All together now: Wall Street Journal editorial, July 13:
... Mr. Wilson wasn't a whistleblower ...
... the CIA interpreted the information he provided in his debrief as mildly supportive of the suspicion that Iraq had been seeking uranium in Niger.
Washington Post editorial, July 15:
... Wilson's portrayal of himself as a whistle-blower was unwarranted.
It turned out [Wilson's] report to the CIA had not altered, and may even have strengthened, the agency's conclusion that Iraq had explored uranium purchases from Niger.
John Tierney's
New York Times op-ed, July 16:
... a bipartisan report from the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that his investigation had yielded little valuable information, hadn't reached the White House and hadn't disproved the Iraq-Niger link - in fact, in some ways it supported the link.
... it looks as if this scandal is about ... a whistle-blower who did not blow the whistle ...
Those are the big three nationals. All their readers will get the
identical message.
Remarkable.
The Washington Post is in the tank (as Yglesias
pointed out recently). The use of "whistleblower" in their editorial is the give-away. It's not a point of fact to be argued about (say, official A telling reporter B about X on date Y).
It's a Republican talking point. Those who suspect or accuse Rove of leaking Plame's identity have no interest in Joe Wilson being a whistleblower or not.
posted by Quiddity at 7/16/2005 03:05:00 AM
Thank You, thank you and thank you. NPR is falling for this crap as well.
I'm surprised that no other blogger seems to have picked this up. When I read the Post editorial I was flabbergasted.
Unfortunately, this goes to the point that Billmon keeps making: that the mainstream media are political agents of the Republican Party. They are not journalists in any accepted definition of the term.
Which, unfortunately, means that the vast majority of the citizens of the US are living in a dream world concocted by Madison Avenue and the Republican Party. It can only end badly.
