Barton Gellman, Media Hero

I've found a new journalist to hold up as an example of all that is good about daily newspapers.

Out here in the hinterlands, it's easy to be unaware of what's happening inside the Beltway. I see stories reprinted from the Washington Post, but I have to confess I don't really pay attention to the bylines unless it's one of the writers who's been around since the 1980s, when I lived in D.C.

So when I saw a really important story based on a book by Barton Gellman in Tuesday's Pioneer Press, I was curious about who Gellman was. His book, called Angler, is about Vice President Dick Cheney.

Titled "Armey says Cheney exaggerated Iraqi threat," the story recounts Gellman's interview with former Republican Majority Leader Richard Armey. In 2002, when Armey was resistant to White House pressure to invade Iraq, Cheney met with Armey privately to tell him about the case for going to war.

The Iraqi threat, Cheney confided, was "more imminent than we want to portray to the public at large." Specifically, Cheney said there was proof Saddam Hussein was connected to Al Qaeda and that Iraq had the technology to miniaturize nuclear weapons to suitcase size.


Neither of which was true, as Cheney must have known at the time. The story concludes with this incredibly damning quote from Armey: "Did Dick Cheney ... purposely tell me things he knew to be untrue? I seriously feel that may be the case. ... Had I known or believed then what I believe now, I would have publicly opposed (the war) resolution right to the bitter end, and I believe I might have stopped it from happening."


Wow. I think this is one of the top 10 most important stories to come out in years, but it hasn't even appeared in the Star Tribune, and the Pioneer Press buried it at the bottom of an inside page.

I'm not one to jump on the impeachment train, but shouldn't intentionally lying to Congress to trick them into voting a certain way be grounds for impeachment? 4,000 U.S. soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqis have died because of this; our economy is being ground into the dirt because the war is bankrupting us.

Isn't this front page news? Not at the Pioneer Press. And it's not news at all at the Star Tribune.

So who is this Barton Gellman? Maybe the editors doubt his credentials, I thought.

Well, he's a special projects reporter on the national staff of the Washington Post. He's been a diplomatic correspondent, Jerusalem bureau chief, Pentagon correspondent and D.C. Superior Court reporter. He was the co-winner of the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting in 2002 and 2008. He's a graduate of the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University and was a Rhodes scholar, which led to a master’s degree in politics at University College, Oxford. He's written an earlier book on George F. Kennan.

Guess he sounds pretty credible, and I would think Dick Armey would be considered credible, too, since, if anything, he would want to make a Republican administration look good, not bad.

So perhaps the local papers just think this story is past its freshness date, that no one cares anymore, that we all already know the administration lied and misled Congress. I've got news for them -- finding out the truth never gets stale.

All I can say is, Barton Gellman makes me proud of journalists. But our local papers' behavior makes me seriously doubt editors.