The Nation | Capital Games | David Corn
Isikoff is not the Enemy
I respect the work of the liberal media watchdogs of Media Matters. I appreciate that its website has occasionally linked to my personal blog. Max Blumenthal, a staffmember at Media Matters, has written for The Nation and is a fellow blogger of mine (who isn't?) at HuffingtonPost.com.
I am a friend of Michael Isikoff, who has been catching much flak for his 10-sentence Koran-in-a-john Newsweek item (cowritten with John Barry, another Newsweeker I know and like) that led to deadly rioting in Afghanistan.
Thus, I am saddened to see Media Matters piling on Isikoff in a selective manner. The MMers have a right to criticize Isikoff's performance in this episode and to draw whatever conclusions they wish to regarding Isikoff's and Newsweek's reporting practices. But their primary beef is that the mainstream media, while covering the Newsweek controversy, has not focused on Isikoff's "checkered journalistic record." What particularly ticks off the good folks at Media Matters--which was founded by David Brock, the right-wing journalist who defected from the conservative movement--is that Isikoff was a "leading reporter on the so-called 'Clinton scandals' in the 1990s, including the Paula Jones, Whitewater and Monica Lewinsky cases."
Media Matters' critique of Isikoff draws heavily from Sidney Blumenthal's The Clinton Wars. (Sidney is Max's justifiably proud father.) In that book, Sidney notes, "Isikoff never hesitated in plunging himself excitedly into a wilderness of sex rumors." Using The Clinton Wars as its key source, Media Matter observes, "Isikoff's leading role in reporting sex stories relied heavily on his relationships with
Tripp and Goldberg, who provided leads, testimony, and tapes of secretly recorded conversations. However, Tripp's and Goldberg's actions were motivated by their personal interests: specifically, animosity toward Clinton and financial windfall."
...
My point is that the MM slam on Isikoff is one-sided. His "checkered" past includes work that liberal media-watchers might consider rather positive. He broke the story of how Alberto Gonzalez, when he was Texas Governor George W. Bush's chief counsel in 1996, connived to get Bush out of a jury duty so that Bush would not have to acknowledge he had once been arrested for drunk driving. (Today Gonzalez is the nation's attorney general.) Isikoff also was a lead debunker of the allegation that Vice President Dick Cheney tossed about before the invasion of Iraq concerning a supposed meeting between Mohamed Atta, the 9/11 ringleader, and an Iraqi intelligence official in Prague. (Isikoff accurately reported that the CIA and FBI had found nothing to this charge.) Last year, after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, Isikoff unearthed the first Justice Department memos showing that the Bush administration had stripped Geneva Convention protections from the prisoners at Guantanamo. He and Mark Hosenball--who together write Newsweek's "Terror Watch" column--recently disclosed that Haliburton had cut a hush-hush deal in Iran and that former GOP presidential candidate Jack Kemp had been questioned by federal investigators about his ties to a businessman under investigation in the oil-for-food scandal. Last year, they detailed how CBS--in the wake of the Dan Rather fiasco--had censored a 60 Minutes segment on the forged documents purporting to show Iraqi efforts to obtain uranium in Niger.
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