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The Bush Administration and the Media

This past week, the Downing Street Memo, as it's been called, found some traction in the mainstream U.S. media -- a month after it was first published in a British newspaper. The memo suggests that President Bush had made up his mind to invade Iraq by mid-2002 -- while publicly insisting that war was only a last resort.

Also this week, NPR discovered a press release -- released by the ACLU in late March -- that also got little play. The ACLU said it had obtained a Pentagon memo showing that Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the former head of U.S. forces in Iraq, had lied to Congress about his orders on interrogation techniques.

Tom Rosenstiel of the Project for Excellence in Journalism discusses whether the mainstream media are shying away from stories that have an anti-Bush administration edge.

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