Video: The DC press corps would like to remind Scott McClellan that nobody likes a tattletale

There’s something mordantly funny about watching the stenographers and voice talent of the Washington press corps fulminate about Scott McClellan’s admissions regarding the paper-thin pretexts on which the Iraq War was sold by the White House. You get the feeling they resent his flouting club rules more than anything else. Did they not wait their turns to ask questions? Did they not dutifully amplify whatever pronouncements, however absurd, his bosses wanted amplified? What did they do, in short, to elicit such unhelpful candor from a former partner?

Never mind the feigned outrage of some commentators over McClellan’s waiting this long to speak; what really torques them off is that he spoke up at all, and in doing so laid bare the extent to which “professionalism” in news media means preserving one’s access to A-list sources, and preserving one’s access to A-list sources means repeating whatever they tell you to repeat.

This is what Judy Miller did in reporting Iraqi WMD claims from a cherry-picked Pentagon source. It’s what the entire US press did with the forged claims of Saddam’s efforts to obtain milled uranium from Niger. It’s the reason the cable news networks have almost completely disappeared the New York Times story from a few weeks back that revealed all the major TV news operations had been used like $20 hookers in their Iraq War coverage by a Pentagon propaganda op conceived to make sure that all war news and views were served sunny side up. 

The LA Times’ Top of the Ticket blog records several network journo reactions. In the video below, network anchors Brian Williams, Katie Couric, and If-I-Only-Had-A-Brain Gibson kick around McClellan’s allegations on the Wednesday Today Show. Also note that Glenn Greenwald at Salon has the goods on Gibson’s indignant insistence that “there was a lot of skepticism raised about” Colin Powell’s WMD speech on the eve of war. (Gibson’s first question about that speech, to Terence Taylor of the International Institute for Strategic Studies: “Specifically, of all the biological and chemical weapons that [Powell] outlined, and the means of delivery, what’s the most frightening? Should be the most frightening?”

Today at Politico, Michael Calderone writes about CNN producer Jessica Yellin’s appearance last night on Anderson Cooper:

Yellin… [revealed] that news executives–presumably at ABC News, where she’d worked  from July 2003 to August 2007–actively pushed her not do hard-hitting pieces on the Bush administration. “The press corps was under enormous pressure from corporate executives, frankly, to make sure that this was a war presented in way that was consistent with the patriotic fever in the nation and the president’s high approval ratings,” Yellin said.

“And my own experience at the White House was that the higher the president’s approval ratings, the more pressure I had from news executives–and I was not at this network at the time–but the more pressure I had from news executives to put on positive stories about the president, I think over time….”