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Matryoshka Dolls - Paris, France - March 2006

Caleb Daniloff provides the text of his latest VPR commentary (listen here), a personal reflection on the 20th anniversary of his father, Nicholas Daniloff’s, infamous run-in with the KGB.

It happened when I was sixteen. I was sneaking a cigarette on our balcony in Moscow when my mom burst out. “Pa’s been arrested for espionage,” she stammered. It was a cool summer morning, twenty years ago today.

My Russian friends Kot and Kolya were over visiting. Before he left, Kolya grabbed my arm and said reassuringly, “Tvoi otets matros.” Which roughly means, “Your dad’s a tough bird.”

Kolya’s words stuck with me. Not because it was a touching show of support, but because when I thought of tough birds, my journalist dad did not leap to mind. To me, he had the air of a professor. He wore highwater pants and thick glasses, wouldn’t step on a bug and rocked embarrassingly on his heels when he talked.

A week later when I visited him at Lefortova Prison, he looked crumpled – no shoelaces or belt, no look of disapproval. His demeanor was calm as if he were spending time at a sanatorium. I’d been coached by Refusnik friends of my parents to extract information for the western reporters camped outside. As a sullen, easily embarrassed teenager, I found interviewing my father far more comfortable than talking with him.

Bob Somerby details the extent to which the press corps covered up for McCain in 2000 (and will likely cover up again) in his "novelization" of McCain series.

To what extent did a fawning press corps hide other oddball things McCain said? Obviously, it’s hard to say, although we did more work on this matter in real time. (It goes beyond the use of “gooks,” into areas of actual substance.) But our analysts chuckled when Frankel said that McCain’s every word had been “on the record.” After all, it’s easy for a pol to speak on the record when he knows the press is so deep in the bag that they’ll airbrush all his weird comments away. But then too, things really did even out in the end. Even as the corps was hiding McCain’s weird statements, they were inventing weird statements by Gore! Voters heard the correct amount of weird statements. The corps simply changed what those weird statements were, and changed the names of who said them.

And concerning the Armitage/Plame story, Media Matters does all the work that I would have liked to have done - but never would have gotten around to - in calling out the consistent misreporting of the story which leaves Rove and Libby off the hook. I heard Isikoff, himself, helping to push this angle on Rachel Maddow earlier this week.

Summary: Numerous media figures have asserted that a recent report purportedly identifying former deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage as Robert Novak’s original source for Valerie Plame’s identity as a CIA operative prove that Karl Rove and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby were not involved in the leak of her identity. However, Armitage’s role as Novak’s first source is not inconsistent with Rove’s and Libby’s involvements in the leak — both were original sources of the information for two other reporters.