What MSM Bias?

Funny isn’t it how a perjury case is making headlines day after day even though the main story was about a leak that never happened and to which no charges were ever leveled.  You want proof that the MSM is biased?  How about the case of Sandy Berger as compared to the Plame case:

Washington scandals are curious things. Sometimes special prosecutors are appointed and the media provide saturation coverage of their doings. An example would be the Valerie Plame episode, which led to this month’s perjury trial of Scooter Libby, the former White House aide accused of lying about who first told him Joe Wilson’s wife worked for the CIA.

[…]Then there is Sandy Berger, the former Clinton national security adviser who pleaded guilty last year to knowingly taking and destroying classified documents from the National Archives while preparing for his testimony before the 9/11 Commission. When archives officials caught Mr. Berger, they bizarrely first asked a friend of his, former Clinton White House counsel Bruce Lindsey, for an explanation, rather than contact the Justice Department. After initially lying to investigators, Mr. Berger finally admitted that he took the documents, but only for "personal convenience."

Prosecutors accepted Mr. Berger’s assurance that he had taken only five documents from the archives, even though on three of his four visits there he had access to original working papers of the National Security Council for which no adequate inventory exists. Nancy Smith, the archives official who provided the materials to Mr. Berger, said that she would "never know what if any original documents were missing." We have only Mr. Berger’s word that he didn’t take anything else. The Justice Department secured his agreement to take a polygraph on the matter, but never followed through and administered it.

The issue is still relevant. Officials of the 9/11 Commission are now on record expressing "grave concern" about the materials to which Mr. Berger had access. A report from the National Archives Inspector General last month found he took extraordinary measures to spirit them out of the archives, including hiding them in his pockets and socks. He also went outside without an escort and put some documents under a construction trailer, from where he could later retrieve them.

What could have been so important for Mr. Berger to take such risks? Was he trying to airbrush history by removing embarrassing information about the Clinton administration’s fight against Osama bin Laden? As columnist Ron Cass has noted with dry understatement, "Bill Clinton has great sensitivity to his place in history and to accusations that he did too little to respond to al Qaeda." Last year the former president blew up when Chris Wallace of "Fox News Sunday" asked him, "Why didn’t you do more to put bin Laden and al Qaeda out of business when you were president?"

This case is actually the Pièce de résistance when speaking of MSM bias. 

Think about this.  If Condi Rice had been caught taking the ORIGINAL memos that detailed the Bush administrations conduct towards terrorism in the final months of the administration, do you think the story would be relegated to the back pages?

That story would explode like the fourth of July but when it comes to Clinton all we get is a shoulder shrug.

And there is no bias in our MSM?

Curt

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