The Stakeholder:: Death of a Hit Piece

Yesterday the Moonie Times claimed that Reid and Dorgan were in the DoJ Abramoff crosshairs:

Now we have this:

ABRAMOFF INVESTIGATION: Sources conflict on Reid status
[Las Vegas Review-Journal]

Published report claiming senator on list denied

The Justice Department is not focusing on Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid of Nevada as part of an investigation of lobbyist Jack Abramoff, a source close to the probe said Wednesday in challenging a published report

Speaking in Salt Lake City, Reid angrily denied the report.

He criticized the newspaper, which was founded by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon of the Unification Church.

"You have to really stretch things to call it a newspaper," Reid said.

That's true. It wasn't so long ago they tried to carry water for DeLay by accusing Earle of breaking the law that DeLay is being prosecuted for. It was a lie.

And now it's your turn to explain, Moonie Times. The piece was written by Jerry Seper and Audrey Hudson. One wonders if Hudson should have been on the Abramoff beat given her history. You see, back when Jack and Tom were focusing on keeping sweatshops in tact in the Marianas Islands, they had a little trouble with the Clinton Administration Department of the Interior, who looked much less favorably on sweatshops than the modern Republican seems to. So Abramoff and House Republicans set out to destroy Allen Stayman, the director of the Interior Department's Office of Insular Affairs (OIA), who was advocating cleaning the place up. A 1998 memo from Abramoff stated the strategy explicitly. Republican-led Congressional investigations of Stayman were held that amounted to nothing, even as DeLay was helping to kill an investigation into the sweatshops themselves. Abramoff tried to drum up as much public attention as possible, but was struggling for traction. Enter payola pundits, who whaddaya know, start writing op-eds in the Washington Times in favor of the Marianas sweatshop regime amongst other things. But that wasn't the only appearance of the Marianas Islands in the so-called newspaper.

How many conservative columnists did Jack Abramoff rent for his clients?
[Media Matters]

Conservative news outlets promote otherwise-ignored Stayman story

On August 3, 1999, a Washington Times article by Audrey Hudson raised questions about whether Stayman and a subordinate, OIA policy director David North, improperly used government resources for political purposes...

[...]

Hudson -- who went on to write six more articles for The Washington Times about Stayman and North from August 1999 to July 2000 -- joined the Times in 1999 after serving as spokeswoman for Republican Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell (R-CO) and Rep. Scott McInnis (R-CO).

But that still wasn't all. Abramoff had not yet "closed the loop" as they say:

The day after the first Washington Times article, the National Center for Public Policy Research (NCPPR) called for an investigation into the allegations against Stayman and North, based on the Washington Times article.

Yes, yes, that National Center for Public Policy Research. But what of it? Plenty of reporters were on this beat, right?

Wrong:

Though investigations of Clinton administration officials rarely lacked for media coverage, the Allen Stayman-Northern Mariana Islands matter received scant attention. Other than Hudson's seven articles, only nine news reports available on Nexis mention the Northern Mariana Islands and the Stayman investigation....

#

one is an editorial in The Washington Times; three are columns, written by Bandow, Ferrara, and Michael Catanzaro. Two of the three columns ran in The Washington Times.

Very, very interesting indeed. It appears that the connections of Hudson and the Moonie Times to Casino Jack are considerably more substantial than those of the men they smeared. Hudson's outraged response to that Media Matters item is here, by all means read her side of the story. But to be even more fair, Hudson did not write the Reid hit piece on her own. Jerry Seper was there as well, and to question his reporting is surely beyond the pale.

Via the DNC, this was Editor & Publisher on June 13, 1995:

A FEDERAL JURY has awarded $500,000 each to two former heads of a federal anti-crime unit after finding that the Arizona Republic in Phoenix libeled them in a 1984 article. Richard Crane and James Henderson alleged that their reputations were damaged after they were quoted in an August 1984 story on corruption.

The jury found in April that reporter Jerry Seper juxtaposed their comments to make the two seem to contradict each other when they were asked if there had been a congressional investigation into their affairs.

Daniel Barr, who represented the paper and Seper, said he would consider a motion for a new trial. Seper now reports for the Washington Times.

The article wrongly gave the impression "that these men are liars when confronted with the allegations, (and that) there is likely something to the allegations," said their attorney, Brian O'Neill.

The reporter actually spoke to Henderson several weeks before he talked with Crane, O'Neill said.

The Justice Department Organized Crime and Racketeering Section in Los Angeles coordinates federal, state and local efforts against organized crime. Crane headed the strike force from 1973 to 1975. Henderson was chief from 1975 to 1985.

Both were officially cleared in 1985 of any wrongdoing.

Seper also penned a classic claiming that Enron was a bipartisan scandal, how very consistent of him..


The Stakeholder:: Death of a Hit Piece