NEWS: A huge scandal is slow to boil
Posted on Wednesday, October 08 @ 10:17:37 EDT
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By Antonia Zerbisias, Toronto Star
I can't a recall a single instance in the past two years, or the past 10 for that matter, that I have nodded my head in agreement with an editorial in The Wall Street Journal.
Usually, I think of its commentaries as hysterical right-wing global-warming-what-global-warming rants.
That's why, last Wednesday, I was startled to find myself in accord with all but two words in the lead sentence of the WSJ's "Political Intelligence: The agenda behind the kerfuffle over Joe Wilson's wife" which read:
"We've been knocking our heads trying to figure out how a minor and well-known story about an alleged CIA `outing' has suddenly blossomed into a Beltway scandal-ette."
Okay, so it isn't exactly `minor' that last July, eight days after Joseph Wilson, the former American ambassador, published a piece in the New York Times about his trip to Niger, a trip that resulted in him challenging the Bush administration's claims that Iraq had purchased nuclear material there, conservative columnist Bob Novak outed Mrs. Wilson, Valerie Plame, as a CIA operative.
According to U.S. federal law, disclosing a CIA agent's identity without authorization is a crime. You could get 10 years for it. Not that Novak would do time but the people in the administration who leaked it to him could. And, as we have subsequently learned, whoever leaked to Novak also leaked to other big-name reporters who opted not to run with the revelation.
Still, it's now obvious to all that somebody high up was out to hurt Wilson. Who? Why? And what did the president know and when did he know it?
That's a huge story. And a big scandal. The biggest in the U.S. right now, except for maybe Arnold Schwarzenneger's inappropriate chest presses.
So I disagree with the WSJ there. But the paper's editors are correct when they wonder how the story has "suddenly blossomed'' — or more accurately exploded — because as I said, it has been around since mid-July.
In fact, just before I left for my summer vacation I was planning to write a column, inspired by David Corn's work in The Nation, asking what the hell was going on in the United States media that they were ignoring this outrage.
But I got distracted by another, not dissimilar politics-of-personal-destruction tale, the suicide of British weapons expert David Kelly.
The Kelly story didn't get that much play in the U.S. — but the Wilson-Plame one should have been top of the news there.
Instead, as the Washington Post's ombud Michael Getler noted on Sunday, "(T)here were a handful of follow-up stories in a few publications, including Newsday, the Nation magazine and one on Page A20 in The Post on July 25 that contained the news that Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) had asked the FBI to investigate whether Bush administration officials had identified Wilson's wife ...
"After that, the press, including The Post, seemed to go to sleep on this story until the night of Friday, Sept. 26, when MSNBC and NBC News disclosed that the CIA had asked the Justice Department for a criminal investigation of the leak."
Since then, the critical spotlight has been more on the media than on the administration. Or at least that's the view from here as I plough through endless navel-gazing and circle-the-wagons stories about journalists protecting sources. Which is well and good — to a point anyway — since it's not smart to burn sources in this business.
But what gets me is how little thought is going into why the media didn't run with this back in July when it first broke.
For example, the Washington Post's resident media critic, who tilts to the right, went on and on last week about leaks and sources and the ethics of both but never discussed why the media have sat on this story for the past two-plus months.
What's more, by protecting their sources in this case — specifically, people who broke the law to hurt a guy who blew the whistle on the White House — aren't journalists ultimately supporting the administration that lied about its reasons for attacking Iraq?
Oh! Smack me silly! Almost forgot. They weren't exactly questioning the administration on those lies either, were they?
I'm all for protecting sources but I have to ask: What deals with what devils did Novak and the other journalists make to be in a position where they can't divulge who tried to smear a truth-teller?
Seems to me the entire Niger affair has all the makings of a really juicy Watergate-type scandal, complete with the misguided cover-up.
And yet the ever complacent corporate media in the U.S. just let it slip away while the administration may have destroyed who knows what evidence of its own wrong-doing.
Chilling.
PUMP THE VOTE: When it comes to TV coverage of today's Total Recall vote in California, Americans are being badly served. I learned more about the big money involvement from Sunday's Foreign Assignment on CBC Newsworld, thanks to Washington bureau chief David Halton, than a month of partisan back and forth screaming on CNN and MSNBC.
No wonder Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has given pec machine a whole new meaning, will strut straight into the governor's mansion.
CONFIRM OR DENY: Last March, I reported that CanWest's newspaper chain, which includes the Montreal Gazette, Vancouver Sun and Ottawa Citizen, was dumping most of its film, TV and music critics and going with only one (or two) for the entire country.
At the time, CanWest issued an angry press release attacking my journalism, as if I got the story wrong.
Now it appears that the cutbacks have come to pass, with one TV columnist (Alex Strachan in Vancouver) and two film critics (Jay Stone in Ottawa and Katherine Monk in Vancouver) serving the entire chain, except for The National Post.
Calls to CanWest news president Gordon Fisher were not returned.
Reprinted from The Toronto Star:
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