Piling On the New York Times With a Scoop (MSM circles the wagons)

Washington Post ^ | 6/27/06 | Howard Kurtz

[RinaseaofDs]

I agree completely. IMHO this all started with Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers. Ellsberg should have been jailed.

[tomzz]

I agree with all of that. I was simply point out the fact that the republicans cannot ignore the situation at this point. The dems are going to try to spin the thing into a case of a republican witch hunt against the innocent.

[GOPJ]

This is the point. It's not just politics here. The NYT has done the equivalent of telling the enemy we've broken their codes, after having published an editorial on the importance of breaking their codes.

It's really that simple. That Sulzberger is still breathing free air is indicative of how little respect we have collectively for the rule of law.

I agree totally.

[lugsoul]

Who says they were waiting on anything? Do you think that they get this stuff set to print instantly? There is a reason why the NYT doesn't have scores from last night's ballgames.

[lugsoul]

What was WSJ's motive?

[Peach]

For what it's worth, this article says that it was several hours after the NYT story appeared on the web before the WSJ article appeared.

It's pretty well accepted that most of the MSM takes their lead stories from the NYT and then develops their own work from there.

http://www.capitolhillblue.com/artman/publish/article_8961.shtml

[lugsoul]

For what its worth, you are being a little loose with language to say that. It says it appeared on the other sites 'within hours.'

And, with all respect, if you think the WSJ follows the lead of the NYT you are smoking crack.

I'm trying to dig out the exact sequence. There are multiple sources of all political persuasions that describe them being posted within minutes of each other.

[edzo4]

perhaps the left over clinton hack that leaked the story called other papers besides the NY times

[Peach]

If you find the exact sequence, let me know.

"For starters, it appeared to be not a leak but a gusher, spouting from news spigots coast to coast. It sprung first on the night of June 23 on the Web site of The New York Times, in a long and detailed report. Within hours, it was gushing out as well on the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times Web sites, and then it appeared in the old fashioned way, in ink on newsprint, on our doorsteps (or perhaps in our rosebushes)."

You'll have to show me how I've been a little loose with my language. I believe I said that it was several hours after the NYT story appeared on the web before the WSJ article appeared. Isn't that what the quote above says?

[lugsoul]

You do know, don't you, that everything in the stories except that it was being done without judicial oversight is already a part of the public record?

Three papers publish a story that contains little new and little that is secret, and the GOP and its supporters act like one - and only one - of them has divulged state secrets and clued AQ into our entire strategy.

Can anyone explain why that is? As in, why not pillory all three? And why pillory them over stories on a program that the Treasury Department has trumpeted in the past?

Just looks like political BS to me.

[lugsoul]

Nope. It says that "Within hours" it appeared on all of those sites. Which could mean it appeared at WSJ five minutes later, LAT one hour later, and WaPo four hours later. Or any combination of the above.

There is no doubt that it was also web posted by WSJ that same night. The only thing I haven't been able to dredge up is the exact posting times of each. But even a cursory look at the stories shows that it wasn't a cut-and-paste job by the WSJ.

I think the reason there isn't any outrage for them is that the NYT outrage - at least over this story - is manufactured and choreographed.

[edzo4]

so then why was revealing valerie plames name such a big deal?


sounds like now that the shoe is on the other foot the lefty losers want to take their ball ang go home.

[Cementjungle]

I agree that the Times are scums, but the real traitor's are the government leaker's, especially if they are Republican malcontents

It could even be someone in Congress, as they do get told about programs like this one.

[Peach]

You think the outrage over the NYT is manufactured? I can assure you, from the people I've talked to in real life, not on the web and not politicians, it's not manufactured.

And if you ever get it nailed down about the timing of the WSJ article release, let me know.

Why didn't the administration send people to the WSJ and others if they knew they were all working on the story?

Just as there are leakers in the government, there are leakers within the media and my bet is that someone let the NYT get it first, and the others followed.

[lionheart 247365]

Let's go for it !!! , Thanks .

[Peach]

You do know, don't you, that everything in the stories except that it was being done without judicial oversight is already a part of the public record? Three papers publish a story that contains little new and little that is secret, and the GOP and its supporters act like one - and only one - of them has divulged state secrets and clued AQ into our entire strategy. Just looks like political BS to me.

Incorrect.

The NYT editors originally said said they had to go public because it's the public's right to know about such a secret program. They have since changed that excuse to the fact that there is no harm in their reporting on this program because everyone knew about it anyway. So which one is it?

Civil rights groups certainly didn't know about it. But they do now and are threatening to sue the financial institutions involved in the EU.

Co-Chairman of the 9/11 Commission Kean said that very few people even in the banking world know about SWIFT and how it works, and almost no one would have had any idea that the US was able to get access to this data.

Kean further said that: "The terrorists didn't know the financial transactions went through this one group. Treasury told me, this was a method of financial tracking that people didn't understand, that nobody knew this was how things were done. Top-notch people in the US didn't even know."

