Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Libby’s Can Of Worms

by digby

So William Kristol has reluctantly come to the conclusion that Fitzgerald is on a partisan witch hunt because if Libby told the Grand Jury that Cheney instructed him to selectively leak the NIE to Judy Miller that means the rest of his testimony must have been true. Video from Crooks and Liars, transcript via Think Progress:

KRISTOL: In fact, we don’t know she was a covert operative, and Patrick Fitzgerald won’t even claim that. Patrick Fitzgerald isn’t investigating the actual source of the leak of Mrs. Wilson’s name, which was the Bob Novak column. We still don’t know who told Robert Novak, apparently Scooter Libby didn’t. You know, the leak story is absurd, but I now think the whole prosecution is absurd. And I have hesitated to say this, because I have friends who respect Fitzgerald, but I now think it’s a politically motivated attempt to wound the Bush administration. Why did Fitzgerald release — I mean, the theory of Fitzgerald’s perjury case against Libby, which is the only crime that’s alleged here, perjury and related crimes…obstruction of justice through perjury, really, for misleading the FBI or the grand jury. The theory of that case is Libby didn’t tell the truth, he didn’t say that Cheney had told him to do this, he blamed it on reporters, because he wanted to protect the Vice President or the President. Now it turns out that Libby, in testifying to the grand jury, carefully explained that he was authorized to go ahead and discuss the National Intelligence Estimate by the Vice President and the President.

Even Brit Hume recognizes that this misses the point:

HUME: But not Valerie Plame, necessarily.

Exactly. Libby was not charged with perjury for things he didn’t lie about. I would think that would be perfectly obvious. Kristol realizes that at this point, so he starts to spin like a dervish:

KRISTOL: But not Valerie Plame, which was tangential, and which came up toward the end, apparently, of the conversation with Judy Miller. It was never central in those two or three weeks. It seems to me that Fitzgerald’s case is crumbling. He’s refusing to close his investigation of Karl Rove and other people. If you read his 39-page rebuttal to Libby, he focuses now on Cheney. He is now out to discredit the Bush administration. He has bought the argument that there is something improper about the Bush administration responding to Joe Wilson’s charges, and that’s the real meaning of what’s happened these last few days, which is very dangerous for the Bush administration. They now have a special prosecutor out not to convict Scooter Libby, but out to discredit the administration.

That’s nonsense, but it signals that we are finally going to get the pushback we’ve been expecting. This thing is escalating, Bush himself has been implicated, and this is their final fallback position.

For those of you who (like me) get a headache when you read things like Kristol’s spin, let me explain in simple terms what it appears Fitz was actually doing. There’s no proof he’s focusing on Cheney, but Cheney has become important in this discovery process because of Libby’s blanket requests for documents:

• Libby hopes to show that he and others in the White House thought the Plame matter was no big deal and therefore it is reasonable to assume that he just forgot he had earlier told a number of people who she was when he testified to the grand jury that he first learned of Plame’s identity from Tim Russert.
• Libby has asked to review numerous documents that Fitzgerald does not believe are germane to the case, but which Libby claims will bolster this defense. One of the claims is that he needs to review certain documents that will show the “context” of the leaks.
• Fitzgerald is obligated to show why these documents need not be produced and he makes a number of legal arguments to that effect.
• As to the “context” Fitz makes the argument that the “context” actually proves that Libby would not have forgotten these particular details of a high level operation which Libby admitted in his testimony was quite unusual. The odd and unprecedented selective declassification of the NIE, the instructions that Scooter speak on “deep backround” to Judith Miller, the fact that he was tasked with this job rather than Cathie Martin, Cheney’s press secretary, all speak to the fact that this was a special job. The overt acts of cover-up show that he knew exactly what he was doing.

Kristol should probably look a little closer to his own circle if he thinks someone is trying to harm the administration with this investigation. After all, none of this would have come out if Libby hadn’t first lied, and now requested that Fitzgerald allow him to rummage willy nilly through government files under the specious claim that it would help him prove that he forgot the unforgettable.

He and his lawyers know very well that his massive document “context” request would likely result in Fitzgerald presenting the court with his evidence that Bush had declassified the document. You can’t blame him. He’s making Fitzgerald lay out some of his case for his own purposes. But let’s not blame the prosecutor for that. Libby’s doing what’s necessary to save his own skin. And Fitzgerald is using what he has to squeeze others who are in his sights. They both are playing an inside and an outside game.

