Frank Rich has the BushyBot nailed this morning

I have never understood why the New York Times has Frank Rich relegated to the Arts section, the man is a fine political writer that generally hits any subject dead on. This morning's column (opinion) is tearing into Crossfire and CNN for their poor job of reports the news. Can't help but wonder who will see it buried in the Arts section.

FRANK RICH
All the President's Newsmen
On "Crossfire," the hosts lob softballs at a man who may have been a cog in illegal government wrongdoing.

(snip)
On this particular "Crossfire," the featured guest was Armstrong Williams, a conservative commentator, talk-show host and newspaper columnist (for papers like The Washington Times and The Detroit Free Press, among many others, according to his Web site). Thanks to investigative reporting by USA Today, he had just been unmasked as the frontman for a scheme in which $240,000 of taxpayers' money was quietly siphoned to him through the Department of Education and a private p.r. firm so that he would "regularly comment" upon (translation: shill for) the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind policy in various media venues during an election year. Given that "Crossfire" was initially conceived as a program for tough interrogation and debate, you'd think that the co-hosts still on duty after Mr. Carlson's departure might try to get some answers about this scandal, whose full contours, I suspect, we are only just beginning to discern.

But there is nothing if not honor among bloviators. "On the left," as they say at "Crossfire," Paul Begala, a Democratic political consultant, offered condemnations of the Bush administration but had only soft questions and plaudits for Mr. Williams. Three times in scarcely as many minutes Mr. Begala congratulated his guest for being "a stand-up guy" simply for appearing in the show's purportedly hostile but entirely friendly confines. When Mr. Williams apologized for having crossed "some ethical lines," that was enough to earn Mr. Begala's benediction: "God bless you for that."

"On the right" was the columnist Robert Novak, who "in the interests of full disclosure" told the audience he is a "personal friend" of Mr. Williams, whom he "greatly" admires as "one of the foremost voices for conservatism in America." Needless to say, Mr. Novak didn't have any tough questions, either, but we should pause a moment to analyze this "Crossfire" co-host's disingenuous use of the term "full disclosure."

Last year Mr. Novak had failed to fully disclose - until others in the press called him on it - that his son is the director of marketing for Regnery, the company that published "Unfit for Command," the Swift boat veterans' anti-Kerry screed that Mr. Novak flogged relentlessly on CNN and elsewhere throughout the campaign. Nor had he fully disclosed, as Mary Jacoby of Salon reported, that Regnery's owner also publishes his subscription newsletter ($297 a year). Nor has Mr. Novak fully disclosed why he has so far eluded any censure in the federal investigation of his outing of a C.I.A. operative, Valerie Plame, while two other reporters, Judith Miller of The Times and Matt Cooper of Time, are facing possible prison terms in the same case. In this context, Mr. Novak's "full disclosure" of his friendship with Mr. Williams is so anomalous that it raised many more questions than it answers.

(snip)

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/16/arts/16rich.html?th

Read the rest at the NYT web site.

...from where he crept out of...:wtf:

easy. He was the president of the company. But what if Novak is getting his shilling money, through his son's business?

too much of a good-old boy network in the media

making changes in its organization, like losing the screaming talking heads on Crossfire, perhaps this article by Frank Rich will empower them to get off their collective arses and actually report some news. Excellent article by Rich, exposing the media for their softball techniques and 'turn the other cheek' mentality. It's pretty obvious that this admin has been employing illegal means to get their point of view out, to the detriment of us all. Rich is calling them on it, and in the NYT, I'm hoping people will take note and raise a stink. Give me my hope, 'kay?

the Arts section.

He should be outed and discredited, but everyone's making a big deal over Williams, missing the fact that our government is paying "correspondents" to push their political agenda, which strikes me as a much more important story than some journalist with low ethics.

Oh, wait, that would mean being critical of the b... oh, never mind, I understand. Can't have that.

"why (does) the New York Times (have) Frank Rich relegated to the Arts section -- ?"

Becuase "the man is a fine political writer that generally hits any subject dead on."

See? Completely self-evident.

:shrug:

I think he was even graduated at one time to head cultural editor or something like that when he was on the op-ed page.
There is no doubt he has great poltical talent.
Anyway, this Armstrong BS is turning in to quite the story.... quite the story.

keeps Krugman focused on economic issues and pays a clown like MoDowd to be their version of a 'liberal' spokes-model, ie to sideline or undermine the importance and credibility of all left-liberal issues.

If that doesn't do it, the NYT editorial board can always whip out the old 'conspiracy theory' label and go whole hog after independent and honest blogs like DU.

<snip>
But we now know that there have been at least three other cases in which federal agencies have succeeded in placing fake news reports on television during the Bush presidency. The Department of Health and Human Services, the Census Bureau and the Office of National Drug Control Policy have all sent out news "reports" in which, to take one example, fake newsmen purport to be "reporting" why the administration's Medicare prescription-drug policy is the best thing to come our way since the Salk vaccine. So far two Government Accountability Office investigations have found that these Orwellian stunts violated federal law that prohibits "covert propaganda" purchased with taxpayers' money. But the Williams case is the first one in which a well-known talking head has been recruited as the public face for the fake news instead of bogus correspondents (recruited from p.r. companies) with generic eyewitness-news team names like Karen Ryan and Mike Morris.

Or is Mr. Williams merely the first one of his ilk to be exposed? Every time this administration puts out fiction through the news media - the "Rambo" exploits of Jessica Lynch, the initial cover-up of Pat Tillman's death by friendly fire - it's assumed that a credulous and excessively deferential press was duped. But might there be more paid agents at loose in the media machine? In response to questions at the White House, Mr. McClellan has said that he is "not aware" of any other such case and that he hasn't "heard" whether the administration's senior staff knew of the Williams contract - nondenial denials with miles of wiggle room. Mr. Williams, meanwhile, has told both James Rainey of The Los Angeles Times and David Corn of The Nation that he has "no doubt" that there are "others" like him being paid for purveying administration propaganda and that "this happens all the time." So far he is refusing to name names - a vow of omertà all too reminiscent of that taken by the low-level operatives first apprehended in that "third-rate burglary" during the Nixon administration.

If CNN, just under new management, wants to make amends for the sins of "Crossfire," it might dispatch some real reporters to find out just which "others" Mr. Williams is talking about and to follow his money all the way back to its source.

section..I guess he was a little too good.

Thanks for this.

I love his columns!