Caveat lector

A GUTTER RUNS THROUGH IT (PART 2)! It might be true, Frank Rich wanly said. Incomparably, we ask: Where’s the outrage?

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 2004

REVISIONIST HISTORY: We strongly recommend Eric Alterman and Michael Tomasky’s current article for The American Prospect. But E&M make a misstatement about Campaign 2000 that call for instant correction, if only because their pleasing error is on the verge of becoming iconic.

Will the press do better in Campaign 04 than it did four years ago? Alterman and Tomasky report hopeful signs. But alas! They get a failing grade in history when they make this suggestion, the last of five:

Don’t let non-news organs drive the news cycle. This may be the most important point, and you need only think back to the last election to see how it might work this time. Some right-wing radio host or FOX will push some tale about the Democratic nominee. It will either be an outright deception (Gore and Love Canal), a perverse distortion of something that contains a small kernel of truth (Gore and the famous “standing student” in Sarasota, Florida), or something completely irrelevant to the man’s qualifications to run the country (Gore and fully buttoned brown suits). It will be framed as reflecting the nominee's “character.” And many voters, who pay only moderate attention to the news and don’t give any thought to how and why the information in front of them gets there, will buy into it.

Every serious journalist will know, deep down, that it’s exaggerated, unfair, and orchestrated. But it won’t matter. It will travel from the right-wing media to the cable shows (if, indeed, that can be called “traveling” at all) and then land on the network news shows and the front pages and op-ed pages of the respectable newspapers.

Clearly, Alterman and Tomasky imply that the iconic slanders of Candidate Gore were initiated and driven by “the right-wing media.” But that is just plainly untrue. Indeed, just look at the examples which E&M cite. As everyone surely knows by now, the “Love Canal” misquotation started (on 11/30/99) at the Washington Post and the New York Times, in stories by Ceci Connolly and Katharine “Kit” Seelye. The matter of Gore and the school desk in Florida? It was an instant post-Debate I hit, lovingly pushed all through the mainstream media. And how about Gore’s “fully buttoned brown suit” (his earth tones)? The notion that Naomi Wolf told Gore to wear earth tones also started in the Post, with a “speculation” reported by—who else?—Ceci Connolly. The right-wing media played no role. And by the way: E&M omit the Love Story tale. That iconic canard was invented in December 1997 at—where else?—the New York Times, in a trio of ludicrous columns by Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich and in tortured “reporting” by Melinda Henneberger. Sorry, kids: All the iconic slanders of Gore began at the Washington Post and New York Times. The “right-wing media” were active in the campaign. But the Post and the Times were in charge.

No one has done more work on the coverage of Campaign 2000 than we have. And we can’t think of a single one of the major Gore Slanders that were initiated or driven by the conservative press. Indeed, the Washington Times worked hard to establish several such stories, but failed to gain traction every time. (Gore’s canoe trip; Gore as slumlord.) The War Against Gore was not initiated or driven by the right-wing press. This war was driven by the mainstream press, no matter how often career scribes tell you different.

Indeed, Al Franken makes the same misstatement in his hilarious and instructive book, LIES And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them. Early on, Brother Al renders thusly:

FRANKEN (page 3): The members of the right-wing media are not interested in conveying the truth. That’s not what they’re for. They are an indispensable component of the right-wing machine that has taken over our country. They employ a tried-and-true methodology. First, they concoct an inflammatory story that serves their political goals. (“Al Gore’s a liar.”) They repeat it. (“Al Gore lies again.”) They embellish it. (“Are his lies pathological, or are they merely malicious?”) They try to push it into the mainstream media. All too often, they succeed. (“Tall Tales: Is What We’ve Got Here a Compulsion to Exaggerate?” New York Times, October 15, 2000.)

