While the details of CNN’s SEAL’s account match up more with those laid out in No Easy Day, written by another SEAL on the mission, Esquire’s editor-in-chief David Granger writes that he and the magazine stand by the Shooter’s account:

Yesterday, CNN issued a report that attempted to cast doubt on The Shooter’s account of the mission and on whether he was the man who was responsible for killing Osama bin Laden. To be clear: Esquire and Phil Bronstein, the veteran journalist and writer of the story, object to CNN’s report in the strongest possible terms. By stark contrast with Bronstein’s thoroughgoing 15,000 word report, the CNN story constitutes a mere act of assertion. As far as can be gleaned from the report, it is based on the opinion of one current SEAL who was not on the bin Laden mission and who therefore could not have first-hand knowledge of it. It is little more than gossip. Esquire’s story remains the most thoroughly reported account of the raid and of the death of Osama bin Laden.

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Aside from getting the SEAL to give his account of what happened that day, the most interesting aspect about this piece is that Bronstein gets him to open up about what has happened after that day. Not much, it seems, has gone well.

The Shooter explained to Bronstein that now that he has retired, he has been left with no pension, no medical insurance for his family, no assistance transitioning to civilian life and about a nine month wait to gain access to medical benefits for himself.

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A few of his ideas:

It is important for you to focus a portion of your interest on the Mujahidin (This means “Those doing jihad,” or “strugglers”) publications; provide them with advice and guidance to avoid the mistakes that would impact either the reputation of the Mujahidin and the sympathy of the nation’s masses or that would impact the mind and the character of the youths — who rely mainly in their culture on the publications issued by the Mujahidin and their partisans.

A sound recommendation. Content should be less “We just killed a whole bunch of innocent people” and more “17 stylish ways to wear explosives.”

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Some other interesting finds: The Kardashian sisters all made the top five for most searched “reality star,” the “Today” show was the most searched morning program and Justin Bieber was the most searched person of the year.

The Biebs was also the most searched musician, meaning “Bieber for President in 2029″ is going to happen. And no, it won’t matter that he’s not a citizen, the man is unstoppable.

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Check out her whole collection of Post covers here. But some highlights, first. On Straus-Kahn: “Frog Legs It” and “Booty Gaul” were some of our favorites. On bin Laden, who could forget the porn stash discovery headlined by “Osama Bin Wankin’!”?

So how to choose? If you’re torn, according to Weiner, at least you can surmise this much: “What it all proves is that it’s still surprisingly hard to determine which group the Post hates more: the terrorists or the French.”

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The reason still cameras are not allowed is simply because of the noise from the camera shutters and the placement of the teleprompter. But this policy results in the president having to re-enact part of his address so photographers can take pictures. After Obama’s speech on bin Laden, for example, once the president had finished addressing the nation, he “then re-enacted the walk-out and first 30 seconds of the statement for us,” explained Reuters photographer Jason Reed.

Apart from just being an odd thing to do, this re-enactment goes against the National Press Photographers Association Code of Ethics, which says: “Resist being manipulated by staged photo opportunities.”

Even though this policy has been going on for decades, since Obama’s speech, it has blown up into a huge story, and not just on journalism blogs — we’ve even seen it covered on cable news channels. Perhaps the unexpected public outcry is because, as Poynter found in a survey,  30 of 50 newspaper front pages that used an Obama photo from the speech “implied or strongly suggested it was an image of the live address.”

But really, we think it had more to do with the fact that headlines on this story allowed for the serendipitous combination of the words “Bin Laden,” “Photo,” “Obama,” and “Staged.”

In any event, the White House caved into the demands of the angry public, and now has ended its practice of re-enacting presidential speeches, the Washington Post reports.

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Oreskes said:

“It’s about us saying we would like to make our own news judgements about news worthy material.”

“We’re not deciding in advance to publish this material,” he pledged.  “We would like our journalists, who are working very hard, to see this material and then we’ll decide what’s publishable and what’s not publishable based on the possibly that it’s inflammatory.”

Ah. So it shouldn’t be up to the White House to decide whether or not the public should see this material — it should be up to the AP?

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Dan Nguyen put the 13,000 responses the Times received through a partway scientific analysis. His methodology:

I used Google Refine to quickly sort out the geographic locations (which varied from zip codes, to city/state, to neighborhoods, such as “Upper East Side”). Gender was not a checkbox in the NYT’s form, so I used Refine to sort based on first names.

The (again, partway scientific) result: female and non-U.S. Times‘ readers were more ambivalent to the news of bin Laden’s death.

The 260 non-U.S.-female respondents averaged a 43 in positivity, which is a whole step below the average female response. U.S. females (2,270 of them), averaged a 52, compared to the 6,059 U.S. males who averaged a 65.

That comes out in line with our expectations. A table of the results (with breakdowns also by U.S. cities) is after the jump.

