During the Libby trial, I intentionally did not watch or read a lot of media coverage because I wanted to form my opinions based directly on what I was seeing in court, and not be influenced by "conventional wisdom" or what others were saying. To turn on the TV today and see the Anna Nicole circus, and the shameful way that everyone involved seems to be exploiting the situation for fun and profit while a story about the criminal conspiracy that lied the country into war and then tried to cover it up goes virtually uncovered is quite shocking. Maybe it shouldn't be, but it is.
If bloggers inadvertently contributed to the public's inattentiveness to the story, it is because there is a tendency in the blogosphere to camp out in the weeds when covering the CIA leak case. We forget that most people's eyes glaze over when we start talking about what CIA briefer was copied on what memo on which day. With the close of the Libby trial, I'd like to step back and start trying to define what the important, overarching narratives to emerge from the case actually are:
1. The administration lied us into war and tried to abuse its power to punish the whistleblower who told the American public the truth.
2. Scooter is the firewall to Shooter.
3. Dick Cheney, Scooter Libby and other members of the administration conspired to keep federal investigators from uncovering their crimes.
4. The media was complicit in spreading administration propaganda rather than doing investigative journalism, and are now helping to set the table for a pardon.
5. The journalistic standards that have been exposed in the case (witness Tim Russert, Judy Miller, Andrea Mitchell, Robert Novak and others) are reprehensible, and have undermined the public trust in the media.
6. The degree to which this story about the lies that lead to war has been ignored by the media (relative to the feeding frenzy over a Clinton blowjob) left a huge opening that the blogs have filled.
The traditional media is not monolithic, and many journalists have done a terrific work covering this story -- David Schuster particularly has done a great job, especially considering how compromised his own network is in the case. It's a shame that Carol Leonig's fine work at the Washington Post has been overshadowed by the paper's decision to prominently feature the wildly ignorant jibberish of David Broder (does Broder really believe that if a prosecutor brings no charges that no crime has been committed? Wow, I guess Al Capone really wasn't guillty of anything other than tax evasion), and the administration propaganda of Victoria Toensing as if it was anything other than a White House press release. Sidney Blumenthal's work at Salon is also not to be missed. But the pathetic bleating of the "what's a little perjury between friends" crowd, the same people who thought nothing short of the guillotine would save the Constitution during the Whitewater scandal, is the pinacle of hypocrisy and should bring on a case of terminal humiliation.
But if this case has taught us nothing else, it's that shame is in short supply amongst the beltway journalists who don't seem to realize quite yet that their credibility is on the line.
That's fine by us. We'll be right here, picking off their readers, one by one.
Jane Hamsher blogs at firedoglake.com.
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