But make no mistake. This is Libby’s doing all the way (and I suspect that certain high level white house officials are rueing the day they ever met him.) He and Rove lied, crudely and stupidly, undoubtedly under the impression that they could not be caught because the reporters would never testify against him. Rove was a little slipperier and it remains to be seen if he’s been caught. But Libby lost that gamble and now he may take the administration down with him. Fitzgerald is only the instrument of Bush’s problems; Libby is the cause.

I think perhaps Kristol is getting Fitz confused with partisan hack Ken Starr, the man who leaked volumes of disparaging information about Bill Clinton to the press during the Lewinsky investigation. He and his prosecutors actually cooperated secretly with a political lynch mob to try to get the president to resign in disgrace. You can understand why Kristol would get the wrong idea. He, like most conservatives, erroneously believes that all prosecutors are obligated by God to be partisan Republicans. He feels disappointed and betrayed that Fitzgerald is playing it straight so he’s lashing out. Poor baby.

Update: It’s interesting that Fitz says he won’t be calling Rove as a witness and refuses to allow Libby to see the documentation on him. After all, when you’re talking about context of the “concerted effort” to smear Wilson you would certainly be interested in seeing the Grand Jury testimony in which Rove reportedly says this (from Murray Waas way back in March of 2004):

President Bush’s chief political adviser, Karl Rove, told the FBI in an interview last October that he circulated and discussed damaging information regarding CIA operative Valerie Plame with others in the White House, outside political consultants, and journalists, according to a government official and an attorney familiar with the ongoing special counsel’s investigation of the matter.

But Rove also adamantly insisted to the FBI that he was not the administration official who leaked the information that Plame was a covert CIA operative to conservative columnist Robert Novak last July. Rather, Rove insisted, he had only circulated information about Plame after it had appeared in Novak’s column. He also told the FBI, the same sources said, that circulating the information was a legitimate means to counter what he claimed was politically motivated criticism of the Bush administration by Plame’s husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson.

Rove and other White House officials described to the FBI what sources characterized as an aggressive campaign to discredit Wilson through the leaking and disseminating of derogatory information regarding him and his wife to the press, utilizing proxies such as conservative interest groups and the Republican National Committee to achieve those ends, and distributing talking points to allies of the administration on Capitol Hill and elsewhere. Rove is said to have named at least six other administration officials who were involved in the effort to discredit Wilson.

Rove seems to have given detailed testimony about the “concerted effort. Why ever do you suppose Fitzgerald isn’t planning to call him as a witness?

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The Reducing Of “Irreducible Complexity”

by tristero

One of the fundamental tenets of “Intelligent Design” creationism dies an ignominious death.

By reconstructing ancient genes from long-extinct animals, scientists have for the first time demonstrated the step-by-step progression of how evolution created a new piece of molecular machinery by reusing and modifying existing parts.

The researchers say the findings, published today in the journal Science, offer a counterargument to doubters of evolution who question how a progression of small changes could produce the intricate mechanisms found in living cells.

“The evolution of complexity is a longstanding issue in evolutionary biology,” said Joseph W. Thornton, professor of biology at the University of Oregon and lead author of the paper. “We wanted to understand how this system evolved at the molecular level. There’s no scientific controversy over whether this system evolved. The question for scientists is how it evolved, and that’s what our study showed.”

Charles Darwin wrote in The Origin of Species, “If it would be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.”

Discoveries like that announced this week of a fish with limblike fins have filled in the transitions between species. New molecular biology techniques let scientists begin to reconstruct how the processes inside a cell evolved over millions of years.

Details then follow. The article is very good until the final few paragraphs which provide Michael Behe, the scientist who propounded the bogus theory of “irreducible complexity” to lie through his teeth about the importance of the study. What the article fails to mention is that Behe’s definition of science is so broad he considers astrology to be a scientific theory. Worse, the Times piece doesn’t mention that at Dover, when shown dozens of articles relevant to the issues raised by “irreducible complexity,” and which debunk Behe’s theory, Behe deployed the famous Austin Powers “That’s Not My Swedish Penis Enlarger!” tactic. He merely asserted that all those studies weren’t enough evidence against “irreducible complexity” without offering anything support his position (at this link, there is a link to a pdf of the full transcript of Behe’s testimony).

As Krugman rightly says, “Shape of Earth: Views Differ” is not responsible journalism. Behe’s 15 minutes is up, Mr. Keller.

Fingerprints

by digby

Many more qualified bloggers than I have been poring over the Fitzgerald filing and examining its every nuance, so I’m not even going to go there. I will just make one observation that I haven’t read anyone else bring up.

