US's leading editorial pages are ignoring the Plame scandal.

[protect freedom impeach bush now]

US's leading editorial pages are ignoring the Plame scandal.


http://www.prospect.org/webfeatures/2003/10/tomasky-m-10-16.html

Papered Over
The country's leading editorial pages are ignoring the Plame scandal.

By Michael Tomasky
Web Exclusive: 10.16.03
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If you've been feeling that the Bush administration may be skating free of having to wrestle with the Valerie Plame controversy and are wondering why this is happening, let me submit one possible explanation: The major media are putting no pressure whatsoever on the administration, or the president, to do anything.

See, back in the days when our leading journalistic institutions were bothering to do their jobs, there used to be these things in newspapers called "editorials." They demanded integrity and honest government of presidential administrations. They would bellow -- often a little pompously or earnestly, but, on balance, in the public interest -- that, say, President Johnson needed to explain to the American people what he knew about the risks of Vietnam before 1965, or that President Nixon had better come clean about what happened in Cambodia (or at the Democratic National Committee's Watergate headquarters). Back then, editorials thundered.

Today? They still exist, of course, but now they whisper into a shoebox, essentially hoping that no one will hear them. The bully pulpit has become the 98-pound weakling's corner, and the government reaps the benefits of the shrinkage.

The New York Times and The Washington Post are still our leading newspapers, and no doubt they consider themselves guardians of the public interest. So one might think that when a scandal of this potential magnitude appears, they would rush in to protect that interest. An undercover agent's identity was exposed, in possible violation of the law and in obvious violation of the old-fashioned morality that conservatives supposedly revere. If ever there was a moment for a newspaper's editorial page to demand that an administration take actions or offer explanations, it's a moment like this one.

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[Jackpine Radical]

1. So we just have to wait for the next shoe to fall

off the CIA millipede. At this point the press, the lapdog press, doesn't think anyone knows or cares about the Plame outing. They're probably right. A this stage of the operation nobody really cared about that 3d-rate burglary back in 1972 either. There certainly weren't many editorials in mainstream papers in those days either until Crafty Richard was well into his second term.