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SF Weekly blogger Dan Mitchell argues that Athar is not a journalist, not even a “citizen journalist” (a lesser designation). Writes Mitchell:

For the most part, Facebook and Twitter aren’t organs of journalism, rather simply organs of dissemination (both of journalism and of sentiments like: “hell naw at 2 something n the morning i was tlking to somebody dat called me private lmao i was half sleep.”)

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There has been a great deal of back-pedaling and rewriting and general muddling of the story of Osama bin Laden‘s death since it was first announced by President Obama on Sunday night. And everyone’s been looking the worse for it.

The Wrap provides a summary of the events:

1. Sunday, May 1, 11:30 p.m. | President Obama Addresses the Nation, in Which We Learn of a “Firefight”
2. Monday, May 2, 2:00 p.m. | John Brennan, Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, Introduces “Human Shield” Myth
3. Tuesday, May 3, 1:57 p.m.| White House Press Secretary Jay Carney: “Bin Laden Was Unarmed, But Dangerous”
4. Tuesday, May 3, 7:00 p.m.| CIA director Leon Panetta Says Bin Laden May Not Have Had a Gun, But Made “Threatening Moves”
5. Tuesday, May 3, 8:27 p.m| Unnamed Senior Congressional Aide, Says Bin Laden Surrender Would Have Had to Take Place in the Nude (seriously)
6. Wednesday, May 4 | U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Says All It Takes for Self-Defense Is No Surrender
7. Wednesday, May 4 | The New York Times Reports There Wasn’t A Whole Lotta Shooting Going On in Abbottabad
8. Thursday May 5|  Press Secretary Carney: Accuracy Was Another Casualty

Phew! It’s difficult to keep up. As The Wrap says, “Carney told the media that the administration was still in the process of cobbling together all the facts.”

Take a little time on this one, administration. Maybe do some fact-checking this time around. We’re in no hurry.

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Apaprently the obituary had been written since November of 2001, as Zernike described, “when we thought Osama was going to be captured, and presumably killed, in a raid in the next couple of days. So as much as it was a project that waited around for ten years, it actually was written in some ways on a fairly tight deadline.”

Zernike said that sometime around 2003, she remembers speaking with an editor about how Bin Laden was “no longer this enormous figure, and so it would probably run one full page inside, but not the two full pages.”

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At National Journal, Gwen Ifill writes that:

My flight from Seattle had just touched down at Reagan Washington National Airport late on Sunday night when I turned on my BlackBerry. It immediately began buzzing with an alarming stream of e-mails and tweets.

She also puts together what other major journalists were doing when the news broke. Here are a few of the stories:

Washington Week regular Jeff Zeleny was watching The King’s Speech on pay per view at home. Helene Cooper was watching a DVR of the royal wedding. (Lots of anglophiles in the media!)

Another Times reporter David Sanger was in Brussels for a NATO story. NPR’s Tom Gjelten was on a late-night run to the drug store. Our favorite: James Kitfield of National Journal was in a Houston hotel room sipping from a glass of brandy. Coincidentally, so was FishbowlNY.

Just kidding. We were watching the Royal Wedding on DVR, too. We’re not that cool.

Update: Dylan Byers reports on what the top CNN journalists were doing when the news broke for Adweek: it turns out that they are some serious hockey fans. Wolf Blitzer was watching the Washington Capitals playoffs on TV when the story broke, and John King and Ed Henry were at the game. Apparently “Ed Henry went to the White House and had to borrow a jacket from someone.”

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Photojournalists from Reuters and AP described how President Obama basically had to silently re-enact part of his speech for the still cameras after giving it.

Reuters White House photographer Jason Reed writes:

As President Obama continued his nine-minute address in front of just one main network camera, the photographers were held outside the room by staff and asked to remain completely silent. Once Obama was off the air, we were escorted in front of that teleprompter and the President then re-enacted the walk-out and first 30 seconds of the statement for us.

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The New York Times‘ web traffic jumped 62% from 10PM to 11:59PM compared to previous Sundays. The Wall Street Journal‘s web traffic jumped 81% during the 11 PM hour over past weeks.  Time magazine page views were up 290 percent from the daily average.

And CNN, which had a traffic explosion, saw a 217 percent gain in page views from Sunday night to 1PM on Monday. Moreover, CNN reported that Monday was one of their 10 biggest days in history.

Let’s just see how long the story lasts.

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Peter Bergen

As part of the scramble to cover Bin Laden’s death, the New York Times reports that, a mere 48 hours after the death was reported, it’s been announced that Bergen will write possibly the definitive book on the Bin Laden manhunt, tentatively titled… “Manhunt”. No chance that this will be the only book on the subject — prepare yourselves for an onslaught — but it may very well be the first.

Bergen has certainly earned the right; he’s the author of three books on terrorism and is now a national security analyst for CNN.

Crown Publishers, part of Random House, described the forthcoming book as  “an immersive, definitive account of the operation that killed the world’s most wanted man.”

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