Greg Sargent at The Plum Line asks why big news organizations, particularly the New York Times “didn’t touch” the “Chas Freeman saga” until “it was already over.”
Today The Times finally ran a story about the whole mess…But The Times didn’t seem that interested in figuring out why Freeman was ousted…Nor did the paper do any real digging to try to settle the question of whether Freeman was really the lightening rod his critics claimed.
The paper’s overall silence is even more bizarre when you consider that its hometown Senator — Chuck Schumer — played a major role in Freeman’s ouster, airing his opposition in private conversations with White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel.
It’s sobering to think that if the paper had weighed in on this earlier, particularly on the editorial page, which drives opinion in Congress, the outcome could have been very different.
Even weirder: Anyone getting their news strictly from the big news orgs wouldn’t have had any idea that this big battle over a major intel pick — one whose outcome could have real consequences — was happening at all.
Andrew Sullivan, too, observes “that the MSM has barely covered it as a news story, and the entire debate occurred in the blogosphere.”
