Scrubbing the news squeaky-clean

Out, out damn spot! Will these hands ne'er be clean?

Ok, I may not have got that exactly right.

Why the melodramatic Lady Macbethisms at 8am? Well, I just happened to read Eric Boehlert's latest post at Huffingtonpost.com: "New York Times' Eavesdropping Story Wasn't The Only One Squashed For Bush During 2004 Campaign"

Last week, the NYTimes public editor, Byron Calame, confessed that the paper's editorial desk killed the story about the NSA warrantless wiretapping program before the 2004 Presidential election. I wrote a bit about the confession last week. Boehlert picks up on a number of stories that fell through the leaky sieve of American editorial desks pre-2004 election. Par example?

1. Time Magazine failing to disclose its knowledge of Rove's role in the Valerie Plame scandal (Boehlert's source: firedoglake.com)
2. NBC knew that the administration was postponing the 2nd razing of Fallujah until after the 2004 election (Boehlert's source: NBC Evening News with Tom Brokaw, Nov 4, 2004)
3. CBS held back their report on the bogus yellowcake-from-Niger memos because "it would have been "inappropriate to broadcast the WMD report so close to the presidential election." (Boehlert's source: Andrew Hayward, president of CBS News, 6 weeks before the election)
4. Bush's debating bulge: NYTimes had a full report from a NASA scientist about the mysterious bulge seen during one of the 2004 Presidential debates. The story was killed on Oct 27, 2004 (Boehlert's sources? The NYTimes reporter, Andrew Revkin, and the NYT public editor, Calame; also, the NASA scientist)

Apparently these subjects are all fleshed out in Boehlert's book, "Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled over for Bush"