Media Brief: No Crime Committed

Andrew McCarthy: "Have you heard that the CIA is actually the source responsible for exposing Valerie Plame's covert status?.....How come you haven't heard?.....Because organized media decided not to tell you."


You see, media operates on a double standard with a liberally biased media agenda. We are smack dab in the middle of an era of muckraking, yellow journalism that renders obsolete the journalistic ethics code of truthfulness, accuracy, objectivity, and fairness. Result -- zilch media credibility (remember RatherGate).

On March 23, 2005, 36 news organizations (including ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, AP, Newsweek, Reuters America, the WaPo, the NYT, the LA Times, among others) filed a friend-of-the-court amicus brief on behalf of Matt Cooper and Judith Miller in an effort to keep these two media types out of jail on contempt charges.

"Why? Because, the media organizations confidently asserted, no crime had been committed." See the brief here.

The brief was based in part on a July 23, 2004 Washington Times article by Bill Gertz. Plame's undercover identity was first disclosed to Russia in the mid-1990s by a Moscow spy, and more recently disclosed when sealed confidential classified documents with references to Plame were sent to the Swiss Embassy in Havana and read by the Cubans.

These instances were cited in the media brief as evidence that no crime had been committed in the Valeria Plame "outing" -- she had already been "outed" years ago.

The media exhorts the neccessity of "leaks" in order to do their job, but feel they are above the law when it comes to revealing their sources.

So, we have no crime committed when charges are levelled against journalists, but the standard is doubled if the biased, agenda driven media believes it can place blame on Karl Rove, Scooter Libby, and the Bush administration.

As Andrew McCarthy said, no crime committed is the story the "press hypes when it reports to the federal court but not when it reports to consumers of its news coverage.....Thus, the same media now stampeding on Rove has told a federal court that, to the contrary, they believe the CIA itself blew Plame's cover before Rove or anyone else in the Bush administration ever spoke to Novak about her."

These previous "outings" could explains Plame's years long desk assignment at Langley.

McCarthy: "We'd probably know the answers to these and other questions by now if the media had given a tenth of the effort spent manufacturing a scandal to reporting professionally on the underlying facts. And if they deigned to share with their readers and viewers all the news that's fit to print ... in a brief to a federal court." -- LynZee