Bloodless Coup

The Smears Against Rep. Mollohan (D-WV) Continue

The Morgantown Dominion-Post continues to set the bar quite high in this year's race to see which paper in the US can engage in the most innuendo aimed at taking down a member of the US Congress. In the Sunday edition they yet again run banner stories proposing that Alan Mollohan might have been up to all sorts of criminal or almost criminal behavior - without presenting readers with evidence that that's actually ever occurred. In this case they are running two stories above the fold (at the top of the front page, and they continue and take up basically all of page 6) on the "investigation" into the supposed wrong-doing of Congressman Mollohan. In fact the lead piece is called "Anatomy of an Investigation". It is quite a piece of work - column after column after column associating Mollohan with wrong-doing (the work is filled with words like bribery and ethics) - but not presenting a single shred of evidence he's done anything wrong. In fact, it doesn't say a single specific thing about what he's supposedly done wrong except to say that he came under notice after filing his 2004 financial disclosure forms. They attracted the attention of a conservative nonprofit (funded by Richard Mellon Scaife) and subsequently the Wall Street Journal and that those leftist-lovin' terrorists at the New York Times wrote stories stemming from the Scaife crowd's (who of course swear they are doing anything partisan) "investigation". And ... that's it. The paper doesn't provide any further discussion of what Mollohan did, or even what he might have done - they merely point to the existence of supposedly questionable financial forms (about which they give us no details) and suggest the nasty stench of corruption is wafting off them.

Not content with this bit of nasty innuendo (which also contains some ridiculous assertions like describing the House Ethics panel as powerful - ha, it is to laugh), right next to it they run a history of unethical behavior in Congress piece by the same reporter - which would seem to implicitly connect Mollohan with people who've gone to jail, had sex with pages, actually taken bribes, and who according to the reporter's language spend many hours of the day trying to pervert the system and get all they can for themselves, no matter the rules of the game (I'm not kidding - her lead actually says they spend long hours figuring out how to act unethically/illegally).

Taken together this is the shoddiest type of political reporting imagineable - coming damn close to being disgraceful. And maybe it is that. And yes, it is worth noting, again, that this newspaper (the only paper in WV's fastest growing city - or one of the two fastest) is owned by the family of John Raese - the Republican nominee for the US Senate this year - so much for that "liberal" media charge.