results now in: “liberal” media helped re-elect Bush

Media Matters reports that former Time Magazine White House correspondent and current Slate political correspondent John Dickerson worked with correspondent Matt Cooper and Washington bureau chief Michael Duffy on an October 2003 story that perpetuated the myth that Karl Rove had nothing to do with leaking the identity of Valerie Plame, even though all three of them knew that Rove was directly involved.

Add reporter Viveca Novak, who also knew that Rove and Cooper had talked, and that makes four at Time that went through the 2004 election season without telling the truth about White House involvement in the outing of Mrs. Joseph Wilson.

Now, put that together with the New York Times’ Miss Run Amok, Judy Miller’s relationship with Scooter Libby, and that makes five reporters that failed to expose a scandal before the presidential election.

But wait, there’s more. New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger and Editor Bill Keller also sat on the story of illegal domestic wiretaps—at the request of the White House—for more than a year—waiting until December of 2005 to publish.

(Yeah, there’s syndicated columnist Bob Novak, too, but I won’t even bother to count him.)

Perhaps everyone understands each of these cases individually, and, perhaps, individually, they seem like academic scandals. But string them all together, and have these stories break naturally during the summer and fall of 2004, and then tell me it wouldn’t have swung the very close presidential election.

So, Dickerson, Duffy, Cooper, Novak, Miller, Sulzberger, and Keller, thank you. Thank you for four more years of cronyism and corruption. Thank you for cutting aid for the poor and taxes for the rich. Thank you for John Roberts and Sam Alito. Thank you for Michael Chertoff and Heckuva-job Brownie. Thank you for continued death, destruction, and failure in Iraq and Afghanistan. Thank you from the bottom of George Bush and Dick Cheney’s one mechanical heart.


Update: I can’t believe I forgot to mention Washington Post Toastie Bob Woodward and NBC’s bag of Bush-loving blubber Tim Russert in my litany of journalists (or, in Russert’s case, pretend journalists) that helped re-elect W with their. . . you know, I was going to say “silence,” but in both of these cases, these guys actively lied about what they knew and their involvement with the Wilson/Plame story.

And Jane Hamsher has more on how Time spiked the Plame Story at HufPo.