Franken grills Dickerson on Time-Rove scandal: "Why can't you just say they're big liars?"

Former Time magazine White House correspondent John Dickerson appeared on the February 8 broadcast of Air America Radio's The Al Franken Show, where host Al Franken asked him about a February 7 Media Matters for America item. The February 7 item demonstrated that Dickerson and at least two Time colleagues, White House correspondent Matthew Cooper and Washington bureau chief Michael Duffy, helped to write an October 2003 article that contained statements they knew to be false.

When the article was written and published, all three reporters knew for a fact that White House senior adviser Karl Rove had outed undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame. They knew this because Cooper was one of the reporters to whom Rove leaked Plame's identity in July 2003; at the time, Cooper told Duffy and Dickerson about the leak. But the October 2003 article reported that Rove had "initially" been suspected to be the source of the leak, falsely suggesting that these suspicions were no longer valid. Worse, the article quoted White House press secretary Scott McClellan describing the accusations as "ridiculous" and saying, "There is simply no truth to that suggestion." As Media Matters demonstrated, Cooper, Duffy, and Dickerson all knew that McClellan's statement was false, yet their article presented it without rebuttal.

Further, Media Matters quoted a January 2004 article co-written by Dickerson that pretended that it was an open question whether anyone "in the White House" outed Plame despite the fact that Dickerson knew full well that someone "in the White House" had outed Plame; Dickerson also asserted that it was "likely that no charges will be filed."

His answers to Franken's questions about the matter indicate that Dickerson is familiar with the February 7 Media Matters item, yet Dickerson did not deny the central point of the item -- that he and his colleagues knowingly participated in the publication of misleading articles that contained statements they knew to be false. Nor did Dickerson offer a single relevant explanation or justification for the knowing publication, without rebuttal, of McClellan's false statement.

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