Rove's Lawyer Uses Jason Leopold to Attack Bloggers, Defend Media

New York Observer:

"Actually, it’s the media—not the prosecutor’s office—that [Robert Luskin] is angry at, and especially the bloggers. Mr. Luskin was eager to portray the suffering of his client as a function of media attention and speculation, rather than real danger of a conviction.

Mr. Rove, Mr. Luskin said, had fallen victim to partisans and—more importantly—the bloggers who became their enablers.

“It seems to me that there are lots of constituencies who have treated this as the story too good not to be true,” he said. “And people have all had their own reasons—whether they’re political, whether they have to do with opportunities to put themselves forward personally, whether or not they are motivated by efforts to show up the mainstream media.”

The criticism of blogging, in fact, goes right to the story of the White House’s relationship with reporters in the “mainstream media.”

“The big criticism of the mainstream media is that they live in this community, they’ve got continuing relationships with their sources and the people they write about, and the blogosphere says that that makes them spineless,” Mr. Luskin said. (Like Judy Miller?) “I think one can make the exact opposite argument, which is that the premise is true but that makes them accountable.

He recalled an episode from last month, when a report on the liberal Web site Truthout.org, written by Jason Leopold and citing “high-level sources with direct knowledge of the meeting,” claimed Mr. Rove would be indicted on charges of perjury and lying to investigators, the results of a marathon session of negotiations in Mr. Luskin’s office that he claims never occurred.”

Luskin should stick to what he does best: defend White House officials who smear veterans and who are involved in national security leaks.

His blogospheric analysis is worse than shoddy. Using Jason Leopold to flog the online community is what we anticipated from people like Luskin and from blog opponents in the media and political establishment. Here's a May 22nd post on the subject:

"You know something's fishy when a prominent rightwing blogger offers a better defense of the progressive blogosphere than a senior Washington Post reporter. Captain's Quarters acknowledges what Howard Kurtz fails to mention in Kurtz's takedown of Jason Leopold and Truthout's Marc Ash:

"The Daily Kos has already outed Leopold for some sock-puppetry, and it doesn't take much imagination to think that Leopold would not have shied from misrepresenting himself." - Captain Ed

As Chris Bowers at MyDD argues - and Captain's Quarters obliquely implies - major progressive bloggers have stayed away from the story....

Kurtz may get some satisfaction from airing Leopold's dirty laundry and painting Rove's team as innocent victims of a hoax, but if he wants to get things straight, he should at least let his readers know that the story behind the story is not that so many bloggers ran with it, but that the vast majority of influential bloggers didn't."