Posted on 04/21/2004 3:21:20 AM PDT by pookie18
(CNSNews.com) - Over the course of the last two weeks, the controversial Senate Judiciary Committee memos have gradually made their way back into the news. But you won't read about any of the latest developments in either The New York Times or The Washington Post.
Both newspapers have shunned new information revealing the process by which the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund's president, Elaine R. Jones, recommended delaying an uncontroversial judicial nominee's confirmation until after a high-profile affirmative action case was decided.
When Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) was asked about the connection of two former aides to the "Memogate" controversy, the senator's refusal to answer resulted in a segment on Fox News and found its way into the Washington Times, but no other media outlet reported it.
And when a conservative group filed an ethics complaint against former Kennedy aide Olati Johnson and pointed out a connection to former Kennedy chief of staff Mary Beth Cahill, now campaign manager for Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, the story failed to generate much buzz.
The apparent lack of interest has left conservative groups in the nation's capital baffled.
Some see it as a double standard. Kay Daly, president of the Coalition for a Fair Judiciary, said the story would certainly produce headlines if Republicans were accused of doing things that allegedly took place between Democrats and liberal interest groups.
"If Republicans even had the slightest taint of any kind of judge shopping or case fixing or influence peddling," Daly said, "how fast do you think the New York Times would print something on that?"
The Center for Individual Freedom's executive director, Jeffrey Mazzella, hasn't let the controversy out of sight. Frustrated by the lack of news coverage, the group published an April 6 story revealing that Johnson, the former Kennedy aide, wrote the memo shortly after leaving the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund (LDF).
It was Johnson's former boss, Jones, who asked Kennedy to delay Julia Smith Gibbons' confirmation to the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, according to an April 17, 2002, memo. At the time, the LDF was serving as lead counsel for students defending the University of Michigan's affirmative action policy at the same appeals court.
"The ultimate story of Memogate is going to be a devastating one for liberal self-righteousness, which the Times and the Post have come to embody," Mazzella said. "This is not a story about clashing ideologies; it's about collusion and corruption, and it is massive in its scope. We are not at all surprised that neither paper wants to send reporters down that road."
Neil A. Lewis at the New York Times and Helen Dewar at the Washington Post have been responsible for most of the newspapers' coverage. But aside from a brief mention in Monday's Post about Manuel Miranda, the Republican aide who read the memos and later resigned, the last time either newspaper did a story about the issue was March 12.
Lewis declined to comment about the charges of media bias and Dewar didn't return phone calls. The Washington Post's national editor, Mike Abramowitz, defended the paper's coverage.
"There's been a lot news going on in the last six to eight months with Iraq, with the presidential election and a lot of other things, so we certainly haven't written a lot about it," Abramowitz said, "but we haven't ignored the issue either."
Abramowitz pointed to a Jan. 3 story by David Von Drehle that ran nearly 1,500 words. In total, Post reporters have written seven stories about the memo controversy; the newspaper also ran a short Reuters article when the story first broke, and it published one editorial.
"When the memos first surfaced, we assigned one of our best reporters on national [Von Drehle] to do an in-depth story," Abramowitz said. "When the sergeant at arms did his thing, we were all over that. In all candor, if there are new memos out, I'd be interested to see what they say."
He added, "I certainly think it's an interesting story, and any time you can get an inside look at the lobbying process on the conservative or liberal side, it's interesting. I think in general, we've done a pretty good job on that."
By comparison, the New York Times hasn't given the issue as much space. Lewis wrote four stories and the newspaper has published two editorials.
The Times' public editor, Daniel Okrent, said the newspaper has given the issue adequate coverage. Okrent noted that he doesn't speak for the Times; instead he offers recommendations to the staff through internal memos and via a forum on the Times' website.
Okrent said he has probably received more mail complaining that the Times had buried a story about "Republican misdeeds" or Miranda's access to the memos. But even if that's what some readers think, Okrent defended the newspaper's approach.
"Four stories over a six-week period, I don't think that's burying it," Okrent said. "One story on the inside and then leaving it go and maybe when the [sergeant at arms'] report was issued in early March, let's say two paragraphs of AP copy in a news roundup, that would be burying it."
Clay Waters, director of TimesWatch, which closely follows the newspaper's coverage, expressed disappointment in Lewis' reports. TimesWatch is a project of the Media Research Center, the parent of CNSNews.com.
"His coverage of these memos has been disappointing because he would devote a summary paragraph to their actual content, being fairly vague, but then go into how it was leaked, who leaked it," Waters said.
Complaints about the mainstream media's approach to the story are nothing new. The earliest reports in both the Times and the Post focused on how the memos were obtained rather than what they said. In many of those stories, Miranda's access to the memos took precedence.
"It just boggled my mind that a double-click on a mouse was a bigger story than the collusion between these left-wing organizations," Daly said. "I've been sitting here scratching my head."
Congress of Racial Equality national spokesman Niger Innis also criticized the media's approach, calling it an "inconvenience of ideology" on the part of the press. Innis' organization was one of four conservative groups to file an ethics complaint against Jones in December.
"It's like somebody discovers a bank robbery being committed," Innis said, "but the person who discovers is being examined because he jaywalked across the street to discover the bank robbery taking place."
While conservatives make no secret about their displeasure with the lack of media coverage or the approach of some reporters, not everyone has the same level of frustration.
Sean Rushton, executive director of the Committee for Justice, said reporters might be asking themselves "so what?" and having a hard time figuring out whether the story is newsworthy. "I think the only way the dynamics of this change is if more Republican senators make it an issue by calling for further investigation and by insisting that more be done on this," Rushton said. "If that happens, the media coverage will have to follow."
Only some? The obvious is obvious. The some arth idiots.
The press should be hounding the MA. Wrong Whale about HIS actions or inactions in this whole mess.
This is a joke, right?
Really?
It seems to me that the thousands of little "fires" continuously being started by the "arsonist" Democrat Party makes it virtuously impossible to concentrate on any but the largest fires at any one time.
Suffice it to say that the majority of those who support this "criminal enterprise" do so out of ignorance, wishful thinking, or (as is the case with the Democrat Party leadership) a design on continuing their power hold at the expense of the United States of America as a sovereign nation.
Make no mistake about it ... the Democrat Party Is a criminal enterprise!
– Charles Pierce, January 5, 2003 Boston Globe Magazine
Same Sh*t, Different Day...
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.