Joe Conason... 'A Press Coverup' (Salon) [View All]

[WillyT]

<Reposted here for wider distribution.>

Leave it to the Beltway herd, with their special brand of arrogance, to insist that the Downing Street memo wasn't news.

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By Joe Conason

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Only a very special brand of arrogance would permit any employee of the New York Times, which brought us the mythmaking of Judith Miller, to insist that new documentary evidence of "intelligence fixing" about Saddam's arsenal is no longer news. The same goes for the Washington Post, which featured phony administration claims about Iraq's weapons on Page 1 while burying the skeptical stories that proved correct.

If you listen to those mooing most loudly, such as the editorial page editors of the Post, the Downing Street memo still isn't news because it doesn't "prove" anything. (Only a Post editorial would refer to Sir Richard Dearlove, the chief of Britain's MI6 intelligence service who reported the fixing of intelligence to fit Bush's war plans, as merely "a British official.") Certainly it proves much about the candid views held by the most knowledgeable figures in the British government. Evidently the Post's editorialists would rather not learn what else the memo might prove if its clues were investigated.

How foolish and how sad that all these distinguished journalists prefer to transform this scandal into a debate about their own underachieving performance, rather than redeem mainstream journalism by advancing an important story that they should have pursued from the beginning. This is a moment when the mainstream press could again demonstrate to a skeptical public why we need journalists. Instead they are proving once more that their first priority is to cover their own behinds.

To my ear, their arguments lack conviction as well as logic. Although reporters tend to be timid or cynical, very few are stupid -- and almost none are truly stupid enough to believe that this memo wasn't "news" according to any professional definition of that word.

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Link (click on day pass if you aren't a subscriber): http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2005/06/17/dsm_pre...

Hey..ey Joe, Where You Goin With That Pen In Your Hand...

God I love Conason!!! Carry on, Joe...

:yourock: