The opinion journalism of Dana Milbank: otherwise, the Washington Post's White House correspondent

ON April 17, two days before the official publication of Bob Woodward's Plan of Attack, Dana Milbank of the Washington Post appeared on the Today show to discuss the book's political impact. White House officials "have good reason to be worried," said Milbank. "I think we finally found the weapon of mass destruction here." He continued: "The administration will have a much tougher time knocking down Bob Woodward than they have had in dealing with some of their other critics."

Yet the Bush team hasn't tried to knock down Woodward--it's been too busy pumping him up. On the president's reelection website, there's a "suggested reading list." Plan of Attack sits at the top. There's even a link to Amazon.com, for purchasing convenience. The GOP has been called "the stupid party" before, but encouraging people to buy a book like the one Milbank described would be about as smart as screening Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 at a Bush-Cheney fundraiser.

To be sure, Plan of Attack is no reverential tribute to Bush's presidential leadership. John Kerry's campaign has tried to exploit several of its details. By embracing the book, GOP strategists perhaps intended to smother some of its criticisms. But Plan of Attack is certainly not the full-frontal offensive of Milbank's telling. "I don't know whether [Bush has] read it," said Woodward in a CNN interview. Somebody who has talked to him said he's looked at the book, and he's happy with it."

Bush's top staff, however, is definitely not happy with Milbank. He holds one of the premier jobs in political journalism--White House correspondent for the Washington Post--yet he approaches his beat with anything but balance, as his attempt to shape public perceptions of the Woodward book demonstrates. The bias comes as no surprise, given his profession. In a recent Pew Research Center survey of national journalists (such as Milbank), 34 percent labeled themselves "liberal" and only 7 percent labeled themselves "conservative." (Most say they are "moderate"--which is how Dan Rather describes the New York Times.) Even in this crowd of semi-closeted Democrats, however, Milbank stands out as probably the most anti-Bush reporter currently assigned to the White House by a major news organization.

Milbank arrived at the Post four years ago, having worked previously at the liberal New Republic. Before that, he held junior positions at the Wall Street Journal and attended Yale, where he was a leading member of the left-wing Progressive party. He's always had trouble hiding his views. "There was a lot of attitude in his copy" when he began covering the White House, said the Post's national political editor Maralee Schwartz in the New Yorker earlier this year. She added that his stories had to be "detoxed" before they could appear in print.

Milbank doesn't report outright fabrications or reams of background quotes that can't be verified. He usually gets his facts right, which isn't to say he gets them straight. The main problem with his articles is one of tone. Milbank will write a juicy lead paragraph that disapproves of Bush and then bury all the mitigating details deep within his story. The first sentence of Milbank's article on June 18, for instance, declared Bush to be "at odds" with the 9/11 commission over the relationship between Saddam's Iraq and al-Qaeda. It wasn't until the seventh paragraph that Milbank admitted that the commission "agrees with the administration on key points."

Other times, Milbank simply unloads on the president. On Memorial Day, he and co-author Jim VandeHei described "the ferocious Bush assault on Kerry this spring," which they deemed "unprecedented" and remarkable "both for the volume of attacks and for the liberties the president and his campaign have taken with the facts."

Don't forget, these words were written by news reporters.

They were also wrong, or at least highly misleading. The Bush campaign was so irritated by the article that it issued a 16-page memo rebutting its various claims.

Milbank and his colleague, for instance, undercounted the total number of negative ads Kerry had run by more than 50 percent because they started their count on March 4, when Bush began his ad campaign (Kerry had started to run his ads long before). They also failed to acknowledge that when negative ads financed by independent groups are included in the mix, the president had been a target far more often than he had been a perpetrator.

That wasn't the only misfire. They also pointed to a Bush ad charging Kerry with intending to "repeal" key parts of the Patriot Act. "Kerry has proposed modifying those provisions," they claimed, "but not repealing them." They went on to chide Bush campaign manager Ken Mehlman for offering "no direct evidence" to support the ad's allegation.