Scott Horton: Mr. Blackledge’s Black Helicopters

[babylonsister]

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article19499.htm

Mr. Blackledge’s Black Helicopters

By Scott Horton



08/03/08 "Harpers" -- -- Back in October, as the House Judiciary Committee was conducting its first hearings into the prosecution of former Alabama Governor Don E. Siegelman, I spoke with Simon Heller, the legal director of a Washington-based advocacy organization called the Alliance for Justice. Heller told me he had gotten a telephone call. “It was strange. The man on the other end of the phone identified himself as a reporter. But he certainly didn’t act like one. We had put out a press release talking about Judge Mark Fuller and the role he played in the Siegelman case, and questioning how, given his many conflicts, he had failed to recuse himself. But this reporter wasn’t interested in our view. Instead he was hysterical, screaming into the phone, asking how we dared to criticize such a great American? I’ve never had a press experience quite like that one.”

The name of the reporter? Brett Blackledge, the award-winning prize star of the Birmingham News. Blackledge has carried the paper’s water in its two major campaigns of the last six years. The first was its effort to take down former Governor Siegelman through a blizzard of innuendo and tendentious reporting straight from the files of a group of partisan prosecutors. And the second, still running, is the effort to reshape the state’s legislature by demonstrating that a large part of it is enmeshed in hopeless graft and corruption by working simultaneously as junior college teachers and administrators. In most states, a reporter like Mr. Blackledge would not venture very far. But in ‘Bama, where they take their Koolaid unalloyed, he’s the real thing.

So it comes as no surprise that when 60 Minutes at length runs its story on Karl Rove and the Siegelman case, Blackledge scoops a print media exclusive: an interview with Karl Rove. In sum, Rove views his paper, the Birmingham News, as the print media equal of Fox News. The interview ran and looked indistinguishable from a Karl Rove press release. No tough questions. Indeed, not even essential information explaining how, when and why the interview was conducted. The article insists there was an interview, even though it provides no evidence of one having occurred.

snip//

We could recount once again the four campaigns on which Rove worked in our newspaper, which we have done numerous times. Frankly, I’m not sure any of that matters. But again, you must remember, I do not, as a matter of routine, believe that black helicopters are flying above.

So there you have it. A serious reporter would have plowed in and asked Rove questions about his actual involvement in electoral politics in Alabama—that is, he or she would have examined the predicates of the Simpson story to see if any of them tally. But not Blackledge. In his mind, Rove is uninvolved, so there is no point in asking any such questions. Moreover, people who believe that he is involved “believe that black helicopters are flying above.”

And certainly, Blackledge speaks conclusively from real life when he tells us that the simple fact that a man was involved in four races long ago does not mean he has any interest in things transpiring today. I’d love to know what kind of real life experience that is. No doubt about one thing: Blackledge is just the kind of reporter Karl Rove loves.

[mod mom]

1. I hope Conyers holds sorry butt in contempt for not testifying. There is no excuse for it unless

there were direct orders from the president.