Let's play hardball! Or better yet, let's tell the truth.

PATRICK FITZGERALD, the special counsel who charged I. Lewis "'Scooter" Libby with perjury and obstruction of justice, warned reporters, "This indictment is not about the war.... The indictment will not seek to prove that the war was justified or unjustified. This is stripped of that debate, and this is focused on a narrow transaction." But that admonition has not stopped some journalists from picking up the Democrats' tune and pressing the question of whether the intelligence Bush used to justify Saddam Hussein's overthrow was "cherry-picked" a suddenly popular phrase--or otherwise "hyped" to make the case for war seem more compelling.

MSNBC exemplifies how some in the news media are themselves cherry-picking quotes and hyping polls to strengthen the case that Bush misled the public. Since the indictment, MSNBC's Chris Matthews and David Shuster have hammered away at two themes: First, President Bush deliberately exaggerated the threat Saddam Hussein posed to the United States. Second, Vice President Dick Cheney masterminded the leaking of Valerie Plame's name to the media in order to retaliate against administration critic Joseph Wilson.

In order to advance the first of these themes, MSNBC has relied on videotaped segments from correspondent Shuster. These segments are all remarkably similar, featuring the same sound bites from the run-up to war, arranged in different orders depending on which conspiracy theory Shuster is hyping. In any of these interchangeable segments, MSNBC could replace Shuster with liberal New York Times columnist Frank Rich without dramatically altering the tone.

In a November 11 segment that ran on Chris Matthews's Hardball about the administration's "strategy" to convince the public that Saddam was behind 9/11, Shuster assembled some selective quotes and spotty poll data to paint an inaccurate picture of the Bush administration's prewar activities. Shuster reported that in the fall of 2002, "the White House started claiming that Iraq and the group responsible for 9/11 were one and the same." For good measure, photographs of the 19 terrorists appeared on the screen, followed by a clip of President Bush saying, "The war on terror--you can't distinguish between al-Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror."

But as Brad Wilmouth noted on the Media Research Center's NewsBusters blog, Bush was not trying to impute responsibility for 9/11 to Saddam Hussein. The quote in context reads:

   The danger is that al-Qaeda becomes an
   extension of Saddam's madness and
   his hatred and his capacity to extend
   weapons of mass destruction around
   the world. Both of them need to be dealt
   with. The war on terror--you can't distinguish
   between al-Qaeda and Saddam
   when you talk about the War on Terror.
   And so it's a comparison that I can't
   make because I can't distinguish between
   the two, because they're both
   equally as bad, and equally as evil, and
   equally as destructive.

At the end of the November 11 report, Shuster said: "The White House strategy worked. In March of 2003, one poll found 45 percent of Americans believed Saddam Hussein was personally involved in 9/11." But as reported by blogger George Gooding at Seixon.com, that number actually represented a decline in the percentage of people who believed that Saddam was involved in the attacks. In September 2002, 51 percent believed Saddam played a role in 9/11, according to the CBS poll from which Shuster apparently got the March 2003 figure. And on September 13, 2001, 78 percent of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was "very likely" or "somewhat likely" to have been personally involved, according to a Time/CNN poll.

A Shuster report on Hardball on November 14 about Bush's Veterans Day speech was even worse. Shuster set out to find fault with Bush's defense that almost everyone, including Sen. John Kerry, former president Bill Clinton, and "intelligence agencies from around the world" had also believed that Iraq had WMDs after 9/11.

Shuster said, "It's true that foreign intelligence agencies and the Clinton administration agreed Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. But the Bush administration was the first to argue that Saddam posed an imminent threat to the continental United States."

The "imminent threat" canard is one of the most frequently cited by administration critics. But in fact, no one in the Bush administration said that Saddam posed an "imminent threat." Bush actually made the opposite case in his 2003 State of the Union Address: "Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late."

Lacking proof that Bush and Cheney lied when they presented their case to the American people, Shuster used a trick to make it seem that they had. He played two prewar statements about Iraqi WMD one from Cheney, one from Bush--and then said, "According to the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, 57 percent of Americans are convinced the president deliberately misled the nation."

After three years of accusations by Democrats and media elites, it is hardly surprising that most people have bought into the myth of Bush's dishonesty. But the evidence falls drastically short of proving that the president deliberately misled his constituents. An equally plausible explanation of the myth's prevalence is that his constituents have been misled--but by others.

Shuster's colleague Chris Matthews, the host of Hardball, has mounted a sustained campaign to promote his theories about White House duplicity. In the course of this campaign, he has perfected the technique of the leading question. When he interviewed Democratic senator Carl Levin regarding Levin's accusations that the White House had twisted intelligence, Matthews asked: "If you were to write a chapter in history and start it with a paragraph, how would you describe the way in which the United States, attacked by religious, fundamentalist zealots from the Islamic tradition, but zealots, terrorists. How that attack led us to attack a country that had no detectable connection to that attack and in fact was run by a secular leadership?" Levin stumbled around for a way to improve upon Matthews's formulation before responding, "In a very mistaken, very arrogant way."

Instead of reporting a story about Scooter Libby's alleged limited misconduct, Matthews is obsessed with vindicating his longstanding suspicions that Dick Cheney is a Machiavellian genius who manufactured the case for war and instructed Libby to out Valerie Plame.

Matthews's belief in Cheney's power is so strong that, on November 8, he accidentally referred to him as Bush's boss, saying: "How can the president not suspect that his boss--I shouldn't say, what a Freudian slip--that his partner, Dick Cheney, didn't have a hand in leaking this?"

Matthews frequently exaggerates to make his theory that Cheney orchestrated the Plame leak seem more profound. On November 3, Matthews said:

   Let's get back and fill that in. Because
   we know the first step in this chronology
   is that the vice president, according
   to the indictment, told Scooter Libby
   who Valerie [Plame] Wilson was. She
   was working for the CIA and had some
   role in sending her husband on that
   trip to Africa. Then we know a month
   later--exactly a month later--neatly,
   July 12 of 2003, the vice president's
   chief of staff, Scooter Libby, the defendant
   here today who was arraigned
   today, goes to see the boss and says how
   do you want me to deal with all the press
   questions about Valerie Wilson? A couple
   hours later that same day, he, the
   vice president's chief of staff, tells Matt
   Cooper of Time magazine and Judy
   Miller of the New York Times all about
   Valerie Wilson. Is that good enough evidence
   to convict Cheney as well here?

But the indictment does not allege that Libby asked Cheney for instructions on how to deal with the press. The indictment states: "On or about July 12, 2003, Libby flew with the Vice President and others to and from Norfolk, Virginia, on Air Force Two. On his return trip, Libby discussed with other officials aboard the plane what Libby should say in response to certain pending media inquiries." Libby is not alleged to have discussed media strategies with Cheney. Yet in Matthews's hyperactive imagination, we've got enough evidence to "convict" Cheney right here. In fact, Matthews goes on to compare Cheney and Libby to the Menendez brothers, who "cooked their evidence ahead of time," although Matthews kindly adds the caveat, "I mean, nobody's here guilty of murder unless you count the war itself and you want to get big-time about it."

Whether Matthews, Shuster, and MSNBC are crusading for justice or ratings, there is no denying that they are on a crusade. Under Matthews, Hardball has come to resemble a swap-meet of Democratic talking points and paranoid conspiracy theories, and shows no signs of letting up. The good news is that, in the cable-news ratings basement, MSNBC's damage is contained. The bad news is that, even though MSNBC is the worst offender, many other news organizations are singing the same basic tune.

Mr. Spruiell writes the media blog for National Review Online.