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Bernstein: Media failed on Ailes-Petraeus

Carl Bernstein is accusing the U.S. media, including his former employer The Washington Post, of failing to adequately cover what he calls Rupert Murdoch's "brazen bid to hijack the presidency."

Bernstein's complaint comes weeks after his former colleague Bob Woodward reported -- in the Washington Post's "Style" section -- that Fox News president Roger Ailes had tried to enlist Gen. David Petraeus to run for president, and that Murdoch, Ailes' boss at News Corp., might have bankrolled the campaign.

"[A]lmost as dismaying as Ailes' and Murdoch's disdain for an independent and truly free and honest press, and as remarkable as the obsequious eagerness of their messenger to convey their extraordinary presidential draft and promise of on-air Fox support to Petraeus, has been the ho-hum response to the story by the American press and the country's political establishment, whether out of fear of Murdoch, Ailes and Fox – or, perhaps, lack of surprise at Murdoch's, Ailes' and Fox's contempt for decent journalistic values or a transparent electoral process," Bernstein writes today in a column for The Guardian.

In the wake of Woodward's report, I noted that Ailes overture to Gen. Petraeus had been seen as little more than a small bit of Washington intrigue, while a similar move by the president of any other news network would have caused a scandal. When I asked Liz Spayd, the Post's managing editor, why Woodward's piece had appeared in the paper's 'Style' section, she called it a "buzzy media story" and told me "it didn't have the broader import that would justify A1."

Bernstein seizes upon Spayd's remark, calling it "tin-eared treatment" of a huge story.

"Buzzy media story? Lacking the 'broader import' of a front-page story? One cannot imagine such a failure of news judgment among any of Spayd's modern predecessors as managing editors of the Post, especially in the clear light of the next day and with a tape recording – of the highest audio quality – in hand," he writes.

"The tape that Bob Woodward obtained, and which the Washington Post ran in the style section, should be the denouement of the Murdoch story on both sides of the Atlantic," he later adds, "making clear that no institution, not even the presidency of the United States, was beyond the object of his subversion."