Our Media

DougJ:  Day six of the Kaplan Daily’s silence on the Norton story

As I said before, I think the Gale Norton investigation is pretty serious stuff:

The criminal investigation centers on the Interior Department’s 2006 decision to award three lucrative oil shale leases on federal land in Colorado to a Shell subsidiary. Over the years it would take to extract the oil, according to calculations from Shell and a Rand Corp. expert, the deal could net the company hundreds of billions of dollars.

The story was first reported on September 17 in the LAT and Chicago Tribune (there’s some form of joint operating agreement and are owned by the same company). The NYT and WSJ did stories on it shortly thereafter.
It is now nearly a week later and the Washington Post has yet to mention aside from an item in one of Howie Kurtz’s blog piece, and a link to an AP piece. This may be why:

Post Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli said he worries “that we are not well-enough informed about conservative issues. It’s particularly a problem in a town so dominated by Democrats and the Democratic point of view.”
To guard against it, he said, “I challenge our reporters and editors with great frequency to look at what is going on across the political spectrum . . . at the extremes, among the rabble-rousers, as well as among policymakers.” He said he pressed the National desk this week to provide more ACORN coverage.

I realize I’ve touched on this before, but it’s remarkable: the Post, in effect, pulled reporters off of a story involving criminal misconduct at the cabinet level involving hundreds of billions of dollars to put more reporters on a story about a gag video involving kids dressed up as pimps and hos. And now we know that the evil ACORN worker who played along with them later spoke to the police about the incident.
It’s Glenn Beck’s world, we’re just living in it.