what other stories has rove shut down?

* " Cooper wrote that Rove offered him a "big warning" not to "get too far out on Wilson."... (Coopers) e-mail characterizing the conversation (with Rove) continues: "not only the genesis of (wilsons) trip is flawed and suspect but so is the report. [Rove] implied strongly there's still plenty to implicate iraqi interest in acquiring uranium from Niger ... "" LINK

theres nothing particularly new or surprising here, although its kinda neat seeing the specifics of rove's behaviour, but when we consider that rove made the same phone call to 6 different journo's, and we see the brazeness in print, one thing that im reminded of is how absolutely systemic this type of behaviour is / must be... and that raises the obvious question - what other stories has rove shut down?

for 3 years its been obvious that stories get promoted or demoted in the media in ways that have nothing to do with the merits of the story, and the question has always been whether there was some sort of institutional groupthink that was dictating the dialogue via some sort of 'invisible hand', or if the mechanism was via a smoky cigar-filled room.

we now know, explicitly, that at a minimum, on some important occassions, there really was a puppeteer pulling the strings. they seem to have been caught red-handed in this case, but surely there are other cases that have yet to float to the surface - can we make some educated guesses about those other cases?

apparently all krove has to do is make a few 'nothing to see here' phone calls and the story gets shut down - when else might he have done that? we know that they were able to keep a lid on the DSM story for a long time - id love to have karls phone records for the first week in May. and we know that the media outright refused to write about the stolen election - its not difficult to imagine karl made similar 'nothing to see here' phone calls - from that horrible first week of november all the way through to the electoral college challenge. how about is-he-wired-gate from the debates? we know that the nyt killed that story. im sure there are many others - in fact i could go out on a limb and say that *every* time karl called 6 journos on any issue, that he was lying to them.

and going a step further, all the journos involved have known for 2 years that, at least in the plamegame, karl knowingly lied, and probably committed treason, and yet they still kept taking his calls, and still kept reporting his spin/lies. for shame.

unfortunately, we dont have many on-the-record examples of senior government officials frantically working the phones on a particular issue - im reminded of aznar getting on the phones on mar11 last year - and we know how that one turned out...

my guess is that a good indicator might be that whenever the repugs started shouting XFILES or CONSPIRACY THEORY, we should start looking at phone records from karls office and we might uncover some more such shenanigans.