Guilty (34 page)

This was a nutty claim circulating on the left-wing blogs, which the
Times
had apparently lifted without one iota of independent investigation.
⁴³
It turned out Gannon's suspect references to classified material came from documents that had been printed in the
Wall Street Journal
weeks earlier. Democrats in Congress were demanding that the independent counsel investigate how Jeff Gannon managed to get his hands on information that millions of people had already read in the
Journal.
⁴⁴
We're working on a number of different theories, but the most promising scenario so far is “bought a copy at a newsstand.”

Once the smoke had cleared from the media hate campaign against Gannon, Gannon's only remaining offense was that he might be gay. Gannon didn't write about gays. No “hypocrisy” was being unveiled. He wasn't caught in Central Park at 3:40 A.M. with a rope tied from his neck to his genitals and methamphetamine in his pocket, as a certain CNN journalist was in 2008.
⁴⁵
The entire scandal that Frank Rich complained was not getting enough attention was that Gannon was a gay Republican. (Because if there's one thing Frank Rich can't abide, it's a gay man who's too scared to come out of the closet.)

The episode with Eason Jordan, chief news executive at CNN was arguably a bigger story. On January 27, 2005, in front of an international audience at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Jordan made the astonishing assertion that the U.S. military was targeting journalists for assassination. Jordan's remarks drew gasps from the crowd—and slaps on the back from the anti-American Europeans and Middle Easterners.

This incident, which Rich said sparked a “media frenzy,” was not reported at the time by the
New York Times.

On February 1, 2005, after a number of conservative blogs picked up on the story, CNN issued the following statement, defending Jordan:

The CNN statement did not bestir the
New York Times
to report the burgeoning scandal. In the
Times's
defense, the newsroom was gearing up for its usual wall-to-wall National Gay Valentines Day coverage at this point.

Jordan issued his own statement, saying, “I have never once in my life thought anyone from the U.S. military tried to kill a journalist. Never meant to suggest that.” He added, “Obviously I wasn't as clear as I should have been on that panel.”
⁴⁷

The
New York Times
still did not report the story. Perhaps
Times
reporters were hot on the story of another all-male golf club somewhere in America.

The statements from both CNN and Jordan quickly became inoperative as various people who were present at the Davos panel gave accounts at odds with Jordan's version.

Liberal Democrat Barney Frank, who was on the panel with Jordan, said he was “agog” at Jordan's remarks
⁴⁸
suggesting that “it was official military policy to take out journalists.”
⁴⁹
Frank said he had asked Jordan “to basically clarify the remarks. Did he have proof and if so, why hadn't CNN run with the story?”
⁵⁰
According to Frank, Jordan then “modified” his statement to say that it was only some U.S. soldiers, “maybe knowing they were killing journalists, out of anger.”
⁵¹

Jordan had described one particular case in which American troops imprisoned an Al Jazeera reporter, taunting him as “al Jazeera–boy” and forcing him to eat his shoes. A producer for Al Jazeera later denied the story.
⁵²
This is what's known in the news business as a story “unraveling.”

When Frank got home from Davos, he called Jordan, asking for more information and offering to hold a congressional investigation if
there was any truth to the allegations. Frank said he never heard back from Jordan.
⁵³

Guess whether the
New York Times
reported the Eason Jordan story yet. No, but this time it was possibly owing to an important break in the Harken Energy scandal that week:
Still No Proof of Bush Wrongdoing.
Folks, a newspaper is only so big. I mean, where is it written that the
Times
has to print all the news?

David Gergen, a longtime friend of Jordan's who had moderated the Davos panel, said he, too, had been “startled” by Jordan's claim and had also immediately asked him to clarify his remarks. Jordan began to speculate, so Gergen decided to shut the panel down because “the military and the government weren't there to defend themselves.”
⁵⁴
Again the
Times
did not run with the story.

Democratic senator Chris Dodd, who had been in the audience, had his office release a statement saying that he, “like panelists Mr. Gergen and Mr. Frank—was outraged by the comments. Senator Dodd is tremendously proud of the sacrifice and service of our American military personnel.”
⁵⁵

The
New York Times
still did not report the story. Even I will admit, at this point, the
Times'
s silence was starting to look fishy.

On February 11, 2005, Jordan resigned from CNN “to prevent CNN from being unfairly tarnished by the controversy.”
⁵⁶

At long last, the
New York Times
reported on Eason Jordan's remarks at Davos in a demure Business section article explaining why he was resigning after twenty-three years at CNN. The
Times
was not alone in refusing to sully its pages by mentioning the mushrooming scandal engulfing CNN's chief news executive. A major player in American news had accused the U.S. military of intentionally killing journalists. But apart from opinion columns and enraged letters to the editor, that was considered newsworthy by fewer than a dozen U.S. newspapers.
⁵⁷

And yet, a week after the mainstream press finally relented on its censorship of the story in order to report Jordan's resignation, Frank Rich was complaining that the “ ‘Jeff Gannon' story was getting less attention than another media frenzy—that set off by the veteran news executive Eason Jordan.”
⁵⁸
Here's the rundown at that point:

As a group, the figures above suggest a “Jeff-Gannon-to-Eason-Jordan-stories” ratio of about 2 to 1. I don't know where Rich falls on the “real newsman” scale, but it seems to me that even an average newsman ought to be able to count.

