Joe Wilson, imbedded: his fibs have infiltrated the media, and the media should know better.

Some journalistic frauds are big and explosive, like the Jayson Blair scandal. They make headlines and generate a lot of interest, but they do little harm outside the news organizations they affect. For instance, Blair's fabricated reporting on the D.C. sniper murders did not permanently corrupt the public's knowledge of the case. It was a big fraud with a big correction, after which everyone--except those of us who make a living writing about the media!--moved on.

Other journalistic frauds are more subtle--that is, the fraud occurs through the endless repetition of false information in the background paragraphs that supplement breaking news reports on a constantly developing stow. These frauds are much more harmful to the public's knowledge of a particular incident than the big frauds, because the repetition of the false information gives it the appearance of fact.

As special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation into the disclosure of a CIA officer's identity has developed, national news organizations have allowed or perpetrated such a fraud. At issue is the officer's husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, whose criticism of the Bush administration's handling of pre-war intelligence led administration officials to leak his wife's CIA affiliation to the press. Several false tales that Wilson told as part of his criticism have become stock paragraphs in the background sections of stories about Fitzgerald's investigation.

These stories normally lead with the most current developments--lately, that's been the indictment of Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, for obstruction of justice and perjury. Then these stories include several background paragraphs to tell the reader unfamiliar with the case what it is all about.

This is what those paragraphs should say: After Cheney heard reports that Saddam Hussein had tried to buy uranium from Niger, he asked the CIA to check them out. This was in February 2002. Valerie Plame, who worked at the CIA, suggested her husband Joseph Wilson for the trip based on his experience as an ambassador in Africa. He reported back to the CIA that it was unlikely that Niger had ever agreed to sell uranium to Saddam. But he also reported that an Iraqi envoy had approached the prime minister of Niger in the late 1990s seeking "expanded commercial relations." The prime minister--by this point the former prime minister--told Wilson that he took this to mean the Iraqis wanted to purchase uranium: Niger's principal export. Because Iraq was under U.N. sanctions at the time, he turned the Iraqis down.

This report from Wilson matched British intelligence reports that Saddam had tried to buy uranium from Niger. Nevertheless, the CIA decided that Wilson's report didn't significantly add to the intelligence, and so they did not include anything from it in subsequent intelligence products. Nor was Cheney briefed on Wilson's findings.

In October 2002, the State Department discovered that the intelligence reports that had prompted Cheney's request were based on forged documents. The British intelligence reports, however, had nothing to do with the forgeries. They were based on Iraq's attempt to negotiate a uranium sale with Niger in the late 1990s, which Wilson had also reported.

By that point, many--but not all--in the U.S. intelligence community were convinced that Iraq had at least attempted to purchase uranium from Niger. In his 2003 State of the Union address, President Bush cited the British intelligence, stating, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

Shortly after the March 2003 invasion of Iraq--as teams searching for forbidden weapons in Iraq began to come up empty-handed--leaks started to seep out of the CIA accusing the White House of exaggerating the intelligence on WMD in Iraq. Against this backdrop, Joseph Wilson started making claims to the press that had no basis in fact.

Claim No. 1: In May 2003, Wilson began telling reporters that he knew that Saddam did not purchase uranium from Niger because the documents that occasioned his inquiry were forgeries. These reporters wrote that a "former ambassador" had reported the forged documents to the CIA after his trip in early 2002. But Wilson could not have known the documents were forged in early 2002. The United States did not receive them until late 2002--eight months after Wilson's trip. During an inquiry into pre-war intelligence, Wilson told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that he may have "misspoken." He has since said that he never claimed to have reported the forged documents to the CIA.

Claim No. 2: Wilson told these same journalists that his report had reached the vice president's office. That also turned out to be false. The CIA never briefed Cheney on Wilson's findings. The intelligence committee found that Wilson's assertion was nothing more than a claim based on an assumption.

Claim No. 3: After two months of leaking to the press, Wilson wrote a bylined op-ed in the New York Times. In "What I Didn't Find in Africa," Wilson said that President Bush's "sixteen words" about Iraq and Africa in the State of Union address "[were] not borne out by the facts as I understood them." He wrote that Saddam had not acquired uranium from Niger--true enough. But his op-ed did not mention his conversation with the former prime minister, who had told him that Iraq had sought to buy uranium from Niger. The findings of his trip did not contradict Bush at all.

Claim No. 4: After Robert Novak wrote a column identifying Plame as a CIA operative and reporting that Plame had suggested Wilson for the trip, Wilson loudly and frequently claimed that she had nothing to do with the matter. But the intelligence committee found a memo she wrote to her boss spelling out Wilson's qualifications for the trip and his contacts in the region. By any measure, she was involved in the decision to send Wilson.

After the intelligence committee's report on pre-war intelligence came out in July 2004, refuting all these claims with evidence, one would have been naive to expect news organizations to undertake major efforts to correct the record. One could have hoped, however, that they would henceforth refrain from treating Wilson as a credible figure. Alas, many news organizations carried on as though the intelligence-committee report had never been written. Reporters in need of background material for new stories about Fitzgerald's investigation simply looked to old stories about Joseph Wilson. In distilling the essence of his role in the case, most chose to portray him as a heroic truthteller, with no mention of his history of fibbing to the press.

The indictment of Libby has thrust the Plame story back into the news, and nearly every story about a new development in the case contains a Wilson canard in the background. Take this paragraph from the October 24 New York Times:

"Mr. Fitzgerald has been focused on whether there was an illegal effort at the White House to undermine the credibility of Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former ambassador who became a critic of the administration's Iraq policy by his dismissive comments over the possibility that Baghdad had sought to buy uranium fuel from Niger."

But Wilson had confirmed that Baghdad had sought to buy uranium from Niger.

Or this paragraph from the October 25 Washington Post:

"Wilson's central assertion--disputing President Bush's 2003 State of the Union claim that Iraq was seeking nuclear material in Niger--has been validated by postwar weapons inspections."

Again, incorrect. The British government continues to vouch for the intelligence report Bush cited in the 2003 State of the Union, declaring it "well-founded"--even though the White House tried to distance itself from the "sixteen words" after Wilson's op-ed (a significant blunder, because Wilson's op-ed did not actually contradict Bush's speech).

Or this paragraph from the October 27 Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

"Eight days later, in what Wilson and his supporters saw as raw personal payback, syndicated newspaper columnist Robert Novak published a column noting that he had been told by top administration officials that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, a CIA officer, may have played a major role in having Wilson sent to Niger."

But Wilson's wife did play a major role. She wrote in a memo to her boss that her husband had "good relations with both the PM [prime minister] and the former Minister of Mines (not to mention lots of French contacts), both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity."

In the week leading up to Libby's indictment, at least ten items from major news organizations--ranging from those mentioned above to the Associated Press and CNN--contained false or misleading information based on Joseph Wilson's tales. Immediately after the indictment, Wilson himself launched a media offensive aimed at framing the indictment as his own vindication. Wilson wrote an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times and gave interviews to CBS and NBC. All three media outlets gave Wilson as much room as he needed to spin wild theories about White House cabals planning to destroy him, despite the fact that Fitzgerald did not charge anyone with crimes related to the leaking of his wife's identity to the press.

Bit by bit, Wilson's fabrications have become part of the narrative the press uses to explain the leak investigation, the Libby indictment, and the Iraq War itself. The press either doesn't care enough to correct the record or doesn't want to expose its own complicity in distorting it. Therefore, those who have the facts about Wilson must repeat them just as often as the press repeats the Wilson canards.

Mister Spruiell writes the media blog for National Review Online.