Telling tales
Gene Lyons
Posted on Wednesday, September 22, 2004
If there’s ever a hall of fame for political propagandists, whoever concocted the phrase "liberal media bias" deserves a statue.
As a catch phrase, it has everything, allowing GOP activists to avoid unpleasant realities, bully timid media careerists and pose as iconoclasts while cashing big checks from crackpot sugar daddies and whining about how everybody picks on Republicans.
Last week saw the perfect fruition of that strategy as the entire howling mob Eric Alterman aptly calls "the so-called liberal media," or SCLM, ran down Dan Rather and CBS like a pack of coyotes hunting a house cat for making a dumb blunder about President Bush’s lost time in the Texas Air National Guard. CBS bungled big time. But what made the suspect documents persuasive was that, whether it was 1972 or last month, whoever wrote them knew the details of the "Mission Accomplished" flyboy’s long ago vanishing act—facts unearthed not only by CBS, but The Boston Globe, New York Times, USA Today and Salon. The White House hasn’t disputed their content. Anybody who imagines that Bush fully discharged his duty, or that the White House has ever told the truth about it, must be inhaling some of the same, um, incense he apparently liked to snuffle up back in those halcyon days when Daddy’s Rolodex held solutions to life’s vexing problems.
"You wonder if you know who George Bush is," Dean Roome, a former roommate, told USA Today in 2002. "Where George failed was to fulfill his obligation as a pilot. It was an irrational time in his life."
But Democrats need to let the National Guard thing go. If 30-year-old controversies matter, Bush is now inoculated against damage. Theories that White House political operative Karl Rove engineered the fiasco are not only too clever by half, they’ll never be proved. How could he count upon CBS’ unwitting cooperation? If only the press would devote equivalent zeal to learning who concocted the phony documents Bush used to claim that Iraq sought uranium from Niger. Or who in the White House helped columnist Robert Novak unmask Valerie Plame, the CIA covert operative married to Joseph Wilson, the former ambassador who helped unravel the African uranium hoax.
Many Washington journalists already know the answer, but everybody’s protecting their sources. The SCLM’s piling on CBS has been something to see. I hold no brief for Dan Rather, but every journalist has been hornswoggled by sources. But that’s the beauty of the "liberal media bias" trope. We live in the aftermath of three of the most egregious press failures in American history: the Whitewater hoax, the Washington press clique’s "war on Gore" during the 2000 election and its disgraceful parroting of Bush’s Iraqi "weapons of mass destruction" propaganda. All three benefited the Republican right. All were perpetrated not by Rush Limbaugh and The Washington Times, although they did their best, but by The New York Times, The Washington Post and the major broadcast networks. Each involved ethical and professional lapses far worse than CBS’ recent screw-up; to my knowledge, none of the perpetrators has paid any price whatsoever.
It just doesn’t happen.
Three personal examples: I saw pundit Andrew Sullivan on CNN clucking over CBS’ mistakes. In 1994, when Sullivan edited The New Republic, it ran a cover story accusing Bill Clinton of corruptly enriching his wife’s law firm by changing Arkansas usury laws as governor. In fact, the deed was done by public referendum under Clinton’s Republican predecessor. On Dec. 19, 1995, ABC News’ "Nightline" aired a deceptively edited video clip of a Hillary Clinton press conference about Whitewater. It accused her of lying about the very information electronically deleted from her remarks. No consequences followed. On May 4, 1996, The New York Times published an article with a deceptive Associated Press byline stating that an FBI agent’s trial testimony described a $50,000 windfall to Whitewater from an illegal loan.
As the actual AP article stipulated, the agent gave no such testimony. Many accusatory editorials and columns followed, helping Kenneth Starr to prolong his fruitless investigation of Bill Clinton’s finances for years. The Times has never acknowledged its blunder. Bob Somerby’s dailyhowler. com has documented countless instances of reporters parroting and sometimes inventing nonsensical tales making Al Gore look like a big phony during the 2000 campaign—that he claimed he’d "invented the Internet," for example, or falsely said he’d inspired the movie "Love Story." Both make-believe, both repeated ad infinitumby pundits who feared no consequences because Democrats don’t get it, while Republicans protect their own and savage anybody who gets in their way.
• Free-lance columnist Gene Lyons is a Little Rock author and recipient of the National Magazine Award.
