Today on the Editorial page of the
New York Times we read a pitiful rant from the increasingly brittle old grey lady.
Free Judy MillerThe New York Times reporter Judith Miller has now been in jail longer for refusing to testify than any reporter working for a newspaper in America.
It is a very long time for her, for her newspaper and for the media. And with each dismal milestone, ....
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It's time for the authorities who jailed Ms. Miller to recognize that continued incarceration is not going to sway a reporter who believes she is making a principled sacrifice. .... This is not about Judith Miller or The Times
or the outing of one C.I.A. agent. The jailing of this reporter is about the ability of a free press in America to do its job.
Link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/29/opinion/29mon2.html?pagewanted=print Before commenting further on this totally transparent effort to cover-up the NYTimes complicity in Miller's neoconster propagandizing, let's take a look at a little item from
Media Matters on the lies of another neocon propaganda organ,
Time.Did Time intentionally deceive its readers in Plame case?Yet on October 13, 2003, three months after receiving the leak from Rove and Libby, Duffy -- the very person to whom Cooper had passed on the information concerning Wilson's wife and the source who gave that information to him -- wrote an article for Time on the subject. In the article, to which Cooper contributed reporting, was this passage:
When word spread last week that the Department of Justice (DOJ) was launching a full criminal probe into who had leaked Plame's identity, Democrats immediately raised a public alarm: How could Justice credibly investigate so secretive an Administration, especially when the investigators are led by Attorney General John Ashcroft, whose former paid political consultant Karl Rove was initially accused by Wilson of being the man behind the leak? A TIME review of federal and state election records reveals that Ashcroft paid Rove's Texas firm $746,000 for direct-mail services in two gubernatorial campaigns and one Senate race from 1984 through 1994. White House spokesman Scott McClellan said accusations of Rove's peddling information are "ridiculous." Says McClellan: "There is simply no truth to that suggestion."
Duffy wrote that Rove was "initially" accused by Wilson of being the man behind the leak, as though Wilson was no longer making that accusation or that the accusation was found to be without merit.
In fact, Wilson did not back down from the charge, although he did allow that he had no proof of Rove's involvement. For instance, appearing on the September 29, 2003, edition of CNN's Paula Zahn Now, Wilson said, "I don't have any specific information. I would hope that an investigation would yield the information as to who was responsible for the precise leak.
What I do have are any number of journalist sources, none of whom I have any reason not to believe, who have said that
the White House was pushing this story after the leak, after the Novak article, and including Karl Rove."
Of course, it turned out that Wilson's charge was correct, as Cooper and his editors knew all along. Despite that knowledge, Time printed a quote from McClellan that they knew to be false without offering any refutation.Duffy, Cooper, and Time not only failed to inform their readers in July 2003 that they were part of the story, but they continued to report on the leak without offering that information for more than a year. In addition to two stories in October 2003, Time wrote about the leak again on January 12, 2004.
It was not until August 2004, when Cooper was held in contempt by the grand jury investigating the Plame leak, that it was revealed that Cooper was involved in the Plame affair.Link:
http://mediamatters.org/items/200508290004 The owners and executive management of
Time, Inc. and the
New York Times, and the other media darlings exclaiming Judith-as-martyr, are doing way more to destroy the First Amendment than Fitzgerald.
As several of us have noted, Judge Tatel and his colleagues did not order Miller and Cooper to respond to Fitzgerald and the Grand Jury without agonizing over the First Amendment implications of their actions. In fact, Judge Tatel attempted, mightly, to write new law, but decided that Cooper and Miller's actions constituted a threat to our National Security.
Lawrence O'Donnell riveted attention to one of the opinions in the case in an article he published at
Huffington Post:
In February,
Circuit Judge David Tatel joined his colleagues' order to Cooper and Miller
despite his own, very lonely finding that indeed there is a federal privilege for reporters that can shield them from being compelled to testify to grand juries and give up sources. He based his finding on Rule 501 of the Federal Rules of Evidence, which authorizes federal courts to develop new privileges "in the light of reason and experience." Tatel actually found that reason and experience "support recognition of a privilege for reporters' confidential sources."
But Tatel still ordered Cooper and Miller to testify because he found that the privilege had to give way to "the gravity of the suspected crime."Judge Tatel's opinion has eight blank pages in the middle of it where he discusses the secret information the prosecutor has supplied only to the judges to convince them that the testimony he is demanding is worth sending reporters to jail to get.
The gravity of the suspected crime is presumably very well developed in those redacted pages. Later, Tatel refers to "having carefully scrutinized (the prosecutor's) voluminous classified filings."<clip>
Tatel wrote a 41-page opinion in which he seemed eager to make new law -- a federal reporters' shield law -- but in the end, he couldn't bring himself to do it in this particular case. In his final paragraph, he says he "might have" let Cooper and Miller off the hook
"were the leak at issue in this case less harmful to national security."<clip>
All the judges who have seen the prosecutor's secret evidence firmly believe he is pursuing a very serious crime, and they have done everything they can to help him get an indictment.From
The One Very Good Reason Karl Rove Might Be Indicted by Lawrence O'Donnell on July 7, 2005
Link:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lawrence-odonnell/the-one-very-good-reason-_b_3769.htmlThe owners and the executive management teams of
Time, Inc and the
New York Times have evidently decided to continue perpetrating the lies, participating in the willful deception of the American public, and aiding and abetting the destruction of not only the First Amendment but of the Republic.
And, in the case of today's New York Times editorial, the quality of the prose likely indicates who wrote the claptrap -- Arthur, let someone do your writing for you.
Fitzgerald, the Circuit Judges and the Grand Jury are attempting to bring to justice those who willfully destroyed not merely (as the NYTimes editorial tellingly mis-characterizes the crime) an important CIA asset, the covert agent ValeriP, but the considerable intelligence infrastructure, focused on WMD, that was willfully vaporized by those who leaked her identity and those who broadcasted it.
The greater faults of the
New York Times, in propagandizing for Bush and the neoconsters, should now make it clear that the slogan of the grey old lady is irrevocably -- 'all the lies that are fit to print.'
Peace.
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