NYT Frank Rich: Wall Street Journal editorial page aids Bush's attacks on the press

RAW STORY
Published: Saturday July 8, 2006

The editorial page for the Wall Street Journal walks hand-in-hand with the Bush Administration in its non-stop attacks on the press, according to New York Times contributor Frank Rich's column slated for Sunday's edition, RAW STORY has found.

Rich insists that "there is no evidence that the Times article on tracking terrorist finances either breached national security or revealed any 'secrets' that had not already been publicized by either the administration or Swift, the Belgian financial clearinghouse enlisted in the effort," and that the Bush Administration "has manufactured and milked this controversy to reboot its intimidation of the press, hoping journalists will pull punches in an election year."

Rich blames the WSJ editorial page for helping to fan the flames.

"That this strategy may work again can be seen in the fascinating escalation in tactics by the Bush White House's most powerful not-so-secret agent in the press itself, the Wall Street Journal editorial page," writes Rich. "The Journal is not Fox News or an idle blogger or radio bloviator. It's the establishment voice of the party in power."

"The infamous editorial it ran on June 30 ("Fit and Unfit to Print"), an instant classic, doesn't just confer its imprimatur on the administration's latest crusade to conflate aggressive journalism with treason, but also ups the ante," writes Rich.

Excerpts from Rich's Sunday column:

The editorial was ostensibly a frontal attack on The Times, accusing its editors of not believing America is "really at war" and of exercising bad faith in running its report on the Swift operation. But an attack on The Times by The Journal's editorial page is a shrug-inducing dog-bites-man story; the paper's conservative editorialists have long dueled with a rival whose editorials usually argue the other side. (And sometimes the Times opinion writers gleefully return the fire.)

What was groundbreaking and unsettling about the Journal editorial was that it besmirched the separately run news operation of The Journal itself.

It was a similarly top-flight Journal reporter, Glenn Simpson, who wrote his paper's Swift story. But the Journal editorial page couldn't ignore him if it was attacking The Times for publishing its Swift scoop on the same day. So instead it maligned him by echoing Tony Snow's official White House line: The Journal was merely following The Times once it knew that The Times would publish anyway. As if this weren't insulting enough, the editorial suggested that the Treasury Department leaked much of the story to The Journal and that a Journal reporter could be relied upon to write a "straighter" account more to the government's liking than that of a Times reporter.

TIMES SELECT SUBSCRIBERS CAN READ FULL RICH COLUMN AT THIS LINK