Posted on Wednesday, September 22, 2004
If there’s ever a hall of fame for political propagandists, whoever concocted the phrase "liberal media bias" deserves a statue.
As a catch phrase, it has everything, allowing GOP activists to avoid unpleasant realities, bully timid media careerists and pose as iconoclasts while cashing big checks from crackpot sugar daddies and whining about how everybody picks on Republicans.
Last week saw the perfect fruition of that strategy as the entire howling mob Eric Alterman aptly calls "the so-called liberal media," or SCLM, ran down Dan Rather and CBS like a pack of coyotes hunting a house cat for making a dumb blunder about President Bush’s lost time in the Texas Air National Guard. CBS bungled big time. But what made the suspect documents persuasive was that, whether it was 1972 or last month, whoever wrote them knew the details of the "Mission Accomplished" flyboy’s long ago vanishing act—facts unearthed not only by CBS, but The Boston Globe, New York Times, USA Today and Salon. The White House hasn’t disputed their content. Anybody who imagines that Bush fully discharged his duty, or that the White House has ever told the truth about it, must be inhaling some of the same, um, incense he apparently liked to snuffle up back in those halcyon days when Daddy’s Rolodex held solutions to life’s vexing problems.
"You wonder if you know who George Bush is," Dean Roome, a former roommate, told USA Today in 2002. "Where George failed was to fulfill his obligation as a pilot. It was an irrational time in his life."
But Democrats need to let the National Guard thing go. If 30-year-old controversies matter, Bush is now inoculated against damage. Theories that White House political operative Karl Rove engineered the fiasco are not only too clever by half, they’ll never be proved. How could he count upon CBS’ unwitting cooperation? If only the press would devote equivalent zeal to learning who concocted the phony documents Bush used to claim that Iraq sought uranium from Niger. Or who in the White House helped columnist Robert Novak unmask Valerie Plame, the CIA covert operative married to Joseph Wilson, the former ambassador who helped unravel the African uranium hoax.
Many Washington journalists already know the answer, but everybody’s protecting their sources. The SCLM’s piling on CBS has been something to see. I hold no brief for Dan Rather, but every journalist has been hornswoggled by sources. But that’s the beauty of the "liberal media bias" trope. We live in the aftermath of three of the most egregious press failures in American history: the Whitewater hoax, the Washington press clique’s "war on Gore" during the 2000 election and its disgraceful parroting of Bush’s Iraqi "weapons of mass destruction" propaganda. All three benefited the Republican right. All were perpetrated not by Rush Limbaugh and The Washington Times, although they did their best, but by The New York Times, The Washington Post and the major broadcast networks. Each involved ethical and professional lapses far worse than CBS’ recent screw-up; to my knowledge, none of the perpetrators has paid any price whatsoever.
It just doesn’t happen.
Three personal examples: I saw pundit Andrew Sullivan on CNN clucking over CBS’ mistakes. In 1994, when Sullivan edited The New Republic, it ran a cover story accusing Bill Clinton of corruptly enriching his wife’s law firm by changing Arkansas usury laws as governor. In fact, the deed was done by public referendum under Clinton’s Republican predecessor. On Dec. 19, 1995, ABC News’ "Nightline" aired a deceptively edited video clip of a Hillary Clinton press conference about Whitewater. It accused her of lying about the very information electronically deleted from her remarks. No consequences followed. On May 4, 1996, The New York Times published an article with a deceptive Associated Press byline stating that an FBI agent’s trial testimony described a $50,000 windfall to Whitewater from an illegal loan.
As the actual AP article stipulated, the agent gave no such testimony. Many accusatory editorials and columns followed, helping Kenneth Starr to prolong his fruitless investigation of Bill Clinton’s finances for years. The Times has never acknowledged its blunder. Bob Somerby’s dailyhowler. com has documented countless instances of reporters parroting and sometimes inventing nonsensical tales making Al Gore look like a big phony during the 2000 campaign—that he claimed he’d "invented the Internet," for example, or falsely said he’d inspired the movie "Love Story." Both make-believe, both repeated ad infinitumby pundits who feared no consequences because Democrats don’t get it, while Republicans protect their own and savage anybody who gets in their way.
• Free-lance columnist Gene Lyons is a Little Rock author and recipient of the National Magazine Award.
posted by A. J. Franklin @ 11:43
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home