The Chronicle‘s Cragg Hines apparently got the Dem talking points not to let the Plame/Rove/Beltway Media Insiders story die, and today offers the following promise:
Some Republicans contend that Bush has been consistent in requiring a violation of law to be laid out before giving someone the axe.
The record, which I’ll go over in a moment, does not support that interpretation.
Hines then purports to go into “the record.”
Unsurprisingly, Hines’ exhaustive research did not turn up President Bush’s definitive statement on the matter in September 2003:
Let me just say something about leaks in Washington. There are too many leaks of classified information in Washington. There’s leaks at the executive branch; there’s leaks in the legislative branch. There’s just too many leaks. And if there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is. And if the person has violated law, the person will be taken care of.
As we pointed out when Julie Mason of the Chronicle‘s D.C. bureau apparently got so caught up in the gossip among journalists inside the Beltway that she also erroneously asserted that President Bush had adopted a new standard (despite the September 2003 comment), there is no excuse for a journalist with access to Lexis Nexis to screw up such basic research. In Mason’s case, perhaps a case can be made for incompetence (we’ve seen it before). In Hines’ case, the omission seems deliberate. So much for his writing about honor and dignity.
In any case, it’s another black eye for the Chronicle‘s D.C. bureau reporters and columnists, whose errors seem always to cast a negative shadow over Republicans.
At this point, the consistently underwhelming nature of the D.C. bureau’s reporting even when it does not contain errors or a slant may well be a product of understandable lack of access to the governing majority in Washington, even though many Texans are important members of that majority. Jeff Cohen should strongly consider shuttering his lackluster D.C. operation and redeploying the journalistic resources locally.
