Media Reporting: A Question of Priorities

In a scathing post, John Hinderaker @ Powerline exposes the agenda of mainstream journalists as it relates to important issues with implications to our national security. Hinderaker reports that Stansfield Turner, ex-CIA director during the Carter Administration, recently did an interview with British ITV, in which he attacked the Bush administration, and especially Vice-President Dick Cheney for being "a vice president for torture." He writes,

Stansfield Turner is one of the worst bureaucrats ever employed by the United States government. As we have noted before, Turner is one of the chief reasons for the decline of the CIA into virtual uselessness, as he enthusiastically slashed 25 percent of all intelligence operatives from the payrolls.

It's interesting, isn't it, that for the last six months, the newspapers have breathlessly repeated the claim that the identification of a single non-covert desk employee of the CIA, Valerie Plame, somehow did great damage to American security interests. Well, if the neutralizing of a single "agent" is so newsworthy as to dominate the papers and the evening news for months, how about firing one-quarter of all the CIA agents--the really covert ones, I mean--in the world? Wouldn't that compromise our security to an almost unimaginable extent? How much publicity should that act of folly generate, in comparison to the meaningless Plame farce? And how much did it receive? That comparison speaks volumes about the agenda that drives mainstream journalism.

As for Turner, he should be ashamed of himself for slandering a man far better than himself, who has the difficult task of dealing with a world whose dangers Turner never acknowledged or understood, with resources that have never fully recovered from Turner's misguided stewardship.