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Politics : Just the Facts, Ma'am: A Compendium of Liberal Fiction -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sully- who wrote (69693)	2/21/2009 2:44:44 AM
From: Sully-	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 90947

RE: Moyers Mark Hemingway The Corner From a reader: <<< I enjoyed your recent Corner post about Bill Moyers. You may have received this from other readers, but Judge Larry Silberman had an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal a few years back about this very issue. Here's the money quote: >>> Only a few weeks before the 1964 election, a powerful presidential assistant, Walter Jenkins, was arrested in a men's room in Washington. Evidently, the president was concerned that Barry Goldwater would use that against him in the election. Another assistant, Bill Moyers, was tasked to direct Hoover to do an investigation of Goldwater's staff to find similar evidence of homosexual activity. Mr. Moyers' memo to the FBI was in one of the files. When the press reported this, I received a call in my office from Mr. Moyers. Several of my assistants were with me. He was outraged; he claimed that this was another example of the Bureau salting its files with phony CIA memos. I was taken aback. I offered to conduct an investigation, which if his contention was correct, would lead me to publicly exonerate him. There was a pause on the line and then he said, "I was very young. How will I explain this to my children?" And then he rang off. I thought to myself that a number of the Watergate figures, some of whom the department was prosecuting, were very young, too. <<< In other words, Moyers didn't just use the FBI to dig up dirt on the sex lives of fellow members of the Johnson Administration. He used the FBI to dig up dirt on the sex lives of the president's chief political rivals. Notice also that Moyers's memory was a lot clearer back in the 70s than he admits today; he didn't have any problem recalling his involvement back when Larry Silberman was Deputy Attorney General. >>> Peter Wehner has more on Moyers over at Commentary that's worth checking out as well. commentarymagazine.com corner.nationalreview.com

To: Sully- who wrote (69693)	2/24/2009 10:47:03 PM
From: Sully-	Respond to of 90947

Bill Moyers, Media Ethicist Mark Hemingway The Corner Over at Slate, Jack Shafer is still on the Bill Moyers hypocrisy beat: <<< When Moyers was Johnson's press secretary, he believed that journalists existed to serve the president. James Deakin writes in Straight Stuff: The Reporters, the White House and the Truth that Johnson's assistant press secretary Joe Laitin told Moyers that it was OK to plant a question with reporters every once in a while at presidential news conferences. A bogus idea, for sure, but Laitin thought the technique was useful in getting important information out. "When [the president] volunteers something, everybody immediately is on guard: what's he trying to sell?" Laitin told Deakin. Moyers pitched the idea of planting questions to Johnson, who embraced it, giving Moyers a couple of questions for Laitin to distribute, which he did. Johnson so loved this innovation that he was determined to plant every question at his next news conference. About 15 minutes before the session started, Moyers brought Laitin about 10 questions from the president. When Laitin protested that this was too much—"Bill, this isn't the way it's done"—Moyers said, "Do it!" A rebuked Laitin approached John Pomfret of the New York Times first, primarily because the two were close. Deakin quotes Laitin: >>>I said, "John, would you mind asking the president this question?" There was no time for amenities; I had to be blunt because they were waiting and it was now eight minutes away from call time. He looked at me and said, "How dare you try to plant a question on the New York Times? I'm offended by this, and it's highly unethical." <<< >>> Shafer later notes that this is the same Bill Moyers who more recently said this: <<< I think these forces have unbalanced the relationship between this White House and the press. Frankly, even if we had tried it in LBJ's time, we wouldn't have gotten away with the kind of press conference President Bush conducted on the eve of the invasion of Iraq—the one that even the President admitted was wholly scripted, with reporters raising their hands and posing so as to appear spontaneous. >>> Shafer also has a follow-up column here. slate.com corner.nationalreview.com