When Senator Barbara Boxer said to Secretary of State nominee Condoleezza Rice on January 18 that “I personally believe — this is my personal view — that your loyalty to the mission you were given, to sell this war, overwhelmed your respect for the truth,” a statement that made quite a bit of news, you would think that reporters would present readers with an evaluation of the evidence in question. You would be wrong.

Boxer actually made specific charges. After the much-quoted line above, she said, “And I don’t say it lightly. And I’m going to go into the documents that show your statements and the facts at the time.” Then she laid out several pieces of evidence – Rice’s use of the inflammatory phrase “mushroom cloud” to suggest that Saddam Hussein might soon attack the US with a nuclear weapon; contradictions between her pre- and post-war statements about how quickly Saddam could acquire a weapon; her claim that Saddam’s pursuit of aluminum tubes proved the existence of a nuclear program; and her assertions about the relationship between Al Qaeda and Iraq.

Whatever you think about Boxer, Rice or the war, these are substantive points that reporters should at least mention and clarify for readers. Without endorsing Boxer’s specific statement, I will point out that we document a number of misleading, inflammatory or false claims that Rice made before or after the war in All the President’s Spin (see the Rice index entry). The issue of what she said before and after the war deserves attention and debate.

Instead, though, we got superficial coverage of the faceoff as a substance-free partisan clash or a dramatic catfight (an approach mocked on “The Daily Show”). Here’s Glenn Kessler’s entire account of Boxer’s statement in the Washington Post on January 19:

In one especially heated exchange, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) quoted from Rice’s statements before the war about Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction — which were never found — and all but accused Rice of lying about the rationale for war in a zeal to promote the conflict.

A Lexis Nexis search of the “major newspapers” category shows that only two ran news stories in the immediate aftermath of the hearing that even mentioned the aluminum tubes issue or the phrase “mushroom cloud” – the San Francisco Chronicle and Baltimore Sun on the 19th (the LA Times published a transcript of the exchange on the same day). A few more did so later — the Christian Science Monitor (1/24), Washington Post (1/26) and the LA Times (1/26) — but it was too little, too late. In short, the press failed… again.