Failure of the Press

As John Edwards said ad nauseam during last year's presidential race, there are two Americas. I agree.

Unlike Edwards, I don't think the dividing line is drawn between the Haves and the Have Nots. I thought his class warfare line was stale. It obviously didn't work to bring in the votes.

What divides this country is not the bread and butter issues. It goes much deeper and strikes at the very core of our values. There are two diametrically opposed ideologies that separate us--conservatism and liberalism.

Certainly, it's unrealistic to think that Americans can be labeled that simply. As an independent, I am very aware that it's possible to be conservative on some issues and take a liberal stance on others. Conservatism and Liberalism are not mutually exclusive. There are shared ideals.

But speaking in general terms, I think it can be said that adherence to one or the other ideology is fundamental in defining us, what we believe and who we are.

There are extremists and special interests on both sides of the ideological spectrum. However, even in the middle ground, there are real differences in the way we think that puts Americans into opposing camps.

I believe the rise of the New Media has made this division clearer and deeper than ever. The liberals' strangle hold on the dissemination of information has been broken by conservative talk radio, alternative cable news, and the Internet. A significant and growing portion of the country has embraced the New Media and has been empowered by receiving a more complete assessment of the issues.

The Old Media are absolutely cracking up over their loss of power to these alternative sources. They aren't used to being challenged. More disturbing than their breakdown is that they are behaving unethically to retrieve their control.

The Karl Rove story highlights the degree to which liberals are willing to put their ideology before the facts, before the truth, and before their country.

The Old Mainstream Media have shown themselves to be positively off the wall in this instance.

Andrew McCarthy has a must-read column at National Review Online that exposes their extreme hypocrisy.

(Excerpts)

With each passing day, the manufactured "scandal" over the publication of Valerie Plame's relationship with the CIA establishes new depths of mainstream-media hypocrisy. A highly capable special prosecutor is probing the underlying facts, and it is appropriate to withhold legal judgments until he completes the investigation over which speculation runs so rampant. But it is not too early to assess the performance of the press. It's been appalling.

Is that hyperbole? You be the judge. Have you heard that the CIA is actually the source responsible for exposing Plame's covert status? Not Karl Rove, not Bob Novak, not the sinister administration cabal du jour of Fourth Estate fantasy, but the CIA itself? Had you heard that Plame's cover has actually been blown for a decade — i.e., since about seven years before Novak ever wrote a syllable about her? Had you heard not only that no crime was committed in the communication of information between Bush administration officials and Novak, but that no crime could have been committed because the governing law gives a person a complete defense if an agent's status has already been compromised by the government?

No, you say, you hadn't heard any of that. You heard that this was the crime of the century. A sort of Robert-Hanssen-meets-Watergate in which Rove is already cooked and we're all just waiting for the other shoe — or shoes — to drop on the den of corruption we know as the Bush administration. That, after all, is the inescapable impression from all the media coverage. So who is saying different?

The organized media, that's who. How come you haven't heard? Because they've decided not to tell you. Because they say one thing — one dark, transparently partisan thing — when they're talking to you in their news coverage, but they say something completely different when they think you're not listening.

You see, if you really want to know what the media think of the Plame case — if you want to discover what a comparative trifle they actually believe it to be — you need to close the paper and turn off the TV. You need, instead, to have a peek at what they write when they're talking to a court. It's a mind-bendingly different tale.

...It turns out that the media believe Plame was outed long before either Novak or Corn took pen to paper. And not by an ambiguous confirmation from Rove or a nod-and-a-wink from Ambassador Hubby. No, the media think Plame was previously compromised by a disclosure from the intelligence community itself — although it may be questionable whether there was anything of her covert status left to salvage at that point, for reasons that will become clear momentarily.

...Just four months ago, 36 news organizations confederated to file a friend-of-the-court brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington...to close ranks around two of its own, namely, the Times's Judith Miller and Time's Matthew Cooper.

