Covering Cindy Sheehan (CBS' Knoller Still Ignores Cindy Calling Terrorists 'Freedom Fighters')

I remember the day Cindy Sheehan first arrived in the President’s hometown in Crawford, Texas in early August 2005.

It was a blistering hot Saturday and she and a small band of supporters got off a dilapidated bus that pulled up in front of the Crawford Peace House – home of a resident anti-war activist.

I was there with a CBS News camera crew and conducted the first interview with Sheehan.

She said her son Casey was a U.S. Army soldier killed in Iraq a year earlier and she blamed President Bush for his death. She bitterly resented his recent statement that Americans like her son had died in “a noble cause.”

“We all know by now that that’s not true,” she told me that day, “and I want to ask George Bush why did my son die? What was the noble cause that he died for?"

Of course, time and again, the President had said that bringing democracy and liberty to the people of Iraq was the noble cause, but Sheehan didn’t buy it.

She had fallen into an abyss of bitterness about and resentment of the President’s policy.

“He took something away from me that’s irreplaceable,” she said that first day in Crawford. “He’s going on a five-week vacation when we’re in the middle of war and I’m never going to be able to enjoy another vacation – because he killed my oldest son. And he better come out and talk to me.”

For the better part of the next two years, Sheehan repeatedly demanded a face-to-face meeting with the President, but never got it.

On that first day, the White House tried to defuse her protest by dispatching National Security Advisor Steve Hadley and Deputy Chief of Staff Joe Hagin to meet with her at the makeshift campsite she set up along Prairie Chapel Road – the main thoroughfare to the President’s ranch. She said later the meeting didn’t satisfy her and she would continue to demand a meeting with the president for as long as it takes.

Actually, she had met a year earlier with him at Fort Lewis in Washington, as one of a number of families of fallen U.S. military personnel. She said she felt patronized and wanted another chance to tell him so.

For a time, she became the poster girl of the anti-war movement in America. She did frequent live interviews on the network morning shows and the cable news channels.

She drew the attention of the White House press corps who often had little else to cover in Crawford when President Bush was at his ranch.

Other anti-war activists rallied to her side providing financial and moral support – including a public relations firm. And she drew the wrath and condemnations of those who supported the president’s policy in Iraq.

With a bullhorn in her hand, Sheehan would deliver blistering tirades against the president. In quiet moments, she was a mother grieving for the loss of her son.

The irony is that her decision to withdraw from the public stage is the result of her frustration with Democrats in Congress. They agree with her call for a pullout from Iraq – but didn’t force the president to do it.

Mark Knoller is most responsible for foisting the false image of Cindy Sheehan as just a grieving war mother looking for answers from President Bush. In the interview he writes about here that he remembers so clearly, he still refuses to acknowledge that Sheehan called terrorists coming into Iraq 'freedom fighters' in that interview.

Had Knoller truthfully reported on the radical politics Sheehan espoused to him that day, the American people would have been better informed about her from the beginning. As it was, it was Freepers who informed the world about Sheehan's expressed sympathy for the terrorists. It was also Freepers who informed the media of the most basic fact surrounding Sheehan's quest to meet with President Bush: that she had already met him one year before.

Columnist John Leo was the only person in the media to confront Knoller on this glaring omission. Leo wrote about it in a column published Sept. 6, 2005:

On August 6, as her 15 minutes of fame was just beginning, Cindy Sheehan used an odd term in a TV interview with Mark Knoller of CBS. She referred to the foreign insurgents and terrorists in Iraq as “freedom fighters.” Knoller cut those words out of his report, he told me, because he “really wasn’t interested.” He should have left them in. In fact, alarm bells should have rung in his brain. First of all, it’s startling that an antiwar mother would talk that way about people who blow up children and who may have killed her own son. Second, “freedom fighters” in this context is the telltale lingo of the hard, anti-American left. When the grieving mother starts talking that way, it’s news.

Knoller recalls that other reporters on the scene were watching his interview that day in Texas, but apparently they weren’t any more interested in Sheehan’s little linguistic adventure than he was. Apparently none bothered to report it. The “freedom fighter” remark reached the public only because an antiwar group, Veterans for Peace, filmed the CBS interview. It was picked up by an anti-Cindy Sheehan website, sweetness-light.com, where bloggers and conservative commentators noticed and circulated it.

...On the whole, the mainstream media depicted Cindy Sheehan as a moral figure without blemish. Maybe reporters and editors felt paralyzed by the “absolute moral authority” rhetoric or justified by polls showing declining support for the war. Some reporters, of course, detest Bush and oppose the war. For whatever reason, they weren’t able to break from the original soft narrative line about a mother’s grief and tell us what was really going on.

Actually Leo got one thing wrong in his column, it was Free Republic that scooped the media and the blogosphere. They all picked it up here, including Sweetness and Light, but only Newsmax was honest enough to credit Freeper research.

From the original report published on FR:

MEDIA COVER-UP: PEACE MOM SAYS FOREIGN TERRORISTS IN IRAQ 'FREEDOM FIGHTERS'
Tuesday, August 23, 2005 | Kristinn

Posted on 08/23/2005 10:48:07 AM EDT by kristinn

Surrounded by reporters with notepads, tape recorders and video cameras, Mrs. Sheehan spoke freely in response to a question by CBS News' Mark Knoller.

Mr. Knoller asked, "You know that the president says Iraq is the central front in the war on terrorism, don't you believe that?"

Mrs. Sheehan replied, "No, because it's not true. You know Iraq was no threat to the United States of America until we invaded. I mean they're not even a threat to the United States of America. Iraq was not involved in 9/11, Iraq was not a terrorist state. But now that we have decimated the country the borders are open, freedom fighters from other countries are going in and they (America) have created more terrorism by going to an Islamic country, devastating the country and killing innocent people in that country. The terrorism is growing and people who never thought of being car bombers or suicide bombers are now doing it because they want the United States of America out of their country."

The mainstream media could have saved everyone, especially Cindy Sheehan, a lot of grief if they had not annointed her with 'absolute moral authority' and instead reported fairly and accurately about her extremist politics from the beginning. But Knoller had an agenda, as did his fellow White House reporters in Crawford that month: get President Bush.

Were it not for the research by Freepers that was picked up by others, the media would have gotten away with it.

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