ANOTHER STORY THE MEDIA HAD KEPT OUT OF THE MEDIA, according to
Times
columnist Paul Krugman, was the Bush U.S. attorneys scandal. After the 2006 midterm elections, Krugman exulted that the new Democratic Congress could finally shed some light on Bush's firings of U.S. attorneys, which he called a “suppressed Bush-era scandal—a huge abuse of power that somehow never became front-page news.”
⁵⁹

Krugman's complaint that the media had been burying the story was, as usual, completely deranged. By that point, the
Times
alone had made the U.S. attorneys “scandal” the subject of eleven major news stories, including two front-page articles, for a total of more than 9,000 words. The
Times
had also published six overwrought editorials, three op-ed pieces, and one indignant letter to the editor on the subject. The topic was featured in seven news summaries. The only way the U.S. attorneys story could have gotten more press is if one of the U.S. attorneys had been caught on the greens of the Augusta National Golf Club.

The wall-to-wall coverage was especially impressive since it had never before been a scandal for a president to fire his own political appointees, such as U.S. attorneys.
⁶⁰
U.S. attorneys serve at the pleasure of
the president. The president may fire them for no reason or any reason at all, including but not limited to: not implementing the president's policy about criminal prosecutions or being in the way of a patronage appointment. Why wasn't a fuss made when Bush fired Donald Rumsfeld? U.S. attorneys are political appointees, just as much as the secretary of defense is. Bush should have said, “We did it, it was political, and there's nothing you can do about it.” Instead, the administration stupidly apologized for firing its own employees, thereby embroiling itself in the most ridiculous nonscandal scandal in human history. We had gone from “Watergate” to “Troopergate” to “Gategate.”

If Bush's firing of U.S. attorneys he had appointed himself was a scandal, then what was President Clinton's unprecedented firing of virtually all U.S. attorneys appointed by his predecessor? This wholesale dismissal in March 1993 was a complete break with tradition. Historically, incoming presidents would gradually replace U.S attorneys from the opposing party as the president found replacements and the prosecutors wrapped up major cases and resigned. A total switchover to the president's appointees would generally take a few years. The Clinton administration requested that all U.S. attorneys submit their resignations by the end of the week.

Clinton's audacious move was particularly troubling because one of the U.S. attorneys targeted for dismissal was Jay Stephens, who was in the middle of a massive investigation of criminal wrongdoing in the House Post Office that was pointing to a key Clinton ally in Congress, House Ways and Means chairman Dan Rostenkowski. The prosecutor had already won several guilty pleas and was within thirty days of making a decision on whether to indict the powerful Democrat, when the Clinton administration peremptorily asked for Stephens's resignation.
⁶¹

In that case, the
Times
lightly rapped Attorney General Janet Reno's knuckles, saying that firing all U.S attorneys was “an odd first step in the wrong direction,” while quickly admitting, “Nobody questions her right to dismiss every Bush Administration holdover.”
⁶²

For liberals to complain about Bush replacing his own U.S. attorneys after excusing Clinton's firing of all U.S. attorneys, not to mention his purge of the White House travel office employees—who were career
civil servants, not political appointees—would be like ignoring Gennifer Flowers's audiotape-backed claims of an affair with Clinton, while running an innuendo-laced front-page article on John McCain's friendship with a female lobbyist. Oh wait … bad example. Okay, then, it would be like the breezing over of how John Kerry came into his money via a recent marriage to an heiress five years his senior, while fixating on McCain's marriage to a hot young heiress thirty-eight years earlier with whom he had four children. Oh wait … another bad example. How about: It would be like the
Times
defending the “Sensation” exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, with “art” defacing the Virgin Mary with close-up photos of women's vaginas, while criticizing John McCain's insensitivity to Catholics for receiving an endorsement from the Reverend John Hagee, a minister who had tough words for Catholicism. No, still another bad example.

Indeed,
Times
editorialists complained that the media had not bashed Hagee enough, with Frank Rich grousing that videos of Hagee's sermons “have never had the same circulation on television as [the Reverend Jeremiah] Wright's.” When the media are complaining about their own massively left-wing coverage being biased in favor of conservatives, we have gone through the looking glass into the nuthouse.

But through eight years of the Bush presidency, liberals wailed that a docile media was ignoring administration scandals. That's if you don't include the entire liberal establishment relentlessly attacking Bush from the moment he took the oath of office. Consider the arsenic hoax.

In his first months in office, Bush was bedeviled by hundreds of regulations the Clinton administration had issued in its final days. The most famous of the Clinton last-minute rule changes was the new rule lowering the amount of arsenic permissible in drinking water. During eight years of Clinton's presidency, his administration considered 50 parts per billion of arsenic in drinking water an acceptable standard— the standard since 1942. But just days before Clinton left office, the Environmental Protection Agency suddenly issued a new rule that would lower the standard to 10 parts per billion over a five-year period, knowing that it would be madness for the Bush administration to implement the rule.

In order to comply with the new rule, small towns in western states, where arsenic naturally occurs, would be forced to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to buy new water plants. The liberal Brookings Institution and the conservative American Enterprise Institute produced a joint study showing that rather than saving lives, the new standard would actually cost about ten lives annually.
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Money spent on new water-treatment plants is money that is not being spent on ambulances, cancer research, and healthy food. So obviously this rule was a joke, the equivalent of Clinton staffers removing all the Ws from White House typewriters before leaving. To paraphrase Will Rogers, every time the Clinton administration made a joke, it was a law, and every time they made a law, it was a joke.