Arriana Huffington and others have been crying foul for the last year or so about the ideological imbalance on the “Meet the Press” roundtable on most Sundays. Today’s show was particularly egregious. Can you find a liberal in this group of panelists:
- Guest moderator Andrea Mitchell
- Reagan era drug czar and gambleholic Bill Bennett
- Wall St. Journal reporter John Harwood
- Washington Post reporter Dana Priest
- New York Times columnist William Safire, who was a speech writer for Richard Nixon
Even if Priest and Harwood are flaming lefties in real life, they are on the NBC set as reporters and therefore prohibited by the rules of journalism from discussing their personal political views.
The main subject was the rightwing’s new assault on the freedom of the press. Bill Bennett hounded Dana Priest about her reporting on the CIA’s off-shoring its torturing of terror suspects.
Priest is no patsy, however, and she got off a good one at Bennett:
MS. MITCHELL: Dana, let me point out that The Washington Post, your newspaper, was behind the others but also did publish this story. And a story you wrote last year disclosing the secret CIA prisons won the Pulitzer Prize, but it also led to William Bennett, sitting here, saying that three reporters who won the Pulitzer Prize—you for that story and Jim Risen and others for another story—were, “not worthy of an award but rather worthy of jail.” Dana, how do you plead?
MS. PRIEST: Well, it’s not a crime to publish classified information. And this is one of the things Mr. Bennett keeps telling people that it is. But, in fact, there are some narrow categories of information you can’t publish, certain signals, communications, intelligence, the names of covert operatives and nuclear secrets.
Now why isn’t it a crime? I mean, some people would like to make casino gambling a crime, but it is not a crime. Why isn’t it not a crime? Because the framers of the Constitution wanted to protect the press so that they could perform a basic role in government oversight, and you can’t do that. Look at the criticism that the press got after Iraq that we did not do our job on WMD. And that was all in a classified arena.
Our founding fathers deliberately sought to LIMIT the power of government by its strict Constitutional edict that freedom of the press not be abridged.
All public officials take an oath to uphold and protect these rights, so every time they seek to destroy that right, or limit it, they are willfully VIOLATING their oath of office.
Oh, they may certainly express their OPINION just as any American can, but due to their position in society, and in view of their oath, it is absolutely WRONG for them to take any affirmative steps to stop or limit the press in VIOLATION OF THEIR OATH.
Violating their oath of office is sufficient grounds to expel them from that office, and it is high time the ACLU started defending the press and assisting with the expulsion from office of ANY person violating their oath.
The supposed “balance” on most TV talk shows has been a joke. Someone like Al Hunt of the WSJ is framed as a “liberal”, whereas in my book he is a moderate Republican at best. The political spectrum represented on these shows extends from the far right to the kinda right.
Can you imagine, for example, a representative from the American Communist Party to offset someone as far right as Sean Hannity or Charles Krauthammer? It’s unthinkable, isn’t it? Why? If we really want to have a free and open marketplace of ideas, then these shows better start allowing a broader representation of political views by articulate spokespeople. If they don’t, this country truly is on the road to fascism…