Neatly Exposing the Press's Lame Coverage of the Bushies

Eric Boehlert, the press essayist for Media Matters, does a great job going back and documenting how weak the press coerverage has been of the Libby commutation outrage. I hadn't realized it was quite that lame.

The media's performance simply highlighted scores of unflattering newsroom deficiencies that have become calcified during the Bush years.

For instance, on July 4, The New York Times tried to shed some light on how Bush came to the decision to wave off a convicted felon's jail time. The news article was headlined "Bush Is Said to Have Held Long Debate on Decision," and in it readers learned that a deliberative Bush had "delved deeply into the evidence" of the Libby trial, consulted with aides, and oversaw "almost clinical" dissection "with a detailed focus on the facts of the case" that had stretched out over several weeks. How did the Times reporters know that Bush had done his due diligence? Because anonymous Bush aides and Republican sources told them so.

Let's put a very fine point on this: The New York Times has no idea how Bush came to his decision to commute Libby's sentence. None. The decision was arguably the most momentous political verdict of Bush's second term and Times reporters were absolutely clueless -- lacking a single independent source -- as to how Bush came to it, and what went into the White House deliberations.

Their only insight was provided by obviously partisan aides who painted for the Times a portrait of a serious and thoughtful Bush poring over his legal options, which the Times gladly printed as fact. (Read Newsweek's similarly lame, anonymous-only, "behind the scenes" account, featuring a deeply "conflicted" Bush.)