Cheney manipulating the media

HuffingtonPost journalist Dan Froomkin is at least one who is not giving dick cheney a free pass to distort the news, unlike Chris Wallace who gave him a platform on Sunday morning tv with softball questions and no challenges.

Froomkin writes (at length but worth reading):

When he was vice president, Dick Cheney got his way by secretly wielding the instruments of power. Now that he's no longer in government, Cheney is still pulling levers and pushing buttons - he's just doing it in plain view. And it's the media that he's manipulating.

After years of speaking in whispers, operating by proxy, and leaving as few fingerprints as possible, Cheney has figured out that he can say pretty much anything he wants, the networks will show it on TV, and the newspapers will dutifully print it. And best of all, they will fail to put it in any context whatsoever.

The first bit of context for any Cheney comment, of course, is that he is a monstrous liar. News articles about Cheney should routinely reminded readers of some of the things he said in the run-up to war in Iraq. . . .

In an interview with beyond-obsequious Fox News anchor Chris Wallace that aired on Sunday, Cheney once again alleged that what he calls "enhanced interrogation tactics" saved "thousands of lives and let us defeat all further attacks against the United States."

It wouldn't have been hard for reporters to put that particular claim in its proper context. Just last week, the CIA released two documents that Cheney had been huffing and puffing (and bluffing) about for months, . . .But just as us critics expected, when those reports were released, they included no such proof -- just a lot of cover-your-ass language from the CIA . . .

In fact, after all these years, and despite a slew of selective leaks while Cheney was still in power, there remains not one iota of proof that torture accomplished much of anything . . . All we know for sure is that torture is still excellent at producing false confessions, just like it was designed to do.

Cheney also criticized Attorney General Eric Holder's decision to launch an extremely limited preliminary review into whether crimes were committed by the handful of interrogators who far exceeded even the Bush DOJ's patently illegal guidelines. . . . Cheney, in his Fox interview, said the review "offends the hell out of me, frankly." He explained: "[W]e had a track record now of eight years of defending the nation against any further mass casualty attacks from Al Qaeda. The approach of the Obama administration should be to come to those people who were involved in that policy and say, how did you do it? What were the keys to keeping this country safe over that period of time? "

Any normal person -- or reasonable journalist -- would gasp at Cheney's spectacular gall, and marvel at his absolutism. (He even went so far as to say that the conduct being investigated, which includes threatening detainees with a drill, a gun, and the rape of family members to be "OK" by him.) But instead, the coverage was restrained, if not respectful. . . .

My association to this leaves even me stunned. What popped into my mind in reading this was a scene from the HUAC Committee meeting when Army Attorney Joseph Welch finally said to Senator McCarthy: "You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"

That is my association to the XVP -- the despicable and discredited Joseph McCarthy. When will some courageous journalist and pundit stand up to this man and call him on his lies and distortions?

Calling Jon Stewart. It seems only the humorists on tv do the real work of journalism these days.

Ralph