All The News That Stinks

Staying with the New York Times, I should note that, of all of the ridiculous media spectacles we’ve seen recently, I think the faux outrage by Peter Osnos over the furor caused by the snippet of Scott McClellan’s book is right up there among journamalism most stupid moments of the year.

(Note: This will be recalled when the time comes for “Doomsy’s Do-Gooders and Dregs,” and I’m going to start really early with that – next week, probably – instead of waiting until New Years’ Eve as I have in the past. I’ve got a ton of stuff, and it’s not going to be possible to produce it at once.)

This prior post tells us that the following excerpt was published:

“The most powerful leader in the world had called upon me to speak on his behalf and help restore credibility he lost amid the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. So I stood at the White House briefing room podium in front of the glare of the klieg lights for the better part of two weeks and publicly exonerated two of the senior-most aides in the White House: Karl Rove and Scooter Libby.

“There was one problem. It was not true.

“I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest-ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice president, the president’s chief of staff and the president himself.”

Well, given this, along comes Clark Hoyt yesterday to sit around opining about whether or not this should have appeared in the print edition of the Times versus the Times’ news blog “The Lede,” where it did appear.

I think we should apply “the Clinton test” here to try and ascertain the answer. And doing so, I think we can be sure that the following would have occurred:

Screaming right-wing talk radio would have gone predictably batshit insane (probably with Drudge leading the way…sorry, but that’s the only way to describe it).

As a result, “legitimate” corporate news would have picked up the “story.”

The resulting furor would have led to a deluge of phone calls, Emails and snail mails to politicians, to say nothing of Internet postings by Reynolds, Malkin and that ilk (with NRO, The Weekly Standard, and other sympathetic outlets following – I’ll acknowledge a likely amount of overlap between the top three bullets here, by the way).

Formal statements would have been issued by elected representatives and inquiries begun as a result.

So the answer then, Clark, is yes - it would have been printed.

So, while Hoyt and Osnos would have been augustly opining from “on high” about whether or not this was news, forces completely out of their control would have turned it into “news” for them. And all of their harrumphing to the contrary would have made no difference whatsoever.

And on a lesser scale, that’s what happened with the excerpt from the McClellan book (I’ll admit that the big-hit lefty blogs can help initiate a corporate media reaction at times leading to some kind of political activity, but we can’t match what the freepers can do in the way I described…yet).

And the real kicker to me, by the way, is noted as follows; I profess that I was angry at the reporters noted in Hoyt’s piece for not following up on what McClellan said, until I read this…

…The Associated Press and the Web site Politico were reporting that McClellan would not comment. “In retrospect, we should have made an effort to reach him,” (Douglas) Jehl (of the Times) said.

I agree, not that it would have done any good. Osnos told me that he and McClellan had decided that McClellan would focus on finishing his manuscript and would not talk to reporters.

So all of this, in the end, was just a ploy to hype McClellan’s book (and I guess the “outrage” by Osnos was part of that also?). So McClellan thinks it’s more important to leave this charge just sort of hanging out there to juice the “buzz” for his book as opposed to beginning an official inquiry (I know, I can feel another “strongly worded letter” coming on that this regime of outlaws will disregard – again – but that’s still better than nothing).

Well, I don’t know about you, but I don’t like to by played, by McClellan, Osnos or anyone else (I think Hoyt, who is otherwise a pro about this stuff despite my occasional disagreements, looks like a “babe in the woods” here).

So I would strongly suggest that we tell everyone involved what we think of this whole scam by refusing to buy McClellan’s book. Loathsome toadies like Our Boy Scottie don’t deserve any of our hard-earned money anyway.