Never Mind

Lorie Byrd in Townhall commenting on the MSM and the way it's dealing with the revelation that Valerie Plame was NOT outed by a White House cabal, but by an opponent of the war in the State Department:

I watched entirely too much television as a child. I was a big fan of Saturday Night Live and loved the Emily Litella character. For those unfamiliar with Litella, she was played by Gilda Radner and was a little old lady who did commentary on the SNL Weekend Update segment. She was hard of hearing and was constantly confusing words. She would rant on and on, slapping the desk all the while, about one outrage or another until Chevy Chase explained to her that, for example, the report she heard was about bussing schoolchildren, not busting them. She would pause a moment, smile a sweet little smile, look into the camera and say, “Never mind.”

There have been quite a few “never mind” media opportunites during the Bush years. They range in significance from such incorrect stories as that of the plastic Thanksgiving turkey in Baghdad, to stories such as those of widespread rape and murder in the Superdome following Hurricane Katrina. Michelle Malkin once used a reference to Emily Litella when writing about the “Gitmo Koran flushing” story. Few of the “never minds” have gotten the prominent play that the original inaccurate reports received though. More distressing is that many of them have passed unrealized at all. Instead of even a “never mind,” too often we have gotten dumb silence.

How does the news media reverse course on a story that it has reported for years as fact, when it learns, through new revelations, such as the recent one regarding Richard Armitage, that the storyline reported for so long was incorrect? Never mind?

Actually we have not gotten a “never mind” out of the mainstream media yet in the case of Valerie Plame. The mainstream media will probably never tell the true story behind Joe’s grand frog marching fantasy. It is an incredible story really -- amazing that so many in the media regurgitated Wilson’s conspiracy theories as if they were fact. It is amazing that the story took off at all in spite of contradictory statements from Bob Novak from the beginning, who claimed that Plame’s identity did not come from a partisan gunslinger and was only offered in response to his question about why Wilson might have been chosen for the Niger trip. Amazing that it continued in spite of revelations that those 16 words were not incorrect after all. Amazing that even after Joe Wilson’s statements were found to be inconsistent with documentation uncovered by a Senate committee, that the story remained the same.

The Wilson fantasy was reported for years, as fact, in countless set up pieces to fawning interviews with Wilson. That reporting had very real consequences. It was Joe Wilson's claim that Bush lied about the “16 words” that started the "Bush lied" mantra. We now know that many of the claims that "Bush lied" were actually lies themselves, but that has gotten scant little attention.

And the Anchoress chimes in with Now In the News With Emily Letita.