The filing says:

“At some point after the publication of the July 6, 2003, OpEd by Wilson, Vice President Cheney, defendant’s immediate superior, expressed concerns to defendant regarding whether Mr. Wilson’s trip was legitimate or whether it was in effect a junket set up by Mr. Wilson’s wife. And in considering ‘context,’ there was press reporting that the vice president had dispatched Mr. Wilson on the trip (which in fact was not accurate). Disclosing the belief that Mr. Wilson’s wife sent him on the Niger trip was one way for defendant to contradict the assertion that the vice president had done so, while at the same time undercutting Mr. Wilson’s credibility if Mr. Wilson was perceived to have received the assignment on account of nepotism.”

Big Time could certainly have come up with this nasty little smear about the trip being a nepotistic “junket” (or boondoggle as earlier reports called it.) He’s a nasty little fellow. But this is a page right out of Karl Rove’s smear portfolio: he always attempts to emasculate the opponent.

Perhaps Karl only got the “plan” after the fact and dutifully set about doing Cheney’s dirty work like a good boy. But I doubt it. It’s got the mark of Rove all over it. I think Cheney got it from him.

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Ask McClellan: Will Bush Start A Nuclear War?

by tristero

This should surprise no one. What’s the point of building nukes today if you’re not going to use them? Or building more unless you plan on replacing ones that will be used? And yet, even though I’ve been expecting to hear about this from a reputable source since 2002, actually reading about it is enough to make me vomit from horror.

George Bush seems to be planning to start a nuclear war. My God.

McClellan must be asked on Monday to state whether plans have been drawn up for George Bush to start a nuclear war. With Iran, certainly, but also against any other country. Because if Hersh is right – and so far, he has been very right – then…oh my God.

These maniacs cannot be permitted to get away with this, or even seriously contemplate getting away with it. No, that’s not enough. If this country so much as opens the question to serious consideration “whether first-strike nukes are justified in the present world,” then we are already halfway down the path to a nuclear holocaust. All it will take to tip it over is one more major terrorist attack, and Bush will guarantee the nukes will fall. And if you don’t think there will be another major terrorist attack in America, either a real one or one faked by this administration, you have not been paying attention to what has been going on. Bush’s nuclear policy is quite clear: from the start he’s wanted to be the first president since Truman to drop a nuclear bomb.

On Monday, someone must ask McClellan: Is George Bush planning to start a nuclear war?

[UPDATE: A few commentators have called into question the possibility mentioned above that the administration might fake a terrorist attack as a pretext to use nuclear weapons in Iran, saying I went to far. I hope you are right, but I had Operation Northwoods in mind. Let us not forget that the people in charge of the country right now are precisely the kind of people who would propose and approve of Northwoods.]

Faux Codpiece

by digby

The “liberal” makeover of Bush continues apace. Calling All Wingnuts catches Rush saying:

“I have never been under any illusion that George Bush is Ronald Reagan. Reagan, with every speech that he gave … was also leading the conservative movement. He was defining it and people rallied to that. When you listen to Bush … he’s who he is, he does not look at himself as leading a movement, he has a job as president and he’s not governed by any conservative movement.”

Now, Ronald Reagan raised taxes, he negotiated with terrorists — he even negotiated with Democrats! Government grew under his watch and he even defied the hardline conservatives by seeking out Gorbachev. (Limbaugh himself was so outraged he derisively called the ensuing media love fest a “gorbasm.”)

One could make any number of arguments saying Reagan was not leading a true conservative movement any more than Bush is. But there is one big difference between the two. Reagan was popular and Bush isn’t. When Bush’s approval rating was in the 60’s, you couldn’t find a conservative who didn’t revere him as William F. Buckley’s wet dream. He was the uber-conservative. Now that he’s down in the 30% approval area, not so much.

According to Rush Limbaugh, George W. Bush has never been a leader of the conservative movement. I guess that means he isn’t a leader of the movement that believes:

* We are confident in our principles and energetic about openly advancing them. We believe in individual liberty, limited government, capitalism, the rule of law, faith, a color-blind society and national security.

* We support school choice, enterprise zones, tax cuts, welfare reform, faith-based initiatives, political speech, homeowner rights and the war on terrorism.

* And at our core we embrace and celebrate the most magnificent governing document ever ratified by any nation — the U.S. Constitution.

* Along with the Declaration of Independence, which recognizes our God-given natural right to be free, it is the foundation on which our government is built and has enabled us to flourish as a people.

