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United States News Title: Al Gore and the Media Protection Racket Al Gore and the Media Protection Racket By Jeffrey Lord on 6.29.10 @ 6:10AM The Al Gore police report is disturbing. To be specific, it's 67 pages of the quite graphically disturbing, as posted here by Red State. You are reading the news of this police report -- originally filed in October of 2006 -- only because the National Enquirer scooped the story. In June of 2010. You did not read it in the Portland Tribune, which has been on this story since 2007 and failed to tell its readers until the Enquirer broke the story. The Tribune's explanation for this is to be found here. Then there's the interesting news that Kathleen Parker, she the "conservative" columnist who has gained renown in liberal quarters for Palin-bashing, has been selected by CNN to partner (so-to-speak) on a new political chat show with Client Number 9 for a rousing -- according to press reports -- $700,000. Client Number 9, of course, would be former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, who was identified as such by the investigating feds curious about the ex-crime busting state attorney general's passion for expensive prostitutes. Said passions led to Mr. Spitzer's resignation as governor. Next up is the recent news that the Washington Post's David Weigel (who has occasionally written here at TAS), hired to blog about conservatives, has resigned after e-mails came to light that suggested he hoped Rush Limbaugh died and said that Matt Drudge should "handle his emotional problems more responsibly and set himself on fire." Not content with this, the Post's longtime media reporter Howard Kurtz tells us Tucker Carlson's Daily Caller has Weigel writing behind the scenes that "conservatives were using the media to 'violently, angrily divide America' and lamenting news organizations' 'need to give equal/extra time to 'real American' views, no matter how [expletive] moronic.'" Last but not least, the Sunday New York Times of June 5, featured a front-page story in its Sunday Styles section on a Washington book/dinner party hosted by David Frum for Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the considerably brave Somali-activist-turned-Dutch parliamentarian who is now, but of course, the target of the same Islamic jihadist thinking that launched on Salman Rushdie, not to mention the world. So what do we have here as we look at these four, seemingly unconnected events? What does the almost three year absence of the Al Gore-Portland-police-problem story from the Portland Tribune, CNN's hiring of Parker, Weigel's resignable sentiments from the Post and the Times story on the Frum party tell us about the state of the Establishment or liberal media -- and of conservatives and conservatism itself? First, the Portland Tribune. The explanation offered for withholding the story sounds eminently reasonable on the surface. Clearly, the paper's editors felt they needed verification of the guts of the story -- the information included in a police report about the former Vice President. The problem here is that the existence of a police report is itself a story. Let's go back to today's granddaddy of political scandal reporting -- Watergate. What happened in the first few hours of this story? The Washington Post was tipped off to the story only by a longtime contact who told the paper of -- a police report. From that scanty info on a burglary attempt at the Democratic National Committee's Watergate Headquarters, information was published -- verified information -- almost instantaneously. What happened next is important. Not understanding exactly what they had on their hands, the two young reporters Woodward and Bernstein did not realize that one of the people they named -- James McCord -- was "the security coordinator of the Committee for the Re-election of the President." They simply made a rookie mistake and didn't follow up. But what they had done -- reporting the basic fact of the police report on the arrest, which was a fact, not speculation -- launched the Associated Press on a quest to learn more about Mr. McCord. Then the news was out -- and the next piece of the puzzle was provided. The question here is why didn't the Portland Tribune publish what they had? Well, says the paper, all they had was an unverified police report. What is missed here is that a police report on a former Vice President of the United States -- a man who has emerged even in political defeat as one of the most listened to voices on the planet on environmental issues and global warming -- existed. The report itself existed. It was fact. And hence news. Had Woodward and Bernstein held the news of the names of those listed in the Washington, D.C. police report until they could verify that there was some actual confirmation of high level involvement -- possibly by the President himself if not his senior staff -- Watergate would have fizzled and faded away almost immediately. It was precisely because the initial Post report set off a chain reaction in the media that others -- notably the Associated Press in the beginning hours -- jumped on to the story and began looking where Woodward and Bernstein had "embarrassingly" (in their later words) failed to look. The Tribune dismisses as nonsense the idea that they would not have held back if the subject in the Portland police report was named George W. Bush or Dick Cheney. We'll take them at their word. But there is a disturbing problem here nonetheless. What problem?
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