RoveGate: Mainstream Media's Last Stand

Fineman spells out in Newsweek just what I was saying last week, that the Rove story is BIG and will be BIG because it's mainstream media's LAST STAND. They can stand up, or keep buying the spin and b.s. the White House is peddling and look like wussies.

Take my word, there has been a lot of soul searching in the so-called Main Stream Media (MSM) over its performance, or lack of performance, in the months leading up to the American-led ouster of Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq. Specifically, did we replace what should have been professional skepticism with a certain mindless credulousness in assessing the reality of the Bush administration’s claims of imminent danger to the country and the world from Saddam’s supposedly vast stash of weapons of mass destruction, including—only months away, it was said—the nuclear kind?

If we failed, was it out of a misplaced sense of patriotic duty, or political cowardice or sheer incompetence—or all three? The press corps was spring-loaded with self-doubt over the WMD issue, and ready to snap over any story that would allow it to revisit what now looks to have been a massive—and embarrassingly successful, from the press’s point of view—propaganda campaign.

So Rove was a spinner on the WMD front? After him!