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No News Is Gun News
Journalism: The administration's fast and furious response to one TV reporter's story on its gunrunning to Mexico raises no cries of "chilling effect" from mainstream media that have largely ignored the story.
Silencers are mechanisms placed on the muzzles of firearms to deaden their sound. It's not a word that should be applied to the administration or its unindicted co-conspirators in the media regarding Operation Gunrunner and its offshoot, Fast and Furious.
This is a scandal, and a cover-up, of major proportions: the deliberate supplying of weapons by the U.S. government to Mexican drug cartels that led to the death of two American agents and possible perjury by the attorney general of the United States. His denying knowledge of it to Congress makes Watergate look like a third-rate burglary.
Yet two of the mainstream networks, ABC and NBC, have turned a blind eye.
As the folks at NewsBusters.org report, ABC's Josh Klein did a two-sentence news brief on the June 15 edition of "Good Morning America." NBC hasn't covered the story on any of its news programs since April 17.
CBS News reporter Sharyl Attkisson, to her credit, has pursued the story with diligence, including exposing the falsity of Attorney General Eric Holder's testimony before Rep. Darrell Issa's House Oversight Committee on May 3 that he'd just learned of Fast and Furious.
Attkisson has found out what happens when you confront this administration with the facts of their deeds and lies. On Tuesday's Laura Ingraham radio show, she revealed that when she tried to contact the White House and Department of Justice about the story, officials at both screamed at her for covering the story at all and for her "bias."
"The DOJ woman was just yelling at me," Attkisson told Ingraham. "A guy from the White House on Friday night literally screamed at me and cussed at me." She added that "they think I'm unfair and biased by pursuing it."
Attkisson identified the Justice Department woman as Tracy Schmaler, who had worked at Yahoo as senior director for global affairs and, before that, for Democratic Sen. Pat Leahy on the Senate Judiciary Committee. The White House screamer was identified as Eric Schultz, associate communications director at the White House and former head of communications for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.
"They (the White House and Justice Department) will tell you that I'm the only reporter — as they told me — that is not reasonable. They say the Washington Post is reasonable, the L.A. Times is reasonable, the New York Times is reasonable. I'm the only one who thinks this is a story, and they think I'm unfair and biased for pursuing it."
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