The Weblog at The View from the Core - Tue. 03/01/05 07:38:34 AM
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NYT Catching Up With Reality? I haven't paid much attention recently to the Plame Affair. James Taranto takes a close look, yesterday, at NYT's tortuous relationship with the + + + + + This column last weighed in on the Valerie Plame kerfuffle back in July, when Joe Wilson, having been cast out of the Kerry campaign after a Senate report impeached his credibility, was fulminating that The Wall Street Journal, which was arguing that the special prosecutor's investigation into the "leaking" of his wife's identity as a CIA "operative" should be shut down, was part of a criminal conspiracy. Since then, the prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, has subpoenaed several reporters, two of whom, Judith Miller of the New York Times and Matt Cooper of Time, have refused to testify before a grand jury and are now threatened with jail. Fitzgerald also demanded that Miller and another Times reporter, Philip Shenon, turn over their phone records, but last week a federal judge quashed that request, which prompted a Times editorial Saturday that contained a stunning turnabout:
The "disclosure" may not have been a crime? Wow, that's a shocker! Well, actually, it's not a shocker to anyone who's been reading this column. In a pair of items in 2003, on Oct. 2 and Oct. 6, we laid out extensive evidence based on information that was publicly available at the time and on the text of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act that there almost certainly was no crime at the center of the Plame kerfuffle. The Times' editorialists and columnists, however, were singing quite a different tune, and it's worth reviewing their record of pronouncements on the subject. As far as we know, the first "mainstream" media appearance of the Plame kerfuffle was a column by former Enron adviser Paul Krugman, which appeared on July 22, 2003. Krugman waxed McCarthyite as he leveled criminal accusations:
Gail Collins & Co. weighed in with an Oct. 2, 2003, editorial, in which they called for then-Attorney General John Ashcroft to recuse himself from the case and asserted that Plame was indeed a "covert" agent for the purposes of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act:
The Times urged that "the Bush administration should not use the serious purpose of this inquiry to turn it into an investigation of [Robert] Novak or any other journalist, or to attempt to compel any journalists to reveal their sources" and said "we oppose 'leak investigations' in principle." But it also likened the "leaking" of Plame's identity to "the disclosure of troop movements in wartime" and called it "an egregious abuse of power." Times columnists went even more over the top:
Eventually Ashcroft relented and gave the Times what it wanted: a special prosecutor. A Dec. 31, 2003, editorial applauded the decision and flatly stated that someone had committed a crime:
The Times never wavered from its view that Fitzgerald should not force journalists, including Novak, to testify, but on Feb. 6, 2004, it published an op-ed by Geneva Overholser, a journalism prof and former Times editorialist, in which she laid out what The Wall Street Journal would call "the Novak exception":
The Times has now dispensed with the certainty that a crime was committed here, but the idea that Wilson was a "whistleblower" and a victim of the administration persists; that presumably is what the Times means in its Saturday editorial when it describes the "leak" as "an abuse of power." We think even this goes too far. To see why, let's go back to Novak's original column of July 14, 2003:
Wilson's response to this had three elements:
It subsequently emerged that Plame had recommended Wilson for the Niger junket, and now even the New York Times doubts that the "leak" was a crime. All that is left of Wilson's response to Novak is point (b), his assertion about the administration's motives. So far as we know, no evidence has ever emerged to support this claim; the Times and others continue to stand by it even though it is based solely on an accusation by Wilson, who was not in a position to know and whose credibility on other matters is in question. On the other hand, Novak's sources asserted that Plame had recommended Wilson for the trip, which turned out to be true despite Wilson's denials. Thus it would appear that Novak's sources were the ones acting as whistleblowers, calling public attention to nepotism at the CIA. In other words, it is increasingly likely that the entire Plame investigation in which two journalists are being threatened with jail is based on nothing. Yet as a Journal editorial noted last week, it may end up having a deleterious effect on press freedom. If Miller and Cooper appeal their case to the Supreme Court, the justices could "end up eliminating whatever hint of protection for sources remains" under existing law. Such an outcome might have been avoided if journalists notably including the Times' editorialists and columnists had treated Wilson's accusations with responsibility and skepticism in the first place. + + + + + See also Novak vs. Wilson, The Novak Exception, and Demomediagate. Lane Core Jr. CIW P Tue. 03/01/05 07:38:34 AM |
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