* We conservatives are never stronger than when we are advancing our principles.

From American Conservatism: A Crackdown, Not a ‘Crackup’ Wall Street Journal op-ed October 17, 2005

Yes indeed, George W. Bush must be a liberal. Otherwise he would be “defining conservatism and people would rally to it” like St Ronnie did — or Rush himself in that piece. Republican losers are always eventually revealed as liberal sheep in conservative clothing. How could it be otherwise? Conservatism cannot lose. It is perfect.

Of course, if Bush decides to nuke Iran, they might reconsider. For a while. There’s nothing like a good bloodbath to bring true believers back into the fold.

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“Mr. President, I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops. Uh, depending on the breaks.”

I suppose it was inevitable. The Bush Doctrine of illegal preventive war has never ruled out the use of an unprovoked nuclear attack. So why wouldn’t they use it?

US considers use of nuclear weapons against Iran

The administration of President George W. Bush is planning a massive bombing campaign against Iran, including use of bunker-buster nuclear bombs to destroy a key Iranian suspected nuclear weapons facility, The New Yorker magazine has reported in its April 17 issue.

The article by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh said that Bush and others in the White House have come to view Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a potential Adolf Hitler.

“That’s the name they’re using,” the report quoted a former senior intelligence official as saying.

A senior unnamed Pentagon adviser is quoted in the article as saying that “this White House believes that the only way to solve the problem is to change the power structure in Iran, and that means war.”

The former intelligence officials depicts planning as “enormous,” “hectic” and “operational,” Hersh writes.

One former defense official said the military planning was premised on a belief that “a sustained bombing campaign in Iran will humiliate the religious leadership and lead the public to rise up and overthrow the government,” The New Yorker pointed out.

In recent weeks, the president has quietly initiated a series of talks on plans for Iran with a few key senators and members of the House of Representatives, including at least one Democrat, the report said.

One of the options under consideration involves the possible use of a bunker-buster tactical nuclear weapon, such as the B61-11, to insure the destruction of Iran’s main centrifuge plant at Natanz, Hersh writes.

But the former senior intelligence official said the attention given to the nuclear option has created serious misgivings inside the military, and some officers have talked about resigning after an attempt to remove the nuclear option from the evolving war plans in Iran failed, according to the report.

“There are very strong sentiments within the military against brandishing nuclear weapons against other countries,” the magazine quotes the Pentagon adviser as saying.

The adviser warned that bombing Iran could provoke “a chain reaction” of attacks on American facilities and citizens throughout the world and might also reignite Hezbollah.

“If we go, the southern half of Iraq will light up like a candle,” the adviser is quoted as telling The New Yorker.

It’s hard to believe they think that they have the political latitude to do this. But then it was hard to believe they thought they had the political latitude to govern as if they had won landslide elections or that they could survive the 2004 election if no WMD were found in Iraq. But they did. In fact, they’ve had their biggest successes by pushing the envelope beyond the point anyone would have imagined. I do not put it past them to believe that they can do this and somehow revive their flagging popularity.

Update: I wonder which top Democrat whose name sounds like Schlieberman the administration has been talking to?

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Straight Up

by digby

I’ve got yer journalistic expertise for ya right here:

Libby testimony shows a White House pattern of intelligence leaks
BY WARREN P. STROBEL AND RON HUTCHESON
Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON – The revelation that President Bush authorized former White House aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby to divulge classified information about Iraq fits a pattern of selective leaks of secret intelligence to further the administration’s political agenda.

Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other top officials have reacted angrily at unauthorized leaks, such as the exposure of a domestic wiretapping program and a network of secret CIA prisons, both of which are now the subject of far-reaching investigations.

But secret information that supports their policies, particularly about the Iraq war, has surfaced everywhere from the U.N. Security Council to major newspapers and magazines. Much of the information that the administration leaked or declassified, however, has proved to be incomplete, exaggerated, incorrect or fabricated.

Thank You.

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Why’d He Do It?

by digby

The White House tried today to quell the furor over the leaking of sensitive prewar intelligence on Iraq, as President Bush’s spokesman insisted that the president had the authority to declassify and release information “in the public interest” and had never done so for political reasons.

The spokesman, Scott McClellan, said a decision was made to declassify and release some information to rebut “irresponsible and unfounded accusations” that the administration had manipulated or misused prewar intelligence to buttress its case for war.

[…]

Mr. McClellan said the Democrats who pounced on Mr. Libby’s assertions that Mr. Bush had given him, through the vice president, the authority to talk to a reporter about some material in the intelligence estimate were “engaging in crass politics” in refusing to recognize the distinction between legitimate disclosure of sensitive information in the public interest and the irresponsible leaking of intelligence for political reasons.

