Valerie Plame, the former CIA employee who was outed during the George W. Bush administration, announced on Thursday that she is running for congress as a Democrat in New Mexico.
Left-wing media outlets all wrote pretty much the same story when covering her announcement — basically a background-filled article-length version of my previous paragraph. What each of these outlets left out, predictably, was the blatant anti-Semitism Plame has espoused in recent years.
Jim Geraghty of National Review outlined Plame’s anti-Semitism, which was ignored by the major outlets. In September 2017, Plame tweeted out a link to an article titled, “America’s Jews Are Driving America’s Wars,” which had a sub-headline that asked, “Shouldn’t they recuse themselves when dealing with the Middle East?”
After being called out for sharing the article, Plame — in a now-deleted tweet — said the article was “very provocative, but thoughtful.” She further stated: “Many neocon hawks ARE Jewish … Read the entire article and try, just for a moment, to put aside your biases and think clearly.”
After further backlash, she claimed she had actually just “skimmed this piece, zeroed in on the neocon criticism, and shared it without seeing and considering the rest.” Geraghty goes on:
She repeated an urban legend about dancing Israelis sighted after 9/11 and an article touting “Israeli fingerprints all over the place” in the investigation of the worst terror attack in American history. She shared an article entitled “Why I Still Dislike Israel” that laments the “Israel Lobby electing and controlling a malleable congress [sic] and increasingly even officials at state and local levels.” She commented that Natalie Portman was a fine choice to play a young Ruth Bader Ginsburg because “they are both Jewish.” (By itself, that’s a harmless comment, but in the context of the other ones, Plame seems particularly focused on knowing who’s Jewish and who isn’t.)
One would think blatant bigotry against a class of people would be important when writing about said person (it certainly would be if that person were a Republican, even if the “bigotry” weren’t blatant but imagined), but one would be wrong.
As @AG_Conservative pointed out in a thread on Twitter, major left-wing outlets completely ignored this information when writing about Plame’s announcement.
The New York Times, “which has had extensive issues with excusing and promoting anti-Semitism recently,” AG wrote, focused only on Plame being outed as a CIA employee. The author of that story later took to Twitter to claim she only had 400 words to write about the announcement, which is why she left out a major issue concerning Plame.
The Daily Beast also left out the anti-Semitism, as did The Washington Post. CNN was one of the few outlets that covered the controversy, but as AG notes, the outlet washed over the whole thing.
“CNN mentioned it, but their description is misleading. They write she resigned “after apologizing for sharing on Twitter an anti-Semitic article that she said she had only ‘skimmed,’” AG wrote. “Ignoring that she had shared quite a few anti-Semitic posts.”
Indeed, this was the paragraph CNN included about Plame’s anti-Semitism:
In 2017, Plame reportedly resigned from the board of the Ploughshares Fund, an organization working to end the threat of nuclear weapons, after apologizing for sharing on Twitter an anti-Semitic article that she said she had only “skimmed.” That Twitter account no longer appears available as of Thursday afternoon.
Don’t expect the media to change its coverage after her campaign is up and running.