Media Matters, the liberal organization whose stated objective is in "monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation," chided the New York Times (in this post) for failing to identify a "heckler" at a Senate hearing as a former U.S. diplomat. Mary Ann Wright, the former diplomat, reportedly stood up from the audience at a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday (October 19, 2005) and shouted at Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Media Matters innocently indicated that Wright was a former senior diplomat and former Army colonel who resigned in protest from her diplomat job in 2003 over the Iraq war.
Wright's identity, however, extends well beyond that of a former official in forceful disagreement with the Bush administration. In August 2005, Mary Ann Wright was the "main coordinator" of Camp Casey, Cindy Sheehan's high-profile demonstration outside President Bush's Crawford ranch. In an interview on the far-left show Democracy Now, Wright described setting up "field operations" for the protest, a reference to her days in the Army. "Longtime diplomat Ann Wright is running Camp Casey," reported the show's web site.
In addition, while at Camp Casey, Wright told the People's Weekly World (emphasis added):
"[There has been] extraordinary looting in Iraq ... But who were the looters? The big corporate cronies of Bush and Cheney along with every Republican suck toad in the Bush administration.”
Finally, in the month after the Crawford protest, Wright was arrested on September 26, 2005, while protesting with Cindy Sheehan and others outside the White House.
In other words, while Media Matters was criticizing the New York Times for not identifying Rice's "heckler" as a former diplomat, they themselves failed to provide a more indicative and more sincere identity of Ms. Wright.
