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• Tuesday, January 3, 2006 10:37 AM

  The New York Times fails again

  We have learned that throughout the election of 2004 The New York Times (or at the very least, their reporter Judith Miller) remained mum concerning vital information in the Valerie Plame affair--sources that reveal that the leak had indeed come from the White House. Miller withheld this information from readers even as John Kerry was being smeared for being not as trustworthy as Bush. (So, apparently, did Matthew Cooper at Newsweek.)

  Now it appears probable that the Times also sat on a story about unlawful wiretapping before the election. (If the story was gathered before the election, as Calame seems to suspect it was.) There are other possible explanations for why they withheld the story, yet I can't help suspecting that the rationale for their silence in these two cases mirrors their reason for refusing to publish a story on the president's back bulge during the first presidential debate: The paper did not want to appear to be doing anything that might influence the results of the election. (Somewhere along the way the Times' editors seem to have picked up the notion that, like the characters on Star Trek, they shouldn't let their actions influence human history.) So they just left their readership in ignorance.

  At some point, ommitting information can become advocacy, too. In this respect, the Times has been as good a friend to the adminstration as Fox News.

  —olevant Read olevant's other letters
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