Following Cheney's claim that he is not part of the executive branch, the Washington Post ran a story detailing Cheney's reach throughout the executive branch. Laura Rozen relates a fascinating letter from a veteran editor:
A careful reading of the story of Cheney's coup against a feeble executive reveals that paragraphs 7 through 10 were written and inserted in haste by a powerful editorial hand. The banging of colliding metaphors in an otherwise carefully written piece is evidence of last-minute interpolations by a bad editor whom no one has the power to rewrite.....That in turn suggests that this piece has been ready to run for some time. Insertions like the one about the veep's office not being part of the executive branch and seriatim "softenings" show that jamming it into the paper at the end of June, when only cats and the homeless are around the read the paper, was made at the last minute.
Why? My guess is that this series ready to go during the debate over the supplemental funding of the Iraq war and that Downie or someone at the top held it back until Gellman and others started carrying snub-nose .38s to work under their seersuckers.
A key element of the coup is also ignored: the role of the press as revealed in the Libby scandal ... : Note in particular paragraph seven the phrase that Cheney's subversive roles "went undetected." The correct verb is "unreported."
This series is a landscape of an internal war. Parts of it are still smoking and some reputations are visibly dying--anonymously, for the moment. The journalistic graves registration people will go in later and tag the corpses.
This is flat out politicization of news. With a 28% approval rating, what exactly are the Washington Post editors afraid of? Can we finally agree that the Mythical Center, as represented by the mainstream media, is nothing more than a subjective political ideology?
The Post has no credibility left.
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"This series is a landscape of an internal war. Parts of it are still smoking and some reputations are visibly dying--anonymously, for the moment. The journalistic graves registration people will go in later and tag the corpses."
Wrong. Journalistic 'credibility' is incredibly hard to kill, as the past 20 years have shown. A reporter or editor can print lie after lie after lie with no consequences, so long as the powers-that-be are happy.
Did you say that was the Washington Post or the Washington Times?
There isn't quite the difference there used to be.
Wrong. Journalistic 'credibility' is incredibly hard to kill, as the past 20 years have shown. A reporter or editor can print lie after lie after lie with no consequences, so long as the powers-that-be are happy