Two top DC press outrages for today

The Daily Howler has a good report today on the Washington Post’s strange decision to give a platform to someone with no scientific knowledge whatsoever to offer her doubts about the science of global warming; except, of course, that it’s not strange at all, since she manages skillfully to level the usual line of infantile attacks on Al Gore that you hear mainly from the D.C. press corps, and not from those who consider him for a Nobel prize or give him an Oscar, or make his film and books best sellers, or the majority who voted for him in 2000 despite the best efforts of that press contingent to trash him.

Also noted by the Howler today: Richard Cohen, in making the flat-out false statement that Valerie Plame “was not covert” (in his absurd apology for Scooter Libby the other day) either did not care or did not know that Patrick Fitzgerald, while releasing a CIA statement for his investigation explicitly saying she was, in fact, considered to be covert by the CIA – which might be expected to know better than, say, a newspaper columnist -- with specific information in the CIA statement identifying how her position met the necessary elements of the definition, expressly declared that he had decided from virtually the beginning that she was covert under the statutory definition.

Perhaps even more infuriating than Cohen’s dishonesty or failure to do minimal homework, whichever it was, is the paucity of reports in mainstream news of Fitzgerald’s conclusion at the time it was issued. Here we had seen one right-wing pundit after another asserting in every possible media outlet with no basis whatsoever that Libby and the administration did nothing wrong because she was not “covert,” and then the major media cannot be bothered to report that every one of them was utterly – OK, extremely likely to be, based on the likely difficulty of proving the CIA does not know when its agents are covert or not – wrong.