The AP, Mansfield's advice, and more.

AP's Preposterous Scoop

Last Thursday, President Bush spoke with a handful of U.S. soldiers in Iraq in a made-for-TV teleconference call. Like all presidential events, this one was carefully planned ahead of time. (For one thing, there's no such thing as a spontaneous satellite uplink.) Before the president arrived, a Pentagon official in Washington practiced with the soldiers the order in which they would talk to the president, as well as the topics that would be discussed.

You may or may not see the news angle here. If you don't, you're obviously not a professional journalist. The Associated Press, on the other hand, smelled a grand opportunity to embarrass the Bush White House. That's what makes them America's leading wire service (that and the fact that they have no real competitors). Here's the "scoop" filed by AP's Deb Riechmann:

Bush Teleconference with Soldiers Staged WASHINGTON--It was billed as a conversation with U.S. troops, but the questions President Bush asked on a teleconference call Thursday were choreographed to match his goals for the war in Iraq and Saturday's vote on a new Iraqi constitution. "This is an important time," Allison Barber, deputy assistant defense secretary, said, coaching the soldiers before Bush arrived. "The president is looking forward to having just a conversation with you." Barber said the president was interested in three topics: the overall security situation in Iraq, security preparations for the weekend vote and efforts to train Iraqi troops. As she spoke in Washington, a live shot of 10 soldiers from the Army's 42nd Infantry Division and one Iraqi soldier was beamed into the Eisenhower Executive Office Building from Tikrit--the birthplace of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. "I'm going to ask somebody to grab those two water bottles against the wall and move them out of the camera shot for me," Barber said. A brief rehearsal ensued. "OK, so let's just walk through this," Barber said. "Captain Kennedy, you answer the first question and you hand the mike to whom?" . . .

Et cetera, et cetera, et (at tedious length) cetera. The Scrapbook, for the record, is no great fan of such events. Come the revolution, we'll enthusiastically join the mob that strangles the last "Presidential Town Hall Meeting" and the last "Listening Tour" with the entrails of the last "National Conversation." But what AP is describing here is the nature of every televised presidential event of modern times, from the moment JFK powdered his oily nose before debating Nixon down to the present.

If AP seriously thinks readers (and client newspapers) are looking to it for a deconstruction of modern media fakery, there are a number of potential follow-up exposés. For instance, after an in-depth investigation, The Scrapbook has learned the following:

*Several well-regarded network anchors wear earpieces through which they receive instructions from cleverer colleagues behind the scenes, including what questions they should ask during the "interviews" they conduct!

*Some of the seemingly spur-of-the-moment questions asked by reporters at presidential news conferences have actually been scripted in advance by bureau chiefs and producers. The correspondents aren't really thinking for themselves, they're just following orders from headquarters!

Meanwhile, in other news, many reporters continue to deny their work is affected by political bias in general or Bush-hatred in particular. They just "follow the story" wherever it leads.

Advice for Freshmen

The Scrapbook is always on the qui-vive for sound advice to pass along to our collegiate readers. Recently we came across an article by one of our favorite professors, Harvey Mansfield, in the Harvard Salient, on "How to Survive as a Conservative at Harvard." We think the advice has broader applicability and are pleased to present excerpts:

"To survive means to survive as you are, by remaining a conservative. You can often survive by surrendering to your surroundings, like certain Supreme Court Justices. That may have been good enough for Darwin's theory of evolution, but you and I want something better than surviving by adaptation. If you think things over and change your mind so as to become a liberal, that is respectable and we will wave goodbye with good humor. But, apart from that possibility, how does one survive at Harvard and remain a conservative?

"Entering Harvard, you are faced with a curriculum that has lots of choice. . . . Lots of choice doesn't mean lots of good choices, as you know from the student dining halls. . . . It doesn't matter so much what the professor's politics may be, liberal or even left. What matters is whether the class is conducted honestly, by which I mean presenting and considering ideas contrary to his own. Like an honest salesman, or better than that, the honest professor makes you aware of the defects or the difficulties of the argument he is propounding.

"Thus choosing your courses is not easy. Getting advice is not easy either, for those giving the advice are often part of the problem, not part of the solution. One place to get good advice is from fellow conservative students. They know the courses to avoid and may have found courses worth taking. Your parents may have good advice for you, though they usually lack information. Don't despair. . . .

"As a conservative you will probably get a better education because you will have been forced to be critical of an institution so blind to itself as to be proud of its openmindedness. But you mustn't be too proud yourself. It's easy to be self-righteous by supposing that if you are in a minority, you must be right. . . . "

Come to think of it, that's probably also sound advice for those of us who've been engaged in self-directed post-graduate studies for the last few decades.

French Diplomacy, 101

Jean-Bernard Mérimée, France's U.N. ambassador from 1991 to 1995, and a special adviser to U.N. secretary general Kofi Annan from 1999 to 2002, was arrested last week in Paris on corruption and bribery charges involving the U.N.'s Oil-for-Food program in Iraq. Serge Boidevaix, the former number two man at the French foreign ministry, and currently president of the Franco-Arab Chamber of Commerce, had been placed under similar investigation the month before.

Get a hold of yourself, though: "The reasons which led France not to participate in the war in Iraq had to do with our conception of international law," a foreign ministry spokesman told reporters seeking comment on this latest development. And French prime minister Dominique de Villepin underscored the point during an interview with Europe 1 Radio. It's for the courts to judge whether the "conduct here" was appropriate, he pointed out. "What I want to say, having been responsible for French diplomacy, is that no one has the right to sully that diplomacy so easily."

Funny thing is, one of French diplomacy's most influential mouthpieces appears to disagree: "These suspicions will knock a deep hole in the image of French diplomacy," moans a breathtakingly hypocritical editorial in Le Monde. "Even the most indulgent will wonder about the risks of a pro-Arab policy that was at times willfully blind."

Having It Both Ways

"What did Karl Rove say to me that I knew on Monday that I couldn't reveal? Well, it's what we all know now, that Harriet Miers is an Evangelical Christian, that she is from a very conservative church, which is almost universally pro-life . . . "

--James Dobson, Oct. 12

"People ask me why I picked Harriet Miers. They want to know Harriet Miers's background; they want to know as much as they possibly can before they form opinions. And part of Harriet Miers's life is her religion."

--President George W. Bush, Oct. 12

"Well, some of you all wanted to focus more on religion. We focused on her qualifications and record."

--White House spokesman Scott McClellan to reporters, Oct.