If it was a legitimate disclosure of sensitive information in the public interest, why didn’t the president just call a press conference? Why all the cloak and dagger stuff?

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Power Tool

by digby

I think we all know that Chris Matthews is a strange fellow. And he often sounds a little bit less than with it. But this really takes the cake. He seems to think that he’s figured out the secret GOP strategy for the fall:

MATTHEWS: …I’ve been thinking now for a couple of days now at least that what the Democrats are going to face this fall, what the Republicans are probably going to throw at them is, “You think we’re bad, we got a guy named Safavian you never heard of and we got this guy DeLay. He’s gone now. And we’re no day at the beach, but look what they’ve got. They’ve got a bunch of crazy guys who are going to try to lynch the president. They are going to try to censure him, but ideally they are going to try to impeach him. They are going to use the subpoena power to go crazy. Don’t let John Conyers of Michigan” —

Doesn’t it sound like he believes that he came up with this himself? And yet:

WASHINGTON, March 15 – Republicans, worried that their conservative base lacks motivation to turn out for the fall elections, have found a new rallying cry in the dreams of liberals about censuring or impeaching President Bush.

The proposal this week by Senator Russell D. Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, to censure Mr. Bush over his domestic eavesdropping program cheered the left. But it also dovetailed with conservatives’ plans to harness such attacks to their own ends.

With the Republican base demoralized by continued growth in government spending, undiminished violence in Iraq and intramural disputes over immigration, some conservative leaders had already begun rallying their supporters with speculation about a Democratic rebuke to the president even before Mr. Feingold made his proposal.

“Impeachment, coming your way if there are changes in who controls the House eight months from now,” Paul Weyrich, a veteran conservative organizer, declared last month in an e-mail newsletter.

The threat of impeachment, Mr. Weyrich suggested, was one of the only factors that could inspire the Republican Party’s demoralized base to go to the polls. With “impeachment on the horizon,” he wrote, “maybe, just maybe, conservatives would not stay at home after all.”

There goes Matthews, repeating this as if he thought it up all by himself. And in the process, of course, getting the theme out there on behalf of the Republicans.

Chris Matthews.

Expertise

by digby

I have always enjoyed Michelle Cottle’s writing in the New Republic. She has an irreverent style and often looks at politics and culture with a fresh perspective that’s interesting and fun. So, I was taken aback by this recent article about the “democratization of journalism” in which she advises the media not to forget its prerogatives:

I realize these are unsettling times for the Fourth Estate. The web is changing the way people consume news. The Bushies, along with their conservative media colleagues, have spent the past several years trashing mainstream journalists as ideologically motivated and morally bankrupt. Jayson Blair has convinced readers we’re making it all up. Dan Rather has convinced them we’re all unpatriotic Bush haters. And every remotely controversial news story winds up sliced, diced, and julienned by an overcaffeinated blogosphere with a chip on its shoulder about the arrogant, self-satisfied, lazy, corrupt “old media.” It’s hardly surprising that polls show our public credibility headed towards that of Jack Abramoff.

[…]

I realize it’s very popular–not to mention economically savvy–to talk about “giving readers what they want.” And I’m in no way suggesting that we ratchet back the “soft news” or “lifestyle journalism” pieces that keep readers subscribing. (Hell, without its Wedding Pages, the Sunday New York Times would only have two dozen readers.) But determining what merits serious, front-page coverage really should be left to people whose careers have been in the service of the news.

How then can we explain the decision by the Washington Post today to bury the story on page nine that a Bush administration verified that the president had, in fact, authorized Libby to leak selected parts of a classified NIE? Or how can we explain Judith Miller’s bogus WMD stories, or wrongly headlining the Florida recount claims, or front page giggling over Al Gore and earth tones, or succumbing to Lewinsky madness, or pimping Republican operative Whitewater nonsense? It was the choice of these front page stories, and many, many more, that led so many members of the public to mistrust the media’s ability to think for itself.

The mindless run-up to war is the perfect example. There was plenty of information at the time that could have allowed for a more thoughtful debate, but the Washington Post (just one example) chose to bury the information. Cottle scoffs at the press “self-flagellating” but the post itself admits that they did not exercise “serious, front-page” news judgment during that period:

Days before the Iraq war began, veteran Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus put together a story questioning whether the Bush administration had proof that Saddam Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction.

