A blog post by Ilan Goldenberg is getting a lot of attention today over at Democracy Arsenal. It's about John McCain's possibly false understanding of the Sunni Awakening in Iraq. Goldenberg uses a series of examples, (Katie Couric/CBS, NY Times, Foreign Affairs magazing and fellow blogger Spencer Ackerman) including quotes from Col. Sean McFarland, stating that the awakening happened before President Bush first announced the surge.
Also, The Jed Report has put together this video which adds some information from a Keith Olbermann segment on the same story. For what it's worth, Olbermann doesn't hat tip either, at least not in the video provided.
Several high-profile bloggers, including Marc Ambinder and Atrios, have cited CBS and the Obama campaign instead of Democracy Arsenal. So, it's not an argument that Democracy Arsenal "broke" the story. But during his show last night, Anderson Cooper did a segment on the story that paraphrased Golodenberg's post, while using several of the same sources (CBS, Foreign Affairs, NY Times) without citing Goldenberg. They're even cited in the same sequence. It's all public information, so this isn't an accusation of content theft. But shouldn't Cooper or the AC360 producers at least given a hat-tip?
You can compare/contrast the post vs. Cooper's script after the jump...
When Should a TV Host Hat Tip?
In a hat tip of my own, Cooper's segment was brought to my attention by a colleague who thought it was worth looking into.
From Goldenberg's post:
This isn't some gaffe where he talks about the Iraq-Pakistan border. It's a real misunderstanding of what has happened in Iraq over the past year. It is even more disturbing because according to John McCain, Iraq is the central front in the "war on terror." If we are going to have an Iraq-centric policy, he should at least understand what he is talking about. But anyway, what happened.
From the transcript of Cooper's show Tuesday night:
ANDERSON COOPER, CNN ANCHOR:
Senator McCain says Obama doesn't understand the significance of the surge. Now he appears to have given critics reason to believe that he doesn't know one of the most basic facts about it, namely when it even began.
...
COOPER: In other words, he's saying the surge made the Sunni awakening possible, except the timeline is wrong.
The surge was announced in January of 2007, with troops starting to arrive in early spring. Colonel Sean MacFarland, who McCain mentions, briefed reporters on the awakening back in September of 2006.
Here's what "The New York Times" said in April of 2007 -- quote -- "The turnabout began last September, when a federation of tribes in the Ramadi area came together as the Anbar Salvation Council to oppose the fundamentalist militants of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia."
And this from a recent history of Iraq in "Foreign Affairs" magazine: "The awakening began in Anbar Province more than a year before the surge and took off in the summer and fall of 2006 in Ramadi and elsewhere, long before extra U.S. forces started flowing into Iraq in February and March of 2007." We will have more on this shortly.
From Goldenberg's post:
This isn't some gaffe where he talks about the Iraq-Pakistan border. It's a real misunderstanding of what has happened in Iraq over the past year. It is even more disturbing because according to John McCain, Iraq is the central front in the "war on terror." If we are going to have an Iraq-centric policy, he should at least understand what he is talking about. But anyway, what happened.
From the transcript of Cooper's show Tuesday night:
ANDERSON COOPER, CNN ANCHOR:
Senator McCain says Obama doesn't understand the significance of the surge. Now he appears to have given critics reason to believe that he doesn't know one of the most basic facts about it, namely when it even began.
...
COOPER: In other words, he's saying the surge made the Sunni awakening possible, except the timeline is wrong.
The surge was announced in January of 2007, with troops starting to arrive in early spring. Colonel Sean MacFarland, who McCain mentions, briefed reporters on the awakening back in September of 2006.
Here's what "The New York Times" said in April of 2007 -- quote -- "The turnabout began last September, when a federation of tribes in the Ramadi area came together as the Anbar Salvation Council to oppose the fundamentalist militants of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia."
And this from a recent history of Iraq in "Foreign Affairs" magazine: "The awakening began in Anbar Province more than a year before the surge and took off in the summer and fall of 2006 in Ramadi and elsewhere, long before extra U.S. forces started flowing into Iraq in February and March of 2007." We will have more on this shortly.
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