The President vs. the Peacock

By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Tuesday, May 20, 2008

There is more to the White House's unprecedented attack on NBC News yesterday than meets the eye.

The blistering letter to NBC from White House Counselor Ed Gillespie ostensibly focuses on the way President Bush's interview with NBC chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel was edited for presentation on Sunday's Nightly News.

But NBC's handling of the interview was not atypical for a tightly-edited broadcast and did not violate any journalistic norms. The White House may believe that news outlets are obliged to reproduce all of Bush's non-answers in their rambling entirety, but that's not the way the news business works.

Here is video of the edited interview as shown on the Nightly News. Here is video of the entire interview, which was 15 minutes long. Here is the full White House transcript.

A major topic was Bush's controversial speech to the Israeli parliament last week. (See Friday's column for background.)

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