CNN: Scooter Libby "allegedly" lied to investigators

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Sunday May 27, 2007 · 3:01 AM PDT

2007/05/27 · 03:01

I had just finished watching a late-night replay of Al Gore on Larry King, when CNN's hourly news update came on. This was at 4:00am EST tonight. And it only took seconds after Gore finished discussing The Assault on Reason, for CNN to prove his point.

Maybe it's a small thing. Just a single word. But this quick report by the alleged journalists at CNN managed to epitomize the stupidity that infects so much of the mainstream media and our political institutions. In the short news brief, the anchor reported that Scooter Libby will soon be sentenced for "allegedly lying to investigators." Allegedly? Is that the word CNN now uses to describe a criminal conviction? This was a straight-up, 30 second, news update on the Libby case. I don't think it was a mistake. It think it reflects the core of CNN's false-balance reporting model, where facts, no matter how obvious, must compete with spin. The fact of Scooter Libby's conviction must be balanced with the claims of right-wing propaganda artists. And in CNN's world, each deserves equal weight. Thus Scooter only "allegedly" lied.

The same absurd lack of reason was on display during Friday's Hardball on MSNBC. During a brief diversion from an hour-long discussion of the evil that is Hillary and the Clenis, Chris Matthews asked his guest, right-wing nutcase Melanie Morgan, for her views on Libby's upcoming sentencing. Her answer concluded with the usual shameless Rethuglican lie: "Valerie Plame wasn't a covert operative!" One would think that Chris Matthews, who himself was directly involved in the case, has reported on it extensively, and knows damned well that Plame was covert, might have said something. But, of course, he didn't. No challenge at all to a brazen lie. Such is the state of American journalism. Earlier in the same episode, Matthews reacted defensively when Hillary Clinton adviser, Howard Wolfson, suggested that voters were more concerned with issues like the occupation of Iraq, than 20 year-old hearsay about the Clintons. Matthews bristled: "You don't need to tell me about Iraq...it's what I think about everyday when I wake up and all day long." Pardon my skepticism, but if Matthews was half as obsessed with the occupation of Iraq as he is with Hillary Clinton, perhaps he would have challenged Morgan when she lied about an issue at the heart of how we ended up starting this horrible war.

There is a cancer on our media. It is devouring rational discourse through a blurring of facts and lies that ultimately threatens the foundations of our democracy. Our alleged president and his henchmen have conducted an assault on reason, but they would be powerless without the corrupt and stupid enablers of our press corp.

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CNN: Scooter Libby "allegedly" lied to investigators

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