Job Description?

by digby

So it turns out that Monsignor Tim spilled his guts early on to the FBI and only later decided that he didn’t have any obligation to testify to the Grand Jury. How odd. Here we thought it was all about the first amendment. Hamsher and Huffingtonwere both in the courtroom today and have the strange story.

This revelation makes it all the more shameful that the widely respected reporter and analyst who hosts Meet The Press could tell the FBI what he knew about the Libby leak but never informed the public. Apparently he wasn’t protecting his sources from government intrusion, he was protecting them from public embarrassment.

Tonight the Lehrer News Hour featured Tim Ruttan, the media critic of the LA Times and another media observer to talk about the Libby trial and what it reveals about the way journalism is practiced in Washington. I thought Ruttan nailed it:

Q: Tim, why don’t you start with an overview. What do you see?

Ruttan: I think we see the picture of a certain strata of the Washington press corps which has a certain relationship with people in the administration at its highest level based on access and mutual convenience. It’s not a pretty picture…

Q: Tim, one of the issues is who talks to whom, and when? And some people see this as a question of whether the press, and you’ve just alluded to this, of whether the press and the people in the government are too cozy. Play that out, spin that out for us a bit. Tell me what you see, how do you see it playing out in the Libby case?

Ruttan: Well, I think it plays out in a very interesting way because if you stand back from what occurred during those months, you have the picture of a number of high level Washington correspondents, very fine news organizations, who were essentially missing the story in the interests of preserving their access. I don’t think that one person in 50,000 really cared what the identiy of Ambassador Wilson’s wife might or might not have been. I do think that a large number of people might have been interested in the story of how the white house, especially the office of the vice president, had set out in a systematic way to discredit a prominent critic of the administration’s rationale for going into the war in Iraq. That’s a real story, but that wasn’t the story that was being told because these reporters were willing parts of that effort to discredit Ambassador Wilson.

We DFH bloggers have been ranting about just that since the details first emerged. All these famous, respected journalists were babbling incessantly about “the case” and almost none of them were telling the real story. It has taken putting them under oath in a federal trial to finally tell the public what they know about the most powerful people in the US government smearing a critic.

Can we all see what’s wrong with this picture?

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