From WNYKKNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.

And I'm Brooke Gladstone. In recent days, the Bush administration has exerted itself backpedaling from pronouncements it made on the eve of war and beyond related to the level of threat posed by Saddam Hussein.

Part of the process has involved blaming the media, as when White House

spokesman Scott McClellan said this week, I think some in the media have chosen to use the word

imminent. Those weren't words. Those were not words. Those were not words we used.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld used it. So did McClellan's predecessor Ari Fleischer,

and actually McClellan himself used it last February. True, the president didn't, but he did call it,

among other things, a threat of unique urgency, which sounds pretty imminent to me. There are many

ways in which ideas ebb and flow in the ether of the media, and we

ask Hendricks-Herzberg, editor and writer for the New Yorker and former speech writer for President

Carter to help us go through them. Rick, welcome to the show. Thank you. So I guess the most obvious

way to remove ideas from the ether is to stop talking about them. And you pointed out in your article

in the New Yorker recently that there were glaring omissions in the State of the Union speech.

Well, one of them, of course, was Mars, which had been the topic of the day, the week previously.

But when it became clear that the mission to Mars was a non-starter as far as public opinion was concerned.

It was quickly dropped from the State of the Union.

But, of course, there were plenty of other things that were dropped from the State of the Union, too,

or that never appeared, the environment, jobs, things like that.

The words we did hear, though, were pretty much related to national security.

We heard war a dozen times and derivatives

of terror 20 times, you counted. Do you think this is an effective way of framing the debate

and keeping control over the coverage? Well, it's an effective way of trying. It's the only way

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