Thank God For Media Matters

     At times like this we really need it. This week has shown if nothing else that history really does repeat itself-or as Marx said, it repeats itself as farce. Well the Clinton baiting was a farce and so is the Obama baiting.

     Maybe absurd things come in twos. I don't know. What I can tell you is I really hate the Beltway media right now. I mean I feel like I could chew nails-provided these nails were the Beltway media. I notice that even pretty good journalists are coming down with this strange disease during these scandalfests. Christ Matthews started an absurd rant where he psychoanalyzed the President as 'only liking giving speeches' but having no appetite for any of the real parts of governing.

   Say what you will about Matthews but at the end of the day, he's like any other Beltway insider-a totally unprincipled lemming. We've often heard the Green Latternists-a la Maureen Dowd-complain that unlike Clinton, Obama doesn't know how to lead. Yet, Dowd and Matthews treated Clinton just as miserably as they are now treating Obama.

   Even Huffintgton Post just wrote such a bad piece you'd think it was written by Politico's Mike Allen.

   "The administration is on the defensive for a trio of issues that are threatening to derail the president's second-term agenda. In addition to the IRS case, President Barack Obama and other officials are being pressed about last September's terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, that killed the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans, and the government's seizure of Associated Press telephone records as part of a leaks investigation."

   http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/17/irs-probe_n_3295076.html#postComment

    Just like all of the VSP's work, this gives a false impression. You;d never know reading it that, Benghazi is completely stillborn as a scandal, that there's nothing there. In fact, the only wrongdoing we've discovered so far is the Republicans who gave ABC's John Karl false information.

    I'm guessing there won't be a hearing into that anytime soon. However, Media Matters points out that John Karl could show some integrity of his own and tell us who the source was that gave him false information-as Dave Camp would say 'not misleading information, but lying.'

  "Another key question is whether Karl should reveal the source who misled him. While journalists take seriously the vow to not reveal the identity of confidential sources in exchange for the information that those sources provide, it's not unheard of for journalists to reveal source identities if it's proven that that person badly misled a reporter or passed along bogus information. Some observers think that's what happened in the case of the Benghazi talking points."

   "The answer here is that Karl pretty clearly got burned by his source," wrote Talking Points Memo editor, Josh Marshall.

   "Reporters enter into an agreement and give anonymity to sources in exchange for information, and specifically, in exchange for reliable information. But when sources pass along provably false misinformation, and particularly when they do it a plainly partisan fashion, the nature of that agreement changes and under some newsroom interpretations, reporters are no longer bound to keep secret the name of the unreliable source. In fact, it's sometimes argued reporters are obligated to 'burn' their source in the name of disclosing attempts at misinformation."

   "Some journalists adhere to a code where the pledge of anonymity is broken if the source lies," noted the New York Times' then-managing editor, Jill Abramson, in 2009.

    "This newsroom ethics issue was raised prominently during the Valerie Plame leak investigation under the Bush administration.  While the White House was sparring with anti-war critics, such as Valerie Plame's husband, Joe Wilson, who accused the administration of manipulating intelligence, conservative columnist Robert Novak wrote a column pushing back against Wilson. Citing "two senior administration officials," Novak named Wilson's wife and identified her as a CIA "operative on weapons of mass destruction.'' Outing an undercover CIA employee is against the law and Novak's column sparked a criminal investigation to determine who had provided him with that information."

    "At the time, the New York Times' public editor, Geneva Overholser, noted that journalists ought to speak out against ethical lapses by their sources. She advised the following [emphasis added]:

In this case, then, journalists should call upon Mr. Novak to acknowledge his abuse of confidentiality and reveal his sources himself -- thereby keeping the control of confidentiality in journalistic hands rather than in those of the legal system.

   "Should Karl follow the same advice?"

    http://mediamatters.org/blog/2013/05/16/should-jonathan-karl-reveal-his-benghazi-email/194099

     During dismal times like these, where we are repeating the 90s, MM is a vital resource-and sanctuary-from the media filter of the VSP. The beauty of it is that while this is a great reminder that the 90s weren't quite as idyllic as many of us remember-and we went through it-MM was basically midwifed from the putrid world of Whitewater, Monica Lewinsky, and Ken Starr. 

    They are the kinds of fire department we need for precisely this kind of inferno-GOP led feeding frenzies. 

    P.S. It goes without saying that Diary is also a vital resource in times like this-or even times not at all like this... But I digress.