[Chgogal]

This "manufactured and choreographed outrage" is a cumulative effect of decades of abuse by the NYT. The NYT has acted in a treasonous manner since Walter Duranty received his Pulitzer in 1932. Let's just say this is the story that broke the camel's back. Or to use another cliché, they used up their Goodwill. As for the BS the Billie Boy Traitor Keller wrote this weekend, that is already being proved wrong. It will be interesting to see if SWIFT will be as forthcoming as it has been in the past. If it is not, you lost the argument. If your argument is that poor little old NYT is being picked on unfairly, well like I say, they've lied for a few decades now and their cumulative history has caught up with them. There will be no mercy for them or the leaker(s).


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Duranty

http://www.nationalreview.com/stuttaford/stuttaford050703.asp

http://www.nytco.com/company-awards-pulitzer-note.html

http://www.timeswatch.org/topicindex/P/pulitzer_prize/welcome.asp

[Chgogal]

This is why the NYT is going to have a big battle. They are going to take the hit for ALL of MSM.

"Nowhere was this mindset more vividly displayed than in a 1987 installment of the series Ethics in America, hosted by the late Fred Friendly, former president of CBS News. Each program in the series featured a moderator and panel of experts discussing ethical issues in business, medicine, or what have you, and the topic in one episode was ethics in the military. Harvard law professor Charles Ogletree was the moderator, and among the well-known panelists were retired General William Westmoreland and media heavyweights Peter Jennings and Mike Wallace. (Hadley Arkes wrote about the series in the June 16, 1989, issue of National Review. The series is available on video here.)

Ogletree asked the panel to imagine a war between the hypothetical countries of North and South Kosan. The United States was backing South Kosan, and indeed American troops were deployed in the field alongside South Kosanese forces. The North Kosanese offered to allow Jennings and a crew to film them behind their lines. Would Jennings go? Of course, he answered.

Then Ogletree introduced the ethical dilemma: While filming the North Kosanese, you see they are setting up an ambush for an approaching column of American and South Kosanese soldiers. What do you do? Would you stand by and film as the North Kosanese opened fire on the Americans?

Jennings pondered the question. "Well, I guess I wouldn't," he said finally. "I am going to tell you now what I am feeling, rather than the hypothesis I drew for myself. If I were with a North Kosanese unit that came upon Americans, I think that I personally would do what I could to warn the Americans." He went on to say he would warn the Americans even if it meant losing the story, even if it meant losing his life.

But this admirable display of patriotic duty was short-lived, for he was then upbraided by Mike Wallace.

"I think some other reporters would have a different reaction," Wallace said. "They would regard it simply as a story they were there to cover." Wallace was "astonished" at Jennings's answer, and he began to lecture him as he would an errant schoolchild.

"You're a reporter," Wallace scolded. "I'm a little bit at a loss to understand why, because you're an American, you would not have covered that story."

Didn't Jennings have a higher duty, Ogletree asked Wallace, than to roll film as American soldiers were being shot? "No," Wallace said. "You don't have a higher duty. No. No. You're a reporter!"

Properly chastened, Jennings backed down. "I chickened out," he said. He had lost sight of his journalistic duty to remain detached from the story.

After more interplay between the newsmen (the sage and the cub), Ogletree turned to another panelist, George M. Connell, a Marine Corps colonel in full uniform.

Connell looked at Wallace and Jennings as he might a pair of stains on his dress blues. "I have utter contempt," he said. "Two days later they're both walking off my hilltop, two hundred yards away and they get ambushed. And they're lying there wounded. And they're going to expect I'm going to send Marines up there to get them. They're just journalists. They're not Americans."

"Oh, we'll do it," Connell continued, "and that's what makes me so contemptuous of them. Marines will die going to get a couple of journalists."

There was complete silence all around. Even Ogletree was at a loss. Finally Newt Gingrich, then a junior congressman, summed it up perfectly. "The military," he said, "has done a vastly better job of systematically thinking through the ethics of behavior in a violent environment than the journalists have.""

What is at the heart of The New York Times' treachery?
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1657050/posts

You, know I was pretty young, but I watched that program and was disgusted. That was the week I stopped watching 60 Minutes. That was the week I lost all respect for the news. That was a watershed week. There were two others in my life. Crossing the Iron Curtain as a kid and watching the last US helicopter leave Saigon. Don't know what the Democrats can do to win me back.

[lugsoul]

Did I ever say it was a big deal for any media outlet to print what they were given on her? That would be a big ol' no.

[lugsoul]

Peach, the people you are talking to are spouting the manufactured story, just like on here. Why are they mad at a conservative paper that did exactly the same thing? Why aren't you? You can toss out the 'cumulative' argument all you want - then get on them for their past misdeeds. In this one, they are one of many. Condemn all or condemn none.

You also have a false premise about the gov't 'sending' people. They did, to all but the WSJ.