Portrait of Media Is Not Flattering: Libby trial gave Washington journalists "a black eye"

WP: A Case of Bad Ink: Portrait of Media Is Not So Flattering
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 7, 2007; Page C01

The parade of high-profile Washington journalists who took the stand in the Lewis "Scooter" Libby perjury case were not on trial. But few would dispute that the proceedings, which ended with Libby's conviction on four of five counts yesterday, gave their profession a black eye.

When Vice President Cheney's chief of staff and other top administration officials wanted to neutralize a critic by disclosing his wife's role at the CIA, they turned to some of the capital's most prominent chroniclers, who -- under longstanding local custom -- promised the leakers anonymity.

"There is an all-too-unsettling nexus between the political and media elite," says Jim Warren, a Chicago Tribune managing editor. "This was a nice little window into the mutual obsession with one another. There's the infatuation with power which we all have and which was vividly underscored, especially those of us at elite institutions."...

"We're always used," says (Jackie Judd, formerly with ABC News). "Someone always has a motivation for talking to a reporter. . . . This was an obvious case of the administration trying to use reporters to do a smear job on Joe Wilson and his wife."...

***

In their dealings with journalists, top administration officials were shielded by a curtain of anonymity so opaque that Libby asked Judith Miller, then a New York Times reporter, to identify him only as a "former Hill staffer," then was disappointed when she failed to write a story. Such pledges of anonymity helped mask efforts, orchestrated by Cheney, to neutralize Wilson's criticism of the administration's claims that Saddam Hussein was pursuing illicit weapons....

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"It's very troubling that there's this cabal," says (Jeralyn Merritt, an attorney and blogger who covered the trial for her Web site TalkLeft), who criticized Miller's 2002 and 2003 reports on whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, some of which turned out to be wrong. "It's not so much that administration officials share information with reporters. It's that they pick reporters who they think are going to spin it their way."...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/06/AR2007030602349.html

been complicit in every lie, scandal, and cover-up with this Administration going back to the election theft, Enron, and go from there.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/comments/display?contentID=AR2007030602349&start=1


Let Howie know that you are interested.

Yeah, Howie. Preach it. :eyes: Splinter meet eye. Face meet mirror. PKB. Yadda yadda.

I don't know if his finger is to the wind, if he's the proverbial clock that's right twice a day, or if, after a few years, he's less in the thrall of his younger, right-winger wife.

It would sure be an improvement, with his platforms at the WP and CNN, if he were at least less strident as an apologist for the Bushies and the Right.

If he is in fact atoning. But he would first have to acknowledge that he himself was a LARGE part of the problem. Yeah, this is a decent piece, but NOW he's waking up? Where the hell has THIS Howie been for the last six years (or even longer)? Good for him, finally. But he gets no kudos from me for FINALLY doing his job properly. It's what he should have been doing all along.

...when in fact you are the crime.

"We're always used," says (Jackie Judd, formerly with ABC News). "Someone always has a motivation for talking to a reporter. . . . This was an obvious case of the administration trying to use reporters to do a smear job on Joe Wilson and his wife."...

No, Jacko. This was about using reporters to commit a crime.

During the investigation phase the media fell all over themselves saying Judy Miller was in jail for not giving up a whistleblower. Joe Wilson was the whistleblower, the leak of Plame did not serve the public good, just the opposite. But all the media whores lined up to say poor St. Judy was being noble to protect the identity of a whistleblower. It was such a charade and obvious to anybody who had even remote knowledge of journalism that they were spinning.

Kurtz knows they have to report on this because the blogs are all over it, so they do it dishonestly and with as much distaste as they can muster. He even trots out the same tired line that the American people aren't interested in Libby, and that is also a bald-faced lie. :puke:

If there's one saving grace for the news business, it's that much of the public long ago tuned out the intricate case. "My guess," Judd says, "is there's not a huge amount of interest in this story outside the Beltway."