Letters to the editor

Behind the truth

Liberal media icon stands for much we've come to regret

Editor, The Times:

In liberal circles, folks may still worship at the altar of Edward R. Murrow, the supposed ultimate in journalism ["Edward R. Murrow: the burden of democracy," Times editorial, Oct. 22].

To many conservative folks, Murrow was simply Dan Rather without anyone to challenge him.

Murrow's news coverage from London during World War II can still be admired. His work after World War II — especially that in opposition to finding traitors, people like Alger Hiss (White House adviser to Democrats Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman), Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (who helped give Stalin the hydrogen bomb), Annie Lee Moss (communist who worked in the Pentagon Code Room), and Laurence Duggan (head of the Latin American desk at the State Department) — is not admirable.

In the 1990s, the publication of the Venona decrypts documented how widespread Soviet espionage was in the U.S. during the Cold War, at a time when millions were being murdered in Soviet gulags. Those decrypts prove Sen. Joseph McCarthy was far more right than he was wrong about traitors in the U.S., and in particular, those employed in high government positions in the administrations of Roosevelt and Truman.

Murrow and his mainstream-media cronies did this country a great disservice. At best, they were naive. At worst, they were communist sympathizers or idiots.

Liberals are now trying to hamstring the war on Islamofascism, just as they hamstrung our efforts in the Cold War. We won the Cold War, not because of liberals, but despite them.

— John Nelson, Mercer Island

Web of self-deceit

Methinks The Times doth protest too much in lauding the new movie about Edward R. Murrow and bemoaning today's sad state of journalism. You betray your biases and narrow frame of reference when you implicitly limit your definition of journalism to newspapers and broadcasting companies, be they corporate or independently owned.

Scores of news sources use neither paper and ink nor a TV talking head to investigate, report and deliver the news. Internet sites and bloggers are the fastest-growing sources of investigative and good old-fashioned news-hound journalism around. It's telling that traditional news outlets routinely ridicule them, dismiss their efforts as "not real journalism," and resist efforts to accord them full First Amendment free-press status.

Stefan Sharkansky's blog, Sound Politics, has done, and continues to do, solid investigative reporting on the complete chaos in King County's Records and Elections Office, yet the "Old Boys" in the mainstream media routinely give this work short shrift or ignore it altogether.

It's less a matter of corporate consolidation in news organizations and more a matter of a free market. Print and broadcast news, including The Times, represent 8-track thinking in an iPod world.

— Scott St. Clair, Kirkland

Judy in disgrace

It is not enough for The New York Times to apologize for Judith Miller and others "not rigorously" having researched articles about Iraq having WMD that were dangerous to the U.S., when now we find out that Miller was the "go-to" person for the administration's propaganda about Iraq [see "New York Times: Regrets, confusion over Miller and her source," News, Oct. 15].

The New York Times received a complaint about Miller in December 2000 from a co-worker who reviewed her distortion of the facts and her role advocating blindly for the administration.

I think The New York Times should dismiss/fire Miller for misuse of the newspaper and for her role as a journalist who was willing to spread propaganda for the Bush administration. I don't believe she was simply caught up in the glamour of having connections within the administration; she clearly took the role into the realm of intentional dissimulation to the American public.

This type of act is beyond being highly unethical, it is anti-American, anti-democratic, and an act of treason, in my mind. Certainly it should be punished accordingly.

— Kim Kendall, Seattle

Weakly standard

We are at war. We must do whatever is necessary to protect our security and safety. The rule of law no longer applies in the name of our country's security.

It is time for the president to declare Judith Miller and columnist Robert Novak "enemy combatants" for exposing a CIA agent in the time of war; have them detained and sent to one of our allies to reveal the source of the leak [about Valerie Plame], and then to Guantánamo to be held indefinitely without any legal rights.

When the leak is found, those involved should be detained without legal recourse in a brig in South Carolina and left to rot for as long as this war continues. They definitely should be exempt from the right granted to the president to pardon people.

This is what has become the norm for enemies of the state. Anyone discussing even the name of a CIA agent in our time of war is an enemy.

I know there are those who have no problem ignoring the rights of Democrats and anti-war protesters, so why is it different when it is White House deputy chief of staff Karl Rove, vice-presidential chief of staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby or Vice President Dick Cheney?

Come on, conservatives and Republicans — this is the standard you have now set. Start practicing what you preach, especially when one of your own is involved. It is our national security, after all, and that justifies anything in your book, right?

— Michael Barr, Sammamish

My wife unhid

Reader Jeff Evans wrote that Valerie Plame's name was not a secret [Northwest Voices, Oct. 23]. Yes, obviously.

The secret was that she was a CIA operative, not that she existed.

— Sandy Marsden, Seattle

All the news fit to "Prince"

Lately, I'm beginning to suspect that former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, et al., are less interested in protecting and defending the U.S. Constitution and more interested in following the dicta laid out in "The Prince," by Niccolo Machiavelli, to protect and defend their party's hold on power.

The same party that expended huge resources trying to prove that the Clintons fudged an income-tax deduction, is now trying to dismiss its own Byzantine conduct as the fabrication of an overly zealous prosecutor.

Are they trying to tell us that former special prosecutor Kenneth Starr wasn't overly zealous in going after Bill Clinton? And, that Karl Rove didn't intentionally expose Valerie Plame for political purposes? Give us a break!

Characters this dark haven't walked across the political stage since the time of the Borgias.

If it looks like a crook and quacks like a crook, it sure as hell isn't a patriot.

— Thomas Munyon, Marysville