Boehlert on Libby: How the Press Enabled the White House
Posted on Wed Feb 07, 2007 at 09:25:28 AM EST
Tags: Libby Trial Coverage (all tags)
Eric Boehlert has a terrific article up at Media Matters on the larger context of the media coverage of the Valerie Plame leak and the Scooter Libby trial:
So as the facts of the White House cover-up now tumble out into open court, it's important to remember that if it hadn't been for Fitzgerald's work, there's little doubt the Plame story would have simply faded into oblivion like so many other disturbing suggestions of Bush administration misdeeds. And it would have faded away because lots of high-profile journalists at The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, and NBC wanted it to.
In a sense, it was Watergate in reverse. Instead of digging for the truth, lots of journalists tried to bury it. The sad fact remains the press was deeply involved in the cover-up, as journalists reported White House denials regarding the Plame leak despite the fact scores of them received the leak and knew the White House was spreading rampant misinformation about an unfolding criminal case.
And that's why the Plame investigation then, and the Libby perjury trial now, so perfectly capture what went wrong with the timorous press corps during the Bush years as it routinely walked away from its responsibility of holding people in power accountable and ferreting out the facts.
Here's a bit more on the "timorous press corps."
Reporters all over Washington, D.C., were more than willing to drop the story and look away. So instead, it fell to Fitzgerald to do the watchdog work traditionally overseen by the press corps.
Nobody would argue that the story is being ignored today. Far from it: The press is gorging on details from the Libby trial, which makes sense considering it's the most significant criminal case to spring from the Bush White House. The case also goes straight to the administration's signature attempt to mislead the country into war, in this case by airing the totally bogus allegation that Saddam Hussein had attempted to purchase uranium from Niger to kick-start his nuclear weapons program. Yet for years, while support for the war remained strong, the press was alternately cautious, misleading, and even contentious about covering the crucial story.
His conclusion:
Regardless of the outcome from the Libby perjury case, the trial itself will be remembered for pulling back the curtain on the Bush White House as it frantically tried to cover up its intentional effort to mislead the nation to war. Sadly, the trial will also serve as a touchstone for how the Beltway press corps completely lost its way during the Bush years and became afraid of the facts -- and the consequences of reporting them.
I'd just note the role bloggers had in keeping the Plame investigation on their front pages. Firedoglake, Empty Wheel, Just One Minute, Needlenose and Left Coaster covered every detail, as did TalkLeft. True, we speculated and weren't always correct, but we never let the story or its implications die.
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