Department of Defense Debuts Bloggish Site

Posted on October 29, 2006

A website launched by the Department of Defense that offers corrections to news stories they think are inaccurate. The site is bloggish in form but there don't seem to be permalinks for every entry so you can't link to each individual entry. You can find a couple permalinks in the box on the top right of the page. One entry says that the AP and Washington Post's headlines about Rumsfeld telling journalists to back off were incorrect.

The Department of Defense website says, "Several news outlets, including the AP and Washington Post, reported or headlined incorrectly that Secretary Rumsfeld told 'critics' to 'back off' during yesterday's press briefing. In fact, the Secretary was referring specifically to journalists who were seeking to create a perception of major divisions between the positions of the U.S. and Iraqi governments. He was not referring to critics of the administration's Iraq policy."

In the entry they include the DOD's letter to the Post as well as a link to the transcript where Rumsfeld spoke the words "back off" to a journalist. Rumsfeld said, "So you ought to just back off, take a look at it, relax, understand that it's complicated, it's difficult, that honorable people are working on these things together; there isn't any daylight between them." The AP and Posts headlines said Rumsfeld told war critics to back off.

One entry on the blogsite the Department of Defense accuses the New York Times of mythmaking. Another entry is critical of an article Bill Kristol wrote for the Weekly Standard. One entry discusses a rebuttal letter they delivered to Newsweek about Newsweek's "The Rise of Jihadistan" article. An interesting side note about the "The Rise of Jihadistan" article is that it was the cover story for all the European Newsweek issues while the U.S. Newsweek cover story was about celebrity photographer Annie Lebovtiz.