Passive Partisans

Eric Boehlert has just come out with a new book, Lapdogs : How the Press Rolled Over for Bush. This is from the introduction:

It was ironic that a federal prosecutor was quizzing a journalist, trying to pry out of him sensitive information that was damaging to the Bush White House and information the investigate reporter had refused to share with the public, let alone his editors. The strange truth was that, at least in regards to the Plame investigation, the special prosecutor had supplanted the timid D.C. press corps and become the fact finder of record. It was Fitzgerald and his team of G-men -- not journalists -- who were running down leads, asking tough questions and, in the end, helping inform the American people about possible criminal activity inside the White House. For two years, the press had shown little interest in that touchy task and if it hadn't been for Fitzgerald's work, the Plame story would have quietly faded away like so many other disturbing suggestions of Bush administration misdeeds. (Lots of frustrated news consumers must have been wondering where was the special prosecutor for Enron, Halliburton, and prewar intelligence?) As conservative blogger Glenn Reynolds noted in the wake of Woodward's embarrassing revelation about his nonaction, "This is Watergate in reverse. The press is engaged in the cover-up here. If everybody in the press simply published everything they knew about this, we would have gotten to the bottom of this in a week instead of dragging it out for two or three years."

More Boehlert, from an inteview on the right and the press, at American Street:

In the classic model of an objective press, we would not want to see a socially intertwined relationship between politicians and the elite journalists who cover them. Of course, this is nothing new. Now, if journalists had made friends with officials in the Clinton Administration, just as they have with officials in the Bush Administration, we might argue that there is less of the double standard… But this explanation doesn’t seem to explain the press corps actions between Clinton; they were not friends with the Clinton officials and are friends with the Bush officials. There is most definitely a double standard, and maybe it is explanatory of a good deal. For example, the example you note, Bob Schieffer, got some key exclusive interviews with Bush, with whom Bush has gone golfing, gone to minor league baseball games with, his brother is a business partner and ambassador… in Schieffer’s book, he noted that Bush gave him “a wonderful interview” around the New Hampshire primary, whereas Schieffer actually mocked Gore for the interview Gore gave him. No one ever seems to talk about this…

Tie in this whole story from TPMmuckraker about John Solomon's reporting on Harry Reid, trying to tar him with the Republican corruption brush,:

We went after Solomon's piece for a simple reason. At a time when Congressional corruption is arguably worse than it has ever been, leading to a spreading net of criminal investigations, Solomon used the most powerful organ in the land to attack Harry Reid for what is at very most a minor ethical transgression. Solomon did not allege a quid pro quo. He did not even allege that Reid violated ethics rules. What he argued was that Reid should have avoided accepting the seats in order to "avoid the appearance he was being influenced by gifts." And remember the supposed influence here was from a governmental body with interest - but no demonstrated financial interest - in pending legislation.

Why pick on Harry Reid? Because Harry Reid is Senate Minority Leader. That's why.

Boehlert points out some disturbing facts about Bush and the media that go deeper than merely reporters trying to appease a vindictive president so they can maintain access. I think he does hit most of the points, but the interplay of "liberal bias" and bottom-line-driven operations is, I think, the key issue. The press is no longer the Fourth Estate; it is now big business, and its interests are the same as other big businesses. This is more than worrisome -- the press has historically been our access to information that the government might not want us to have.

One thing this trend in the media has made possible is stealing elections. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has a story in Rolling Stone that just blows the lid off of the 2004 election. I have to summarize, since Rolling Stone won't let me copy and paste:

Essentially, the exit polls, which were the most exhaustive and careful ever done, showed huge discrepancies against the official vote tallies. The six media organizations, rather than latching on to that story, dismissed the results as "flawed." In point of fact, based on follow-up research by experts, the chances of the polls being wrong were astronomically against. And in almost every case, the discrepancies favored Bush. Read the whole article. Scary.

Keep in mind that there were reported incidences of chicanery -- Democratic registrations being shredded; registered voters showing up to discover that they were not, indeed, on the lists; "terrorist alerts" designed to keep media away from the vote counts; more votes being counted than there were registered voters in some precincts. Do we need to remind anyone of the phone jamming scheme in the Northeast? I remember hearing relatively brief reports on some of these things, which then disappeared. Of course, Kennedy has his own agenda.

