The Media Catches on in... Arizona?

In the first newspaper editorial I have seen on the Air America case that we have covered extensively here, the New York Times Arizona Republic (!!) has finally caught on to the fact that something stinks in New York, and it's not going away (Hat tip: Brian Maloney). Most of the following material is review for those who have been following the story closely, but notice their interesting conclusion:

The nugget of this story is just astonishing:

In early 2004, the directors of the nascent Air America network were scouring the nation for potential contributors to its start-up. One of the network's directors, Evan Montvel Cohen, appears to have partially solved the problem by arranging loans from the Gloria Wise Boys & Girls Club that eventually totaled at least $480,000, and possibly more.

According to reports, Cohen was in an advantageous position to secure the loans: In addition to directing Air America, Cohen also served as development director of the Gloria Wise club.

At the same time, it is worth noting, Cohen also secured loans to himself. All told, he borrowed more than $800,000, according to club officials.

In this case, "borrow" seems to be a loose term. The club's president says Cohen made at least one of the Air America loans - $213,000 - without her approval. Cohen no longer works for either the club or the network, and there is some indication that the current owner of Air America, Piquant LLC, may not have been aware of the loans at the time it purchased the network on May 24, 2004.

For the Boys & Girls Club, meanwhile, the results have been disastrous. The New York Department of Investigation announced in June that city grants and contracts to Gloria Wise - about $10 million worth - were to be suspended because its officials had approved "significant inappropriate transactions and falsified documents that were submitted to various city agencies."

You don't have to be a Columbia School of Journalism grad to sense that this developing story might have legs.

One wonders, then, why so many of the graduates of the CSJ have failed to sense that the story even exists, much less has a permanent mode of ambulation. And what is even more interesting is what the editorial goes on to say:

Wholly unrocked by the experience, however, is the Bronx-area paper of record, the New York Times, which, since the story began to seriously break on July 29, has published exactly nothing on the scandal.

The Times' lack of interest has become the scandal within the scandal. Bloggers, of course, are making hay over the Times' disinterest in a story that casts the formerly much-heralded Air America in a very bad light.

As well they should. News judgment is a subjective thing, certainly. But it is difficult to imagine a more politically explosive New York-centric subject than this one.

Doug MacEachern (the author of this editorial) is dead-on. Not only are the facts of this story explosive, political and ghastly, but they are also almost exclusively the property of the city of New York. The fact that the New York Times has been silent on this story for eight days (and counting) is almost becoming as noteworthy as the sordid details of the scandal itself.

What in the world could possibly be motivating them to keep silence while two smaller papers in the area relentlessly work to undig a huge political scandal? Why is the newspaper that was all over Armstrong Williams incredibly and stunningly silent in the face of what appears to be a far more serious scandal?

And despite what those on the left would have you believe, this is not a non-story, or a story of dubious factual certainty, in which the editors of the Times can hide behind journalistic due diligence - New York City's DOI has released two official statements thus far clearly indicating that the folks involved with Air America are under investigation, and both of these official statements have directly contradicted the claims of AIr America officials. That is, for the record, two more official statements than have been released by Patrick Fitzgerald's office. Can anyone even count the number of Times stories on unsubstantiated rumors in the Karl Rove case?

This kind of media negligence is exactly the sort of thing that makes the tinfoil-hat wearers on the right who jump up and down screaming about open collusion between the Times and the DNC look more sane by the minute. Every day that goes by the absence of a news article looked more like a contribution-in-kind to liberal interests.

The clock is ticking on the New York Times. What will be the event that finally forces them to break cover?

Comments

[jefe]

maybe it'll be the same day they actually report that Bush lied into war, that Rove committed treason, and hundreds of thousands of people are dead because of them. That would seem to be a balance... bad loans versus 100000 people dead...

[MachoNachos]

Dear Jefe,

Thank you for proving my point. They already have reported those things, even the ones that aren't true.

Nachos