...The media's brief, fairly short and extremely illuminating, is available here. The Times, which is currently spearheading the campaign against Rove and the Bush administration, encouraged its submission. It was joined by a "who's who" of the current Plame stokers, including ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, AP, Newsweek, Reuters America, the Washington Post, the Tribune Company (which publishes the Los Angeles Times and the Baltimore Sun, among other papers), and the White House Correspondents (the organization which represents the White House press corps in its dealings with the executive branch).

The thrust of the brief was that reporters should not be held in contempt or forced to reveal their sources in the Plame investigation. Why? Because, the media organizations confidently asserted, no crime had been committed. Now, that is stunning enough given the baleful shroud the press has consciously cast over this story. Even more remarkable, though, were the key details these self-styled guardians of the public's right to know stressed as being of the utmost importance for the court to grasp — details those same guardians have assiduously suppressed from the coverage actually presented to the public.

Though you would not know it from watching the news, you learn from reading the news agencies' brief that the 1982 law prohibiting disclosure of undercover agents' identities explicitly sets forth a complete defense to this crime. It is contained in Section 422 (of Title 50, U.S. Code), and it provides that an accused leaker is in the clear if, sometime before the leak, "the United States ha[s] publicly acknowledged or revealed" the covert agent's "intelligence relationship to the United States[.]"

As it happens, the media organizations informed the court that long before the Novak revelation, ...Plame's cover was blown not once but twice. The media based this contention on reporting by the indefatigable Bill Gertz... Gertz's relevant article, published a year ago in the Washington Times, can be found here.

As the media alleged to the judges (in Footnote 7, page 8, of their brief), Plame's identity as an undercover CIA officer was first disclosed to Russia in the mid-1990s by a spy in Moscow.

...Of greater moment to the criminal investigation is the second disclosure urged by the media organizations on the court. They don't place a precise date on this one, but inform the judges that it was "more recent" than the Russian outing but "prior to Novak's publication."

And it is priceless. The press informs the judges that the CIA itself "inadvertently" compromised Plame by not taking appropriate measures to safeguard classified documents that the Agency routed to the Swiss embassy in Havana. In the Washington Times article — you remember, the one the press hypes when it reports to the federal court but not when it reports to consumers of its news coverage — Gertz elaborates that "[t]he documents were supposed to be sealed from the Cuban government, but [unidentified U.S.] intelligence officials said the Cubans read the classified material and learned the secrets contained in them."

Thus, the same media now stampeding on Rove has told a federal court that, to the contrary, they believe the CIA itself blew Plame's cover before Rove or anyone else in the Bush administration ever spoke to Novak about her. Of course, they don't contend the CIA did it on purpose or with malice. But neither did Rove — who, unlike the CIA, appears neither to have known about nor disclosed Plame's classified status.

...[C]ould the possibility that Plame's cover has long been blown explain why the CIA was unconcerned about assigning a one-time covert agent to a job that had her walking in and out of CIA headquarters every day? Could it explain why the Wilsons were sufficiently indiscrete to pose in Vanity Fair, and, indeed, to permit Joseph Wilson to pen a highly public op-ed regarding a sensitive mission to which his wife — the covert agent — energetically advocated his assignment? Did they fail to take commonsense precautions because they knew there really was nothing left to protect?

We'd probably know the answers to these and other questions by now if the media had given a tenth of the effort spent manufacturing a scandal to reporting professionally on the underlying facts. And if they deigned to share with their readers and viewers all the news that's fit to print ... in a brief to a federal court.

When I read McCarthy's column, all I could think of was the pummeling Scott McClellan has been taking by reporters employed by the very organizations that know damn well that NO CRIME HAS BEEN COMMITTED. They have argued it in court! While claiming to be getting to the bottom of the "scandal," the MSM have actually been suppressing the truth and purposely blocking the public's right to know.

Their deplorable lack of journalistic integrity is shocking.

I knew the MSM had a shameful liberal bias in their reporting. That comes as no surprise; but what McCarthy has uncovered crosses over from being an attempt by the MSM to merely push a Leftist political agenda to being utterly unethical. The liberal slant we've all come to expect from them, while despicable, seems relatively benign in comparison to this.

I agree with McCarthy's assertion that the performance of the Old Media has been appalling. Jaw-dropping.