If you’ve yet to notice, the latest daily must-read covering the very heart and soul of the U.S. Attorney Purge scandal is Fired Up ! Missouri.
They have been reporting on the nub of the issue — the resounding corruption and/or cover-ups emanating out of Thor Hearne’s MO law firm Lathrop & Gage — in a way that even the good folks at TPMMuckracker have yet to fully comprehend and/or adequately cover.
Anyway, Howard Beale at FU!MO (an interesting acronym, now that we write it) has a notable follow-up today to his Friday story on the KC Star having re-written the excellent McClatchy story on Missouri as “Ground Zero” for the GOP “Voter Fraud” fraud.
The KC Star, ironically enough, owned by McClatchy’s parent company, had rewritten the piece to make it far more GOP/Missouri Politico-friendly as we subsequently covered here.
Beale today, has a suggestion as to why the Star may have gone out of their way to whitewash a previously brilliant piece of investigative reporting by McClatchy’s Greg Gordon when they reran it (a day after McClatchy’s other papers had done so): KC Star’s corporate attorney is none other than Hearne’s Lathrop & Gage, the very firm that is at the absolutely epi-center of this entire matter in many more ways than one, including representing a number of the subjects of Gordon’s story, such as Hearne, Gov. Matt Blunt, etc.
All of which begs another important question which Beale forgot to ask in his coverage: Why did the Star fail to make that disclosure for readers when they reran even the whitewashed version of the McClatchy piece?
After bullet-pointing several of the L&G connections to all of these coming out of the U.S. Attorney Purge scandal, Beale concludes:
Indeed. But readers shouldn’t have to “wonder”. The paper ought to be disclosing it in every article — if they still have any journalistic ethics left at the joint, in any case.
UPDATE: What is disclosed by the Star at the end of their re-written McClatchy hatchett job, btw, is this: “McClatchy Newspapers correspondent Margaret Talev, and The Star’s Steve Kraske and Mark Morris contributed to this report.” McClatchy’s Talev was listed as a contributor on the original version of the piece. As to the others, we don’t yet know much about Morris personally, but Kraske’s GOP leanings and Fox “News”-style tactics of “journalism” are well-dissected in this Sunday piece from Beale, covering Kraske’s own whitewashing of the duplicitous, anti-democratic, politicization of the DoJ under the guise of the GOP’s “Voter Fraud” canard as run at the Star over the weekend.
Why even one reporter would be needed to rewrite such a story is already worth questioning. Putting two on the case, especially in light of the grotesque rewrites, is certainly notable. Especially when one of them is Kraske.
It’s plain as day that they’ve more or less held up their hand and said, “I’m guilty!”
Pathetic by Rovian standards.
It seems these shameful excuses for journalists are doing their damnest to destroy the Fourth Estate. Without a vigorous and free press, our democracy is doomed. Too bad lame journalists like Steve Kraske don’t realize how much damage they’re doing to our nation. Or, maybe Kraske does realize it and he just doesn’t care.
They are changing the DOJ into the Department of Just Us, and the Star into a propaganda rag.