American Street also pulls together links to some of the commentary on this article. I'll go with Jane Hamsher, who managed a telling quote (I'll have to find out how she does it).

Republicans derided anyone who expressed doubts about Bush’s victory as nut cases in "tinfoil hats,"’ while the national media, with few exceptions, did little to question the validity of the election. The Washington Post immediately dismissed allegations of fraud as "conspiracy theories,"(1) and The New York Times declared that "there is no evidence of vote theft or errors on a large scale."

See also Tristero's initial comment at Hullabaloo, followed by his second look taking into account Farhad Manjoo's article at Salon. Assuming Manjoo is no more partisan than Kennedy (and frankly, from the tone of his article, that's not necessarily a safe assumption), there is some doubt as to the validity of the count. It might not be so believable if it weren't obvious at this point that the Republicans at large are not too careful about obeying the rules (rules, after all, are for the little people). Of course, Manjoo's credibility has holes -- he's been a stolen election scoffer from just about day one, so he has a personal stake in the validity of the count -- so we're back to square one on that issue. (Read the comments on Tristero's second post. Very interesting. I question Manjoo's dismissal of exit polls, as well.)

However, enticing as it is, voter fraud in the 2004 election is tangential to what I want to talk about.

The common link I'm noticing here is the press -- the establishment news outlets. Fox News is, of course, a joke at this point -- the Republican Party's propaganda arm -- but I've been noticing a trend over the past few years of bending over backwards to accommodate the right wing while savagely attacking Democrats. Read the Eric Boehlert inteview on that one. He makes some interesting points that I have heard from members of the press before, particularly the "liberal bias" thing. (On that topic, I have to hand it to the wingnuts -- they've got a winning strategy that takes full advantage of Americans' tendency to be a "nice guy" -- accuse anyone of something repeatedly, and instead of telling you to go f**k yourself, which is the only appropriate response to these yahoos, he'll try to defend himself. That's one thing that lost Kerry the election. It doesn't even have to be true -- better if it's just short of tinfoil-hat outrageous, like the Swift Boaters. Just enough credibility for the criminally gullible.)

Notice how quick NYT and WaPo were to drop the voter fraud story in 2004. Why did the scandals of the Clinton administration, both real and (mostly) imagined, get such intense scrutiny, while major issues in the Bush administration get, at most, a brief mention with no follow-up (except on the blogosphere)? Why does the MSM have to be prodded into covering what turn out to be major stories? I ran across a bit at, I believe, AmericaBlog recently about an interviews with Rep. John Murtha, in which the interviewers tried to impugn Murtha's credibility, which has never been at issue outside of Rightblogistan, while avoiding the story of Haditha and the murders committed there, and that fact that Murtha was correct in his comments. It seems to me a much more interesting interview would have concentrated on how he knew.

Sound like a pattern?

I'm calling it passive partisanship. This came up in a discussion group recently, where someone noted that being lazy doesn't count as giving the Bush administration a free pass. However, it seems to me that if you are going to call yourself a "journalist" in the tradition of America's free press, and you know that your source has an agenda, you must either question that agenda or allow yourself to become, passively, a partisan of that point of view. Even after the Judith Miller-Ahmad Chalabi fiasco, they haven't learned.

Even those areas where the press does stress "balance" are telling: If there is an article about a high-profile same-sex wedding or civil union in Britain or Canada, it will include a quote from a fringe-right hate group. If there is an article on the discovery of a new fossil or strong biochemical or genetic evidence supporting evolution, it will include a quote from a creationist or IDiot. FMA is getting a huge amount of coverage, and it's all about the far-right Christianists and the politicos' need to energize their base -- vanishingly little analysis of the amendment itself, its possible consequences, or any surveys on whether people in this country actually favor amending the Constitution on this, and what there is is buried and usually given no more than a very brief paragraph, if that much.

So: James Dobson and Donald Wildmon now own the White House, Congress, the courts, and the press.

Sleep well.