Why Is The Press Protecting Cheney?

There are few columns I see as indispensible, but at the top of my list is Dan Froomkin's weekday "White House Briefing," that appears in the Washington Post.

Froomkin was one of the very few to initiate a discussion on Col. Lawrence Wilkerson's comments on a Dick Cheney 'cabal' last month.

I previously devoted an entire entry to the lackadaisical media response to this revelation by Colin Powell's former chief-of-staff.

Today, Froomkin remains optimistic and suggests that the media, which he says eventually caught on to Col. Wilkerson's initial remarks, will eventually latch on to the most recent revelation.

I disagree, but more on that in a second.

Froomkin wrote the following about the newest comments from Wilkerson:

"On NPR yesterday, the former chief of staff to the secretary of state said that he had uncovered a 'visible audit trail' tracing the practice of prisoner abuse by U.S. soldiers directly back to Vice President Cheney's office."

Upon linking to the Froomkin column, there is supportive audio evidence of the comments, though no official transcript is yet available.

At the time the column was posted, on early Friday afternoon, Froomkin wrote that the only news service to cover the story thus far, was Agence France Presse. By the way, you've got to love the accompanying Cheney photo that Yahoo! has on their site, to go with the AFP story.

Unlike Froomkin, I don't think the media responded well at all to Col. Wilkerson's major revelations. What Wilkerson was alleging had earth-shaking implications; that Dick Cheney and a group of power-mongers hijacked this administration and essentially were doing un-precedented misdeeds that went, and still have gone, unchecked.

If a stain on Monica Lewinsky's dress can be front page material, why not this??

At the time of this post, I checked Google News for all stories matching 'Wilkerson' and 'Cheney,' and I have 417 hits. At the same time, a search of Madonna wielded over 4,000 hits.

The latest story may catch on, but the point was, this should be headline 'in-your-face' news. And it is not.

Since Froomkin posted, the most recent Wilkerson story has spread a bit...to the CBC and Editor & Publisher, but it has not spread nearly fast enough. Why is this not on every front page?

As for Cheney, I think that the Washington Post was on to something, when, in an October 26th editorial, they labelled him as the "Vice-President for Torture."