From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media.

Brooke Gladstone is away this week. I'm Bob Garfield.

This week, the Battle of the Speaches.

Two men won the President of the United States and the other the former Vice President right now are preparing to deliver dueling speeches on how to deal with terrorists.

The showdown over national security, President Obama and former Vice President Dick Cheney,

going toe to toe in back-to-back speeches.

The major newspapers framed it the same way, and for 24 hours there was absolute media consensus.

Back-to-back policy speeches by the president and the former vice president

constituted a clash of titans.

But did they really?

Dick Cheney has been waging a month-long media campaign to defend Bush administration

interrogation abuses and to portray Obama as soft on terrorism.

His principal argument, waterboarding saved American lives.

Never mind the facts, or legality, or morality, or even logic, systematic war crimes could save American lives too.

The question is, have the media aired and even influenced the political dynamic by portraying an immensely unpopular

ex-VP as equal and opposite to the president of the United States?

Simply put, has the press invented a drama where none really exists?

We put this question to Mark Juerkowitz of the Project for Excellence in Journalism,

who explained that the media just loved the reductionism of a head-to-head clash,

but that, he says, doesn't mean the conflict is contrived or unimportant.

One of the things that the media claimed in the run-up to the Iraq War

was that their failure to more closely scrutinize the rationale

...