This does not directly involve the election, but really, everything does, this more than most, and I promise to specifically tie some of this to the elections (see, NH) on the upcoming weekend.
Since I began posting here a few months ago, I have pasted some older pieces written for other venues as well as more current diaries. The following is an older rant, but serves as part 1 to something worth discussing further this weekend on the theme of why we hate television news but why it is nonetheless so important, and the broader question of how low what passes for journalism has sunk.
That Tom Brokaw and Chris Matthews could both cover the New Hampshire primary but Brokaw in a subordinate role to Matthews is one sign of what John Chancellor used to call the "decline of civilization as we knew it" and that we have a major problem. Another might be that, with all respect and thanks to DKos and as much modesty as I can muster, this is where I hang my own journalistic hat, rather than in the spaces where such drivel as that put out by David Broder, Joe Klein and Elizabeth Kolbert.
But that is a complaint for another day. For today, a look back, still quite relevant in my opinion, to the way the Washington Post---the newspaper that let Woodward and Bernstein report the political story of the last century and, perhaps of all time, viewed the significance of the
Scooter Libby trial, at least editorially, and what that says about the worth of our major metropolitan newspapers today.
The morning after the Libby verdict, I heard Don Imus reading the Washington Post’s editorial about it. Hearing what he said, a person had to wonder whether he was presenting a great spoof of editorial writing. I had to read it myself before I could believe that the newspaper that pushed the Watergate story and Pentagon Papers at such great cost and with such courage would actually publish such nonsense.
Yes, I know the editorial writers and kept from the people who report the news, and a completely different hierarchy from the "editors" who decide what is news, editorializes for the newspaper, but the Post’s editorial view of the Libby trial is reminiscent of nothing so much as the newspaper’s poor work, which they have acknowledged, in covering the administration’s claims and justifications for going to war with Iraq. In 2004, the Post, among other news organizations, conceded, in the words of Executive Editor Leonard Downiethat "we were so focused on trying to figure out what the administration was doing that we were not giving the same play to people who said it wouldn't be a good idea to go to war and were questioning the administration's rationale. Not enough of those stories were put on the front page." Wash Post Aug 11, 2004
One of the claims made by the President, in his 2003 State of the Union address was that "The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." We know today that Saddam Hussein had not "recently sought quantities of uranium from Africa" when the President made this statement. Whether the White House "twisted intelligence" or deliberately lied is, without doubt, a slightly different question, but the evidence from the Libby trial demonstrates that the Vice President, and undoubtedly the administration, was far more concerned with Ambassador Wilson’s article relating his findings on the subject, that determining the truth of the assertions underneath the claim and, if it was wrong, what that said about other intelligence used to support the argument that the United States had to attack Iraq.
The frolic and detour around this central issue, obfuscating it with true irrelevancies as to, for instance, whether Ambassador Wilson’s wife had anything to do with his trip, whether Ambassador Wilson claimed he had been sent by the Vice President (as opposed to having been sent because of a concern raised by the Vice President amounts to an attempt to obfuscate the rather simple question. The editorial then asserts, in the same off the point way, that a Senate committee had concluded that "all of [Ambassador Wilson’s] claims were false." Putting aside whether that was the committee’s finding, the most important point of Ambassador Wilson’s article on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times on July 6, 2003 was that his 2002 trip to Niger led him to conclude that " it was highly doubtful that any such transaction had ever taken place."
He said that others knowledgeable about Niger and Iraq had reached the same conclusion and that these doubts were known within the United States government prior to the President’s 2003 speech or an earlier one in Cincinnati that appeared to make similar claims. We know today that all of this, the conclusions and the agreement with them by others in the government before they were contradicted by the President’s speech in January, 2003, was true.
That others disagreed with these conclusions is also true, and that the President was one of them is obviously so. He had his reasons for disagreeing with those conclusions and maybe some of them had validity, though given what else we have learned since the war began, the credibility of those who claimed war was a necessity is certainly open to question. But the point having to do with the evidence disclosed at the Libby trial, is that rather than consider the possibility that intelligence was misused to lead the country to war, the White House sought instead to retaliate against Ambassador Wilson and spent a lot of time doing that (including conversations with the same Bob Woodward who became famous for his Watergate reporting, but by 2004, had decided that we readers were not as important as we were then and decided to keep all this to himself). When questioned about his involvement in all of this, Libby lied.
This is hardly trivial and certainly worthy of the efforts of one of the few heroes of this era, Patrick Fitzgerald and his staff . For the Post to argue that the evidence did not reveal any "conspiracy to punish Mr. Wilson by leaking Ms. Plame's identity" or that the trial told "us nothing about the war in Iraq" makes its editors look more than foolish, but rather as if they are happy with having been willing conduits of baseless claims which scared so many people into supporting the march to a war that has done little else than made a terrible situation is a part of the world that was already dangerously unstable, much worse. Placed against the outrage and teeth gnashing over the previous President’s proven lies about his personal infidelities and you have to wonder whether the political system and its allies in the press have taken leave of their senses.
It will be a long time before the Post can be again taken seriously. That is a terrible shame, not just for the memory of the Meyers and Grahams who supported the making of truly great newspaper, but for all of us searching for information about what our government is doing in our name.