in effect. Nor was this wholly a Bush administration innovation, as a similar office had existed on the Clinton administration NSC, though with more of a focus on communications.  

Why Jones claims this "strategic planning cell" as a new initiative is a head-scratcher, as is the failure of Ignatius to ask the logical follow-up question of whether the office had existed before in the Bush White House or in previous NSC structures. I hope that Ignatius has not fallen prey to the affliction common among too many journalists of assuming that if an idea is sound than it could not possibly have come from the Bush administration.

For another example just this week, see this bizarre Defense News article which, in reporting on Under-Secretary Michele Flournoy’s sensible and balanced speech on QDR principles, can’t resist indulging in some editorializing and caricature of the Bush administration policies rather than acknowledging that many of the threats and principles Flournoy lays out are consistent with those identified by the Bush administration.

Then there is the Ignatius column’s conclusion,

What comes across with Jones is a solid, experienced manager with a Marine’s blunt approach to problems. Asked if he supported Obama’s decision to release the torture memos, for example, Jones answered simply: "I did because I think it’s the right thing to do. In my military experience, I came to believe that bad news doesn’t improve with age. Better to put out bad news as you know it."

Except for the inconvenient truth that the political arm of the Obama White House seems to have seen the so-called "torture memos" as good news, not "bad news," and as an opportunity more than a "problem." Good news and an opportunity, at least, in the sense that their release of the memos served their political agenda of appeasing their left-wing base, casting further aspersions on the Bush administration, and advancing the Obama administration’s narrative of itself as a paragon of virtue, transparency, and integrity. The White House communications team can be expected to peddle this type of theme; that is their job. But the media’s eager compliance does not serve the marketplace of ideas or the health of the democratic system.