Maybe it will change now, we'll see...
Anyway, Murray Waas has been breaking a lot of the news on the Rove Scandal. I have become a devout follower. This is from an interview on Democracy Now which took place yesterday before Novak's hissy fit. This explains a lot. Not only did Novak practice bad journalism, no one in the DC press corps will go after him for it. He's part of "the elite."
Waas was asked about the press, I think the question is instructive because it seems to be a given that many members of the media have known the facts of the Plame affair including Rove's involvement:
JUAN GONZALEZ: And Murray Waas, the role of the press in this whole issue, because clearly, because of the attempts of the White House to leak the information on Valerie Plame to a whole number of folks in the press, this is a story that many reporters in Washington know more about than they're actually reporting.Waas really dissected Novak's work, explaining how poor the journalism was, and then said this:
MURRAY WAAS:....So if we believe Bob Novak's account, he engaged in substandard news reporting on not one aspect of this column, but several aspects of this column. And it's led to the jailing of a New York Times reporter, it's harmed the national security of the United States because it led to the outing of a C.I.A. operative. It's hurt the morale of the C.I.A. It's damaged the Bush administration endlessly, and it's hurt the credibility of the press, partly because reporters were engaged in this scheme or took the bad information, and also because they're now revealing their confidential sources in cooperating with the prosecutors.
So, all of this occurred because reporters were sloppy, because they didn't do their work. I mean, that, in effect is the cover story, or that's what Robert Novak is insisting. And I have interviewed Geneva Overholser, for example, the former editor at The Des Moines Register, and she said some strong words about Novak, but what's interesting is because he's really at the core of a elite group, a cocktail party crowd or kind of celebrity journalism at CNN, nobody will come out and -- the Washington press corps is pretty much silent. The big wheels and big guns are not saying anything. They're not policing themselves. And this could have really deleterious and damaging long-term effects on journalism.
