How the Mainstream Media Got Bush Re-elected

Columnists in today’s Boston Globe, L.A. Times, and Washington Post all have pieces that make it very clear that Patrick Fitzgerald had the goods to indict White House aides for obstructing justice in the CIA leak case as of October of last year. Each one of the columnists notes that the MSM was complicit in preventing Fitzgerald from doing so.

Media giants like the New York Times, Washington Post, NBC, and others all played the Pre$$titute roll and had they not, John Kerry would most assuredly be President today. These OP/ED’s are all must-read pieces about the White House’s obstruction of justice, how the MSM is complicit in it, and how it impacted the outcome of the 2004 presidential election.

Robert Scheer notes in his column “What Judy forgot: Your right to know,” in the L.A.Times that: “The most intriguing revelation of Special Prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald’s news conference last week was his assertion that he would have presented his indictment of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby a year ago if not for the intransigence of reporters who refused to testify before the grand jury. Scheer said that without that delay, “we would have been here in October 2004 instead of October 2005.” Had that been the case, John Kerry probably would be president of the United States today.”

It is deeply disturbing that the public was left uninformed about such key information because of the posturing of news organizations that claimed to be upholding the free-press guarantee of the 1st Amendment. As Fitzgerald rightly pointed out, “I was not looking for a 1st Amendment showdown.” Nor was one necessary, if reporters had fulfilled their obligation to inform the public, as well as the grand jury, as to what they knew of a possible crime by a government official.

How odd for the press to invoke the Constitution’s prohibition against governmental abridgement of the rights of a free press in a situation in which a top White House official exploited reporters in an attempt to abridge an individual’s right to free speech.

The spirit of a law is more important than the letter, but the reporters who fought to avoid testifying to the grand jury in the investigation that snared Libby upheld neither. They were acting as knowing accomplices to a top White House official’s attempt to discredit a whistle-blower.

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