Lynn Sweet reports, but because it’s truthful and negative about Barack Obama
Mark
Halperin, who recently moved from "The Note" to TIME, accuses
her of being a hack.
Clinton campaign throws opposition research on Obama’s “secrecy”
over Chicago
Sun-Times transom.
It’s happening to a lot of us who dare to do any reporting ourselves, though
I clearly don’t have a frontline seat like Sweet, because I just don’t have
the budget or traditional media backing.
But there’s nothing in Sweet’s column that isn’t part of extended effort on
her part to report the facts, regardless of whether people like it or not.
… .. The clear implication from Halperin’s headline and link was that the
Clinton campaign provided Sweet with research material and she simply typed
it up as a column. Not true, says Sweet: "The column was the result of
string I had been gathering for a long time." She noted, "The trigger
for the column was Obama’s stepped-up talk of transparency" on the campaign
trail. Sweet has been covering the Obama campaign since its inception last
winter and has previously written about the issue of campaign transparency.Also, despite the fact that The Page’s headline placed the word "secrecy"
in quotation marks, suggesting that the Sun-Times column was an attack on
Obama’s "secrecy," Sweet never accused Obama of "secrecy";
rather, while crediting Obama’s efforts to increase the transparency of governmental
affairs and campaigns, Sweet wrote that "[o]n other fronts, the Obama
transparency record is lacking." … ..
There’s something virulent going around during this primary season that targets people honestly doing
his or her job. Everyone is seen to have ulterior motives, with the Clinton camp being accused
of all manner of mischief; also named as the camp guilty of sending out emails and messages
over transoms envisioned by the paranoid and pathetically untalented, not to mention grossly
overpaid.
Candidate loyalty has turned into blind willingness to follow and outright deification, with anyone pointing to the truth targeted and attacked. Sweet was going her job and doing it honestly. The same cannot be said for many right now who are on the attack and care more about a candidate than the facts.
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