Missing Media on Downing Street

Media Matters for America notices, "While editors nationwide call for increased scrutiny of Downing Street Memo, biggest editorial pages remain silent." They crunch the numbers on the coverage and find an embarrassingly small number of outlets that have mentioned the Downing Street Minutes, however of those, the vast majority say it's news and chide their peers for failing to cover the story.

Media Matters posts a list of the newspapers and also some delicious quotes from the positive editorials and op-eds. The quotes from the sources that seek to minimize the importance of the Minutes and thus no doubt assuage their own guilt for failing to do their jobs as journalists reveal just how deeply they sit in the Bush administration's pocket.

The Denver Post trots out this tired canard. "The American media has been castigated for not giving more prominence to the British memo, but it reinforces what we already know from other sources. ...Attention now is best focused on how to win the war and leave Iraq to a democratic future."

I guess this guy is a little behind on his reading. Maybe he didn't notice the growing chorus of military experts that have been stepping up lately to say the bloody occupation cannot be won. Our best bet is to negotiate a truce with the so called insurgents (otherwise known as Iraqi citizens) and get the hell out of Baghdad.

The Bangor Daily News takes a new approach. "[T]he discovery of the memo is like finding out that the glove fit O.J. Simpson after all -- interesting in a historical sense but proving nothing new. George Bush was disingenuous about the impetus for the war in Iraq, his consideration of alternatives to war and the cost of the war. This was all understood before November 2004."

Bush was "disingenuous?" That's like saying Ted Bundy was disingenuous about his intentions before he killed all those women. And I know Maine is kind of out in the sticks and all, so maybe this editor forgot that in November 04, something like at least 60% of Americans, (or was it 75%) still believed we found WMDs in Iraq and that Saddam had something to do with 9/11, because goldbrickers like him failed to do his job and make the public aware of the facts. That goes for the other similarly lame excuses from the White House stenos in Atlanta and Philly.

So kudos to the courageous editors that have finally dared to step over the Bush line - one hopes their bravery will prove to be contagious. As for the likes of Kingsley at the LAT and his ilk, if that's your phone ringing, it's probably Scott McLellan with your "lead" for today - or would that be leash?