I'm Vexed

I'm watching CNN's Reliable Sources, where one of the reporters who wrote the Times' banking story is on. Now, the panel is he, Post columnist Eugene Robinson, and well-known journalism diva Geneva Overholser on the one hand, and Hugh Hewitt on the other, so it's already a stacked deck since Hewitt is a radio talk host and partisan, not a journalism person who tips the other way.

That said, the headline that flashes on the screen is GOP vs. THE TIMES.

I am so tired of this being framed as a partisan issue I'm ready to scream. That framing makes it look as if people are only going after the Times to "rouse the base," is if the base is simply Times-hating since it's "an elite paper" (what does that say about the base, those unthinking rubes who don't really understand the complexities of this or any other story and don't care), and makes the Times the victim. And it leaves no room for those of us who are angry at the Times for substantive reasons that have nothing to do with politics -- and therefore creates no reason for the Times to have to answer us seriously.

And having Hewitt on talking about the "MSM" and Bush-hating and the way the panel's "hiding" because they won't appear on his show doesn't help. I'm sure it's a great show. They should probably go on it. But appearing on a CNN show and saying that "MSMers" who aren't willing to go on some show many people probably haven't heard of are ducking is not going to help make the point that there are serious people who don't see this as an issue related to politics.

Hewitt falls right into Kurtz's set-up, so that there are sober, reflective journalists on one side, and an aggressive, paranoid partisan on the other.

Update: In this market all the Sunday shows overlap, so I missed Bill Keller on Face the Nation. Luckily for us, Patterico didn't. The Times is increasingly trapped by its backpedal on how well-known this program was -- as Patterico points out (and note the earlier post at his site from a guest, which goes back to the original story) there's a real tension between the position they're taking now (everyone knew, the administration itself kept talking about tracking terror money and so on) and the position they originally took -- that the story was a major revelation and particularly newsworthy.

Comments

[Ron Hardin]

Talk Radio has produced a lot of ninth-tier hosts who are completely unlistenable. On the other hand, so are the Sunday talk shows, so it's even.

[Nobody]

Ohhhh.....a stacked panel. Alert the media and welcome to the real world.

[Media Hound]

I thought Hewitt came off as the only clear thinking individual.

Here's a video of the broadcast in question:
http://www.exposetheleft.com/2006/07/02/hh-nytimes-rs/

And while we're looking at video, here's the Washington Post's Dana Priest saying "It's not a crime to publish classified information"

http://www.exposetheleft.com/2006/07/03/priest-classified-information/

These "mainstream" media people are really a piece of work.