We think Alterman and Tomasky are basically right; current coverage is following a different arc from the astonishing coverage of Campaign 2000. But the reason for that change is clear. By March 1999, the mainstream press had declared a War Against Gore as part of the payback for Clinton’s impeachment. No such war is being waged now. So why can’t we simply state the obvious? Why must we pretend that the “right-wing media” drove the astonishing War Against Gore? Why is it so hard to tell the truth about the mainstream press corps’ astounding misbehavior?

ONE FINAL POINT: By the way, The American Prospect hid behind desks while the twenty-month War Against Gore was conducted. The grinding cowardice of such “liberal” journals put Bush in his current position.

A GUTTER RUNS THROUGH IT (PART 2): Yep! A famous slime-sniffer was workin’ it hard when Drudge made up tales about Kerry’s vile love life (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 2/17/04). But Andrew Sullivan wasn’t the only Big Scribe who didn’t know “how to talk about it.” Once again, a famous dirt-bag was making a joke of America’s presidential discussion. And mainstream scribes of the left, right and center didn’t know how to react.

Consider the New York Times’ Frank Rich. Rich appeared with Sullivan on last weekend’s Reliable Sources. Indeed, after Sully said that he “didn’t know how to talk about” Drudge’s latest dirt-dropping, Kurtz laid out the problem for Rich:

KURTZ: But on that point, Frank Rich, in the first 24 hours, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh picked this up, the Web sites of the Wall Street Journal and National Review, Chicago Sun-Times and Philadelphia Daily News did a little bit, and the British press has jumped on this with great glee. What does that tell us about the way the media food chain works when after all, there may not be a story here? What we have is an unsubstantiated rumor.

RICH: Well, it’s an unsubstantiated rumor, and a lot of times these unsubstantiated rumors that go out through the Internet and are occasionally picked up by the mainstream press don’t pan out, and then they die. There were certainly a number of examples of that with Clinton, even though obviously a lot of things that were divulged about him on the Web were true.

But again, I would stress, much as with Vietnam, there is a contextual change here from the Vietnam years. I think our attitudes about this, and particularly about the personal lives of candidates in general has changed. Witness the Schwarzenegger campaign, where a lot of stuff came out. It was in the mainstream media, in the Los Angeles Times, and a lot of it was obviously true, and it didn’t make a bit of difference.

RICH: Well, I think the press [is] not covering it up, and I think that lots of people, including people who lean towards the right, are going to do everything possible to find out what’s there. And my guess is we will find out what’s there or not there fairly shortly.

A DIRT-BAG RUNS THROUGH IT: Other famous dirt-bags did care, and they swung into action. On Tuesday, the Hotline excerpted famous dirt-bag Rush Limbaugh. Rush was tugging his dick extra hard as he made a sick joke of your discourse:

DENIAL BE DAMNED! RUSH STILL PUSHES ISSUE
On his radio show yesterday, Rush Limbaugh read the Polier denial and added: “The media will accept this statement at face value and they will move on. The fact that AP has now run this statement and did nothing or next to nothing with the original story shows how the media spins for liberals. Not so with Bush and the National Guard, an illegitimate issue, raised time and again at the prodding of Democratic operatives and now Kerry surrogates like Max Cleland. ... The press didn’t follow this supposed rumor, did they? The press followed all kinds of rumors about Bush 41, and they followed all kinds of lame accusations about Bush 43 and the National Guard, but they didn’t follow this…I mean his horndog reputation is apparently well known inside the Beltway. But it’s not a big deal to people there. And I warned you people last week when this all hit that it wasn’t going to be in the press and that they’re going to do everything they could not to make anything of it. ... Ladies and gentlemen, I’ve been formulating my answer here to USA Today. They want to know what my reaction is the way the press has been covering this Kerry and Kenya story as contrasted to the AP release today where the woman and her parents are denying it. I think what I’m going to say to them is: Just as the White House’s denials that Bush was AWOL from the National Guard or deserted raised more questions with the press than they answered, so do this woman’s denials and her parents’ denials of an affair with Senator Kerry raise more questions than they answer” (rushlimbaugh.com, 2/16).