National media bury Wisconsin story backing up charges that Bush has politicized U.S. attorney offices: Reps used to influence election

Wed, Apr 11, 2007 5:52pm EST | National media bury Wisconsin story backing up charges that Bush has politicized U.S. attorney offices

An April 11 article in The Washington Post on the House Judiciary Committee's decision to subpoena hundreds of Justice Department documents related to the U.S. attorney firings noted that Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) has "joined other members in demanding records and additional information about a federal public corruption case" in Wisconsin. Regarding the case, the Post reported only that a federal appeals court in Chicago ordered a former state employee to be "released after overturning her conviction." The article did not report that Georgia Thompson -- who was not identified by name -- was convicted on charges brought by a Bush-appointed U.S. attorney just before the 2006 election, that Wisconsin Republicans used her conviction to attack Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle (D) during the campaign, that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit took the highly unusual action of ordering the defendant released during oral argument because of the lack of evidence to support the conviction, and that Feingold and five other senators have requested information about the case to investigate whether "politics may have played an inappropriate role" in the prosecution.

An April 11 Los Angeles Times article reported that the senators were looking to see if "politics may have played an inappropriate role" in the case, but also left out the fact that Republicans had used Thompson's conviction to attack Doyle.

Several other national media outlets have ignored the Thompson case altogether, despite its relevance to congressional allegations that the Bush administration has attempted to use the U.S. attorney function for political and electoral advantage. A Media Matters for America review* found that USA Today and The Wall Street Journal have not covered the story, nor have the national network broadcast news programs on CBS, NBC, and ABC. As Media Matters has previously noted, the broadcast networks' evening news programs -- ABC's World News with Charles Gibson, the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric, and NBC's Nightly News with Brian Williams -- were all slow to report on the U.S. attorney scandal. ...