The myth of 'voter suppression'

Who at NY Times has the credibility problem?

Stephen Spruiell:

In her response to Barney Calame's Sunday column, "The Miller Mess," Judith Miller asserts that New York Times managing editor Jill Abramson discouraged her from writing a story about Joseph Wilson's credibility:

You chose to believe Jill Abramson when she asserted that I had never asked her to pursue the tip I had gotten about Joe Wilson’s trip to Niger and his wife’s employment at the C.I.A. Now I ask you: Why would I — the supposedly pushiest, most competitive reporter on the planet — not have pushed to pursue a tantalizing tip like this? Soon after my breakfast meeting with Libby in July, I did so. I remember asking the editor to let me explore whether what my source had said was true, or whether it was a potential smear of a whistleblower. I don’t recall naming the source of the tip. But I specifically remember saying that because Joe Wilson’s op-ed column had appeared in our paper, we had a particular obligation to pursue this. I never identified the editor to the grand jury or publicly, since it involved internal New York Times decision-making. But since you did, yes, the editor was Jill Abramson.

Miller asks, "Why would I — the supposedly pushiest, most competitive reporter on the planet — not have pushed to pursue a tantalizing tip like this?" The companion question should be, "Why wouldn't a New York Times editor stamp out an effort to investigate Joseph Wilson's credibility, given the Times' subsequent pattern of whitewashing Wilson's lies out of the news?

Also scroll down to Spruiell's disection of the continuing factual error in the Joe Wilson stories.

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As the liberal media critic Bob Somerby has pointed out over and over again:

We’ll assume that Wilson was right about that. (No one has seriously challenged the professionalism of his actual report.) But when we understand what Wilson actually wrote, we see that his famous New York Times column didn’t really contradict what Bush said in his State of the Union Address. Bush had said that the Brits had learned that Iraq had “sought” uranium in Africa. Wilson’s column merely said that a sale hadn’t likely occurred. So no, there wasn’t a contradiction. But to this day, scribes like [NY Times reporter David] Johnston shave the facts to paper over this unpleasant problem. This morning, Johnston adjusts what Wilson wrote. In so doing, he creates a sharp contradiction which never quite occurred — and he heightens a standard press drama.

Yep! Bush said Iraq sought uranium from Niger. Wilson said a sale couldn’t likely take place. But from Day One, the press corps acted as if Wilson had flatly contradicted Bush’s troubling statement.

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