In a recent posting by Tim Graham, MoveOn.Org vs. Liberal Media Reality On 2,000 "Milestone" Coverage of Iraq, MoveOn.Org, is seen to be misrepresenting the facts concerning the extent of media coverage of the US military deaths reaching the 2000 mark in Iraq, claiming that “the national media are ignoring this tragic milestone." In reality, the national media gave not only exceptionally broad and prominent coverage to the event, they flooded the air and print medium with extended coverage over many days. In the process, many other newsworthy items, such as the historic vote on the constitutional referendum in Iraq, and the after effects of Hurricane Wilma in Florida were left in the dust.
Today, the misrepresentation by MoveOn.org continues. Following the announcement of the indictment today of Lewis Libby, MoveOn.org sent the following e-mail message to it’s members
Dear MoveOn member,
Today, the Chief of Staff to the Vice President of the United States was indicted by a federal grand jury.
Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, a Republican appointee, announced that Lewis "Scooter" Libby lied to a grand jury, lied to FBI agents and obstructed an investigation into the White House cover-up of the lies that led our nation to war in Iraq. Libby has now resigned….
Did Fitzgerald announce that Libby “obstructed an investigation into the White House cover-up of the lies that led our nation to war in Iraq”? I think not. MoveOn.Org has completely misrepresented 1. the investigation that Fitzgerald led, and 2. what Fitzgerald “announced” today.
In fact, a word search of the entire transcript of today's “announcement” by Fitzgerald and the very lengthy press conference which followed, makes it clear that Fitzgerald not only did not announce what MoveOn.Org claimed, he in fact, made a concerted effort to make sure we did not read this type of foolishness into the investigation and indictments. The word “cover-up” and the term “nation to war” do not appear anywhere in the transcript of today’s press conference. Here is a good example of Fizgerald's care in setting the record straight here [my emphasis added]:
QUESTION: A lot of Americans, people who are opposed to the war, critics of the administration, have looked to your investigation with hope in some ways and might see this indictment as a vindication of their argument that the administration took the country to war on false premises.
Does this indictment do that?
FITZGERALD: This indictment is not about the war. This indictment's not about the propriety of the war. And people who believe fervently in the war effort, people who oppose it, people who have mixed feelings about it should not look to this indictment for any resolution of how they feel or any vindication of how they feel.
This is simply an indictment that says, in a national security investigation about the compromise of a CIA officer's identity that may have taken place in the context of a very heated debate over the war, whether some person -- a person, Mr. Libby -- lied or not.
The indictment will not seek to prove that the war was justified or unjustified. This is stripped of that debate, and this is focused on a narrow transaction.
And I think anyone's who's concerned about the war and has feelings for or against shouldn't look to this criminal process for any answers or resolution of that.
MoveOn.Org moves on to say, “The White House spin machine is going to be working hard to minimize what has happened.” I suspect that the White House will, indeed, have to work overtime to offset the well-funded spin machine of MoveOn.org.
