Inside Politics

Leaks ‘n’ lawyers

“On the home front, a different kind of war has raged — a war not only against the Bush administration, but against the tools that this president, or any president, would find useful in the larger war on terror, transcending Iraq,” syndicated columnist James Pinkerton writes.

“The New York Times, for example, eagerly printed details about the National Security Agency’s wiretapping programs last December; amid the backlash against those disclosures, the journalistic establishment rallied ‘round the Times, awarding it a Pulitzer Prize for its report. For good measure, The Washington Post won a Pulitzer, too, for its report on the CIA’s secret prisons in Europe,” Mr. Pinkerton noted.

“And just last month, the Times, and other newspapers, did it again — printing information about the U.S. government’s effort to trace terrorists’ financial networks. The papers said, in effect, that ‘everybody knew’ about the effort, although one might ask: If there was no real news in the stories, why did they end up on the front page? …

“Working closely with the media on the anti-war cause, of course, are litigators and law professors. Reporters seem to think that law schools, instilling liberalism and proceduralism, are the proper gateway to public service. That’s why Jane Mayer, writing in the July 3 New Yorker, expressed dismay that so few top officials in the Bush administration are lawyers — in stark and unhappy contrast to the Clinton administration.

“The leaks ‘n’ lawyers crowd scored yet another victory over Bush last week, when the Supreme Court ruled against military tribunals for Guantanamo inmates. Reporters and editorialists cheered, but is it really good news that Congress and the country will be tied up on this issue for years to come? Let’s put it another way: Does this ruling increase the likelihood that more al Qaeda terrorists will come spilling out of Gitmo? And where will they go, and what will they do?”

News blackout

“No matter how good the U.S. economy gets, no matter how many new jobs are created, the red-hot economy still gets no respect from the media, leading the Wall Street Journal to call it the ‘Rodney Dangerfield economy,’” Mark J. Perry writes in the Hartford Courant.

“The media have consistently downplayed the turbocharged U.S. economy, now in its fifth year of solid economic expansion. And yet almost any country in the world would gladly trade its economic conditions for a U.S. economy,” said Mr. Perry, an associate professor of finance and economics at the University of Michigan at Flint, whose commentary was distributed by McClatchy-Tribune News Service.

“In Canada, it was headline news in June that the unemployment rate fell to a 32-year low of 6.1 percent. In more than a decade, the United States has not had an unemployment rate higher than 6 percent except for five months in 2003, and our media disparagingly dismissed that period as a ‘jobless recovery.’

“With the same unemployment rates of about 6 percent, it’s a ‘jobless recovery’ according to the U.S. media, and the strongest economic expansion in more than a generation in Canada!

“Another example of the media’s downplaying of the U.S. economy is its neglect of the history-making news that nine states have set record-low unemployment rates so far in 2006, and an additional 15 states are within a percent of their historical low jobless rates. Almost half of all states are at or near their lowest jobless rates in history, and we hear nothing about it from the media. Even though a national unemployment rate of 4.6 percent gets no respect from the media here, almost any country in Europe would love to have our labor market conditions. …

“Where are the reports today about the explosion in tax revenues generated by the strongest economy in a decade, and the increasing share of taxes paid by ‘the rich’?”

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