Friends in Low Places: Karl Rove's Press Gang

[babsbunny]

http://pacificfreepress.com/content/view/2370/1/

Friends in Low Places: Karl Rove's Press Gang
Written by Scott Horton
Sunday, 09 March 2008
Mr. Blackledge’s Black Helicopters

by Scott Horton

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.

A loyal News reader recently shared with me her exchange of emails with Blackledge, which explain perfectly his attitude towards the story he’s covering.

First the email query to Blackledge:

[Uncle Joe]

1. Thanks for the thread, babsbunny.

Kicked and recommended.