Hugh Hewitt has a good story in the Weekly Standard on a reason, besides liberal bias directly, why the mainstream press has not picked up on the Senate Intelligence Memo Leak Scandal that I've posted on previously.

SEAN HANNITY'S big scoop is not generating the headlines it ought to. The memo Hannity obtained and made public that details the plans by Democratic staff on the Senate Intelligence Committee to politicize the committee's investigations in the service of partisan politics far overshadows in importance Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld's memo pushing the Pentagon to think about the hard problems ahead in the war on terrorism, but it has received significantly less attention than the Rumsfeld memo did.

Why?

Three reasons could account for the disparity in treatment:

The most obvious explanation is that elite media is populated by left- leaning reporters and editors not inclined to throw spotlights on a memo the contents of which Democratic senator Zell Miller has called the "first cousin of treason."

A second explanation focuses on the fact that Hannity--a radio and television guy, not a print fellow--got the scoop, and newspapers hate being upstaged by talking heads.

The third theory is the most plausible: The Democratic memo reveals that much of what the media has been focusing on for the past six months has been a set-up job. The staff and Democratic members of the Senate Intelligence Committee have been selling story after story (think the Niger yellowcake and "imminent" threat controversies). Out of whole cloth, they have contrived an ambiguous but ominous speculation about the Bush administration's sinister motives for invading Iraq. Now, through this one memo, they have been revealed as nothing short of cynical political operatives. And the reporters who ran with their hints are revealed as breathless and easily manipulated amateurs.

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