apropos of anything

W. Mark Felt finally admitted he was the “Deep Throat” referenced during the Watergate investigation. To Vanity Fair. The same Vanity Fair whose last big breaking story was about the infighting amongst the desperate housewives.

Yeah, I don’t get it either.

Why VF? Why not just tell the Washington Post crew, hey, go ahead and spill the beans! Or, if he’d had a falling out with the fine folks at the Post, perhaps sister news mag Newsweek? Actually, I can see why he wouldn’t want to go with Newsweek (more on that in just a bit), but there’s still Time. The New Yorker. The New York Times, even, if he wanted to go for a combination of the two. Dozens of serious news outlets that would have climbed all over each other for the chance to break this story… and he picked style magazine Vanity Fair.

It’s like naming a bowler “athlete of the year.” I mean, you can, but there’s undoubtedly more qualified people out there.

The Newsweek snub, however, is not entirely unfathomable. After all, this is the magazine that got the bulk of the Quran desecration story correct, yet under pressure from the government, they retracted it before we even had time to adequately express our outrage. Obviously the journalistic integrity of their predecessors didn’t stick within the corporation. If I were W. Mark Felt, Newsweek‘s spineless backpeddling probably wouldn’t inspire me into giving them the scoop either.

There’s a larger issue here about the media doing their job regardless of the pressure put on them by the subject(s) currently under their scrutiny, and of the public needing to have faith that they’ll get the story, the whole story, each and every time. There’s also an issue of the media ensuring they’ve gotten everything straight before sending a story to press (or to air, these days). I suppose we’ll completely never know how much of the quick cave-in at Newsweek was due to a shaky source and how much to external pressure, but if their source wasn’t solid, they should have gotten independent confirmation before printing, and if it was, they should have stood their ground.

Because they were, after all, right.

The supporting evidence that has come out of the woodwork is too numerous to link. Report after report after report of abuses claimed by the detainees, and unflattering new nickname to boot. I wonder what the history books will say in fifty years about the “Gulag of our time” and how we responded to it, particularly our president who said today the allegations of abuse were made by “people who hate America.” So… Amnesty International hates America?

Of course, at this point, I’m kinda wondering who Bush thinks doesn’t hate America.