By: E&P Staff In the latest demonstration of the glass house/throw stones syndrome, Fox News host Brit Hume accused E&P of displaying bias and selective editing Monday evening.
In Hume?s ?Grapevine? segment, he said the following, according to a Fox transcript. Behind him as he spoke was the E&P logo, a photo of John F. Burns, and the caption ?Takes Quotes Out of Context.? By that he meant E&P, not Burns.
Hume: ?New York Times Baghdad bureau chief John Burns has long been highly pessimistic about the war in Iraq from the start. In an interview with TV host Bill Maher Friday night, Burns remained pessimistic, but he also said that now ?U.S. military and political diplomatic leadership in Iraq ... is about as good as you could possibly get.? And he said the U.S. team there has ?got the formula more or less right.?
?But by the time the trade publication Editor and Publisher had edited and published the Burns interview you wouldn't have known any of that. The magazine ignored it all instead claiming that Burns for the first time was predicting failure.?
Not surprisingly, Hume?s account is flat-out wrong. There is no question, judging from a review of the Burns segment on HBO and a look at the transcript, that it is Hume who is taking quotes ?out of context.?
E&P hardly ignored Burns? praise for the U.S. ?leadership in Iraq??it simply put it in the proper context of overall reversals. Burns, noted the E&P article, ?said the current U.S. leaders there -- military and diplomatic -- were doing their best, but sectarian differences may doom the enterprise.? Burns? statement that they had ?got the formula more or less right? merely meant they were trying to make the best of what he called an ?impossible? mission. They were trying to bring the ?American enterprise in Iraq?to some kind of satisfactory conclusion, improbable as that seems to be.?
The overriding message of the interview segment, reported accurately by E&P, was that Burns ?feels that the failure of the American effort in Iraq ?now seems likely.? The chances that it will reach ?a satisfactory conclusion? appears ?improbable.?"
Further, Burns said that the insurgency continued to make gains. Asked if a civil war has arrived, Burns said, "It has been for some time," adding that it's just a matter of "scale."
Speaking from Cambridge, Mass., where he was attending a conference on the Vietnam war, Burns observed that he had been on the ground for 24 hours and, of all the people he had interacted with so far, "no one supports this war."
Yet Hume takes all of this and comes out with the fair and balanced assertion: ?Takes Quotes Out of Context.?
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