Blind to the Truth

An astonishing column by the Chicago Tribune's Public Editor Timothy J. McNulty suggesting "there is no substitute for an investigative reporter examining documents" and belittling the contributions of bloggers, suggesting they are the repository of conventional wisdom. McNulty then glorifies a discredited journalist:

My question about blogs is what will they contribute beyond conventional opinions, the occasional "gotcha" to politicians and to other media, and the opportunity to vent?

Those calls, letters and e-mail messages foretelling the demise of the Mainstream Media in favor of blogs and other online offerings led me to think of the late I.F. Stone, an independent journalist whose career flourished long before the Internet.

Perhaps Public Editor McNulty should engage in a little investigative journalism of his own. I suggest starting with the Venona Project (it's been out for some time), and perhaps a FOIA request on I.F. Stone. Accuracy in Media:

As AIM has documented, however, I.F. Stone merely postured as an independent writer. We have noted that "When North Korea attacked South Korea in 1950, he tried to bolster the false Communist allegation that the United States and South Korea had started the war. During the Vietnam War, he became an icon of the anti-war movement. His writings mirrored the Communist propaganda line, but at the time there was no proof that he was a communist agent.

"After his death, the evidence came out. Decoded cables from the National Security Agency, known as the Venona intercepts, conclusively demonstrate that Stone was taking money from the KGB during many of the years he was publishing his newsletter, I.F. Stone's Weekly. One of the documents describes his recruitment by the KGB. In addition, FBI files released to Accuracy in Media through a Freedom of Information Act request state that an informant within the Communist Party USA had identified Stone as a member in the 1930s."

Stone was a KGB tool who ignored one of the major stories of his day, the death of over 100 million innocent people at the hands of Stalin and his communist comrades around the world.

A story, by the way, that still has not been told by either Hollywood or the mainstream media, as the "conventional wisdom" of liberalism continues to blind them to the truth.