<This story got a full-up headline on the Drudge Report.

Not sure why. Mickey Kaus (Thanks yet again to Andrew Sullivan) says there ain't no "there" there:

Cheney is Guilty of ... What?



Questions raised about the NYT's coverage!

By Mickey Kaus
Updated Thursday, August 1, 2002, at 12:12 AM PT

Update: Jeff Gerth and Richard Stevenson's Drudge-hyped "questions"-raising front-page Cheney piece has now been posted. It's written clearly enough -- which makes it easy to see that it's not even close to damning. No fire, no smoke to speak of -- not even the general perception of smoke that's sometimes generated by the very incomprehensibility of Gerth's prose. Cheney stands accused of presiding over a merger that went sour, after he left, because the firm he acquired, Dresser Industries, had more exposure to liability for asbestos than had been anticipated -- and a former subsidiary of Dresser's got new owners and hit Halliburton up for more money after Cheney had left Halliburton (a fairly crucial fact the NYT buries in graf 35 of 41). Gerth and Stevenson make some noise about whether Cheney's firm did adequate "due diligence," but at worst it looks like an ill-advised deal, not an illegal deal.

Gerth and Stevenson also trumpet "previously undisclosed documents," which show that Dresser got a hint that more liability was in store a month before the merger. Unfortunately for the NYT, Cheney was head of Halliburton, not Dresser, and Halliburton claims it was "kept in the dark by Dresser," which would make it the victim in a corporate lily-gilding, not the victimizer. (Yes, yes, G & S postulate that Cheney was told privately about the letter by Dresser's CEO, but they have no evidence of that.)

Isn't this the sort of busted Gerth effort that would normally run on an inside page, where it could be safely ignored (on the sound principle that any Jeff Gerth piece that actually delivered the goods would be on page 1)?

The Raines regime is not only going off on moody anti-Republican jags, which isn't a sin in New York -- it's wasting our time, which is.

P.S.: Nor do G & S make it clear why asbestos liability of $43.3 million a year would cause the stock of a company with $13 billion a year in annual revenue to plunge from $40 to $14. ... 11:00 P.M.



It is worth noting that when campaign finance reform kicks in, this kind of stuff from liberal newspapers will be able to run unimpeded, while politicians will be prevented from running opposing ads close to an election. Then people wonder why the media supported the reforms.

This makes venues like the Internet and talk radio even more critical for getting information out there.