At yesterday’s press briefing, Scott McClellan made the assertion that if you opposed the Iraq War, well, you don’t really count. The President doesn’t care what you have to say. Apparently neither does the New York Times. The stalwart of the “liberal media” covered the Conyers hearings with the headline “Antiwar group says leaked British memo shows Bush misled public on his war plans.” The lede to the article makes a point of stressing the type of people behind these dubious hearings:

Opponents of the war in Iraq held an unofficial hearing on Capitol Hill on Thursday to draw attention to a leaked British government document that they say proves their case that President Bush misled the public about his war plans in 2002 and distorted intelligence to support his policy.

It isn’t until later in the article that the NYT bothers to mention that the hearings were being chaired by no less than the ranking minority member on the House Judiciary Committee Rep. John Conyers (D-MI).

The paper goes on to say that “the hearing and other events…reflected antiwar sentiment re-energized” by the British memos and as well as plummeting support for the war in Iraq. Of course, they don’t bring up the fact that the current state of the war in Iraq is another possible explanation for the “re-energized” antiwar sentiment.

Funny enough, the article does point out how McClellan responded to inquiries about the hearing. But then they play his lapdog one more time: “Activists have accused mainstream news organizations of playing down the document’s significance, even as antiwar bloggers have seized upon it as evidence.” Silly activists.

One of the witnesses at the hearing was John Bonifaz. A constitutional lawyer, Bonifaz is the founder and general counsel for the National Voting Rights Institute. Furthermore, he used to work with the Center for Responsive Politics and his writings have been published in both the Yale Law and Policy Review as well as the Columbia Law Review. How did the NYT sum
up all his accomplishments? “John Bonifaz, anti-war activist.”

In today’s Washington Post, Dana Milbank attempts to dismiss concerns about the Downing Street Minutes as the ravings of fringe conspiracy theorists. A sample of Milbank’s coverage of the hearings:

Conyers’s firm hand on the gavel could not prevent something of a free-for-all; at one point, a former State Department worker rose from the audience to propose criminal charges against Bush officials. Early in the hearing, somebody accidentally turned off the lights; later, a witness knocked down a flag. Matters were even worse at Democratic headquarters, where the C-SPAN feed ended after just an hour, causing the activists to groan and one to shout “Conspiracy!”

To bolster his point, Milbank tries to create the impression that Rep. John Conyers is the only member of Congress who is paying attention to the controversy:

A search of the congressional record yesterday found that of the 535 members of Congress, only one — Conyers — had mentioned the memo on the floor of either chamber. House Democratic leaders did not join in Conyers’s session…

What Milbank doesn’t mention is that 121 other members of Congress — including Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi — have signed Conyers’s letter demanding President Bush answer questions about the Downing Street Minutes.

Maybe the media should spend less time mocking the Downing Street minutes and more time covering them.

UPDATE: John Conyers wrote a letter to the Post in response.