Here are today's news items from Media Matters for America, click on the title or 'read more' to read the entirety of each story.

2008 Elections

NY Times article on Clinton's faith lacks sources for those who question her "sincerity"
A July 7 New York Times article by reporter Michael Luo exploring how Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's (D-NY) Methodist faith "intertwines" with her "political life" asserted that Clinton "has been alluding to her spiritual life with increasing regularity in recent years," and that those references "have come under attack, both from conservatives who doubt her sincerity ... and liberals who object to any injection of religion into politics." Yet the article cited only one named conservative source attacking the "sincerity" of Clinton's faith -- Weekly Standard senior editor Andrew Ferguson, whose comments were taken from a separate interview on MSNBC, previously noted by Media Matters for America -- as well as unnamed "conservative bloggers." By contrast, in addition to interviewing Clinton about her faith, Luo cited numerous sources -- including those close to Clinton, Republican candidate for president and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (himself a Baptist minister), theologians, and other religious experts -- asserting in a variety of ways that Clinton is, as John C. Green, senior fellow at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, was quoted as saying in the article, "a person of deep and sincere faith." Notwithstanding Luo's assertion about "attack[s]" on Clinton's "references to faith" from both conservatives and liberals, the article did not quote -- either by name or anonymously -- any "liberals who object" to Clinton's "injection of religion into politics." Read more

Liasson noted Thompson's "pickup truck" but failed to mention it was a campaign prop
On the July 8 edition of Fox Broadcasting Co.'s Fox News Sunday, during a discussion of the 2008 presidential race, National Public Radio national correspondent Mara Liasson asserted that former Sen. Fred Thompson (R-TN) "could definitely" run for president as a populist candidate. Liasson added that "that's how he ran before" and said he could wear "his plaid shirt and get into the pickup truck again" -- referring to the red truck he drove during his 1994 and 1996 Senate races. However, Liasson did not mention that Thompson's truck was nothing more than a campaign prop leased by his staff for the purpose of winning over Tennessee voters, as Media Matters for America has noted. Read more

War in Iraq

Taranto repeated stale falsehood that there's "no evidence" Plame was a "covert agent"
On the July 6 edition of CNN's Lou Dobbs Tonight, while discussing President Bush's commutation of former vice presidential chief of staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby's 30-month prison sentence, Wall Street Journal Opinionjournal.com editor James Taranto falsely claimed that "[t]here's still no evidence that [former CIA operative] Valerie Plame [Wilson] was a covert agent." In fact, as Media Matters for America has repeatedly noted, in a May 25 sentencing memorandum, special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald wrote that "[a]t the time of the leaks, Ms. Wilson in fact qualified as a 'covert agent' within the meaning of the IIPA" (Intelligence Identities Protection Act). To support this claim, Fitzgerald included an "unclassified summary" of Plame's employment at the CIA -- which had been given to Libby's defense team in June 2006 -- stating that the CIA "declassified and now publicly acknowledges the previously classified fact that Ms. Wilson was a CIA employee from 1 January 2002 forward and the previously classified fact that she was a covert CIA employee during this period." The "unclassified summary" established that she had headed a counterproliferation operation focused on Iraq and had traveled overseas in an undercover capacity in the five years prior to the disclosure of her identity. Read more

On Fox News Sunday, Liasson called Armitage the "real leaker"
On the July 8 edition of Fox Broadcasting Co.'s Fox News Sunday, National Public Radio national correspondent Mara Liasson stated that "to the majority of Americans" the CIA leak investigation is "confusing" and then repeated the claim that deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage was "the real leaker" of former CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson's identity. However, as Media Matters for America has repeatedly noted, while Armitage leaked Plame's identity to syndicated columnist Robert D. Novak, who later revealed that information in a column, according to evidence and testimony at former vice presidential chief of staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby's trial, Libby was a source of the information about Plame's CIA employment for at least two other journalists -- The New York Times' Judith Miller and Time magazine's Matthew Cooper. Read more

Books

On Rose, Gerth and Van Natta repeated discredited defense of alleged 1993 plan for Hillary Clinton presidency
On the July 6 edition of the Public Broadcasting Service's (PBS) Charlie Rose Show, authors Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta Jr. repeated their defense of the disputed claim in their book Her Way: The Hopes and Ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton (Little, Brown & Co., June 2007) that after President Bill Clinton took office in 1993, he and Hillary Clinton updated their alleged "twenty-year project" to include "eight years as president for him, then eight years for her." When host Charlie Rose noted that the purported source of the story, historian Taylor Branch, "has denied it," both Gerth and Van Natta suggested that Branch originally told them that he "didn't remember" relaying this story to a married couple (whose secondhand account the authors cite in the book) "at a barbecue in Aspen, Colorado, in the summer of 1993." Gerth and Van Natta also claimed that Branch "wouldn't deny it happened" when they spoke to him during the writing of the book. However, as Media Matters for America noted, Branch claimed in a May 31 written statement that the authors "never told" him what he was "supposed to have said" to the couple and that what he "didn't deny" was dining with the couple in Aspen in 1993. Branch asserted that it was not until receiving advanced "proofs" of Her Way that he became aware of the substance of "a story attributed to me therein from the summer of 1993" and further stated he had "never heard either Clinton talk about a 'plan' for them both to become president." Read more

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