But he ran into resistance from the paper’s editors, and his piece ran only after assistant managing editor Bob Woodward, who was researching a book about the drive toward war, “helped sell the story,” Pincus recalled. “Without him, it would have had a tough time getting into the paper.” Even so, the article was relegated to Page A17.

“We did our job but we didn’t do enough, and I blame myself mightily for not pushing harder,” Woodward said in an interview. “We should have warned readers we had information that the basis for this was shakier” than widely believed. “Those are exactly the kind of statements that should be published on the front page.”

Overcaffeinated or not, the public (which includes bloggers) is well within its rights to question the press’ vaunted professionalism considering its recent performance. And considering that even today the flagship DC newspaper continues to miss the story, I think we are right to keep the pressure on. I know it’s unpleasant for them to be questioned, what with their superior credentials, experience and expertise, but the stakes are too high to ignore.

For my part, I waited for more than a decade for the press to report what I could see with my own eyes: a powerful political party had morphed into a criminal enterprise that was bent on permanently altering our fundamental system of government. This is not hyperbole. The Republicans wrote about their dreams of empire and executive infallibility. They advertised their plan to dominate Washington. The information was available to those who had the time and patience to wade through the cacophony of media static to find it. But the media itself behaved like a flock of birds, startling to every rightwing noise and flying off together into whatever direction the Republicans wanted them to go.

The smear jobs of the early to mid-90’s were not new. The Republicans did it better than most, but they didn’t invent it. They fed damaging titillating information to a gullible and eager press at a time when harsh competition, 24 hour cable and tabloid ethics were starting to permeate the news media. It created a constant sense of crisis that served them well when they upped the ante.

But tabloid smears aside, using institutional power and the levers of government to deny the people their democratically elected choice of president, whether it was through impeachment or the Supreme Court deciding an election, was not business as usual. Openly abrogating treaties and setting forth an aggressive doctine of preventive war is not business as usual. Consciously governing on a strictly partisan basis in order to render the opposition completely impotent despite its near parity in the nation, is not something we’ve ever seen in American politics. Using the power of the executive in “wartime” (the war being purely defined by the executive) to embed a theory of a unitary executive is a dramatic shift in the constitutional design of checks and balances. None of this is benign. These are steps toward dictatorship.

I can see this. Millions of people in this country can see this. But the press has behaved for the last decade as if nothing out of the ordinary is taking place. Indeed, they have participated in this ongoing constitutional crisis, not by just turning the other cheek, but by actively taking the bait and running with the cheap tabloid distractions of the 90’s and then the martial fervor of the aught years.

Cottle believes that all this anger at the press is because we bloggers think we are qualified to be journalists:

And make no mistake. No matter how half-assed or silly it may at times seem from the outside, journalism is a real, grown-up profession in which, as with nearly every other job on the planet, experience and acquired skill matter. While that may sound obvious, I’m convinced that a sizeable chunk of the public can’t quite get past its belief that any idiot can be a journalist because, by and large, it doesn’t require the same sort of specialized or technical knowledge as being a doctor, chemical engineer, or CPA. (Just look at all the articles and blog posts cheering the death of the exclusionary, elitist big media and the rise of the web-empowered citizen journalist.) It’s a little like the disdain with which many people quietly view child care providers: It can’t take much skill or smarts to tend to a child, because look at how many clueless teenage moms do it every day. Likewise, folks figure that any idiot can form an opinion and write a sentence, so what’s so tough about being a journalist?

What an odd analogy. I see what she is saying and it’s certainly true that parenting, like journalism, takes skill. But is Cottle then also suggesting that there is some small elite minority of parents who can do it well?

I would suggest that just as there are many millions of good parents out there, there are millions of informed, engaged citizens who can read and think and see the world around them without having to be credentialed members of the press corps. And they see a media that is not doing a proper job of speaking truth to power.

Cottle concludes:

Certainly, journalists could stand to pay closer attention to what’s happening in the communities they cover–or, in the case of the national media, to venture beyond the rarefied cultural bubble of the New York-to-Washington corridor. But it’s absurd, not to mention counterproductive, to think any of us can win readers’ admiration by further undermining the notion of journalists as serious professionals with acquired knowledge and expertise. If members of the news media can’t take what they do for a living seriously, how can they possibly expect anyone else to?

I think the greatest “expertise” any professional journalist should develop over the course of years of reporting or editing is the ability to detect bullshit when they see it. The last ten years of collective mainstream political journalism proves that there is far less “expertise” in the professional media than the professional media thinks there is.

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