To me, the single most significant event of the
2004 election campaign
hasn’t been the Iowa caucuses or President Bush’s
State of the Union
address. Rather, it was the quick debunking of
an attempted smear of
retired Gen. Wesley Clark by a half-dozen or
so news organizations
functioning exactly as a free press should. Basically,
the Republican
National Committee got caught doctoring Clark’s
words in a vain attempt
to manufacture a "flip-flop" on the Iraq war.
Given the dreadful
standard set during the 2000 campaign, when the
Washington insiders who
set the tone of political coverage at the nation’s
major newspapers,
magazines and TV networks conducted themselves
like a high school
clique trying to fix a prom queen election, the
Clark incident came as a
welcome surprise. Has war sobered them, or has
American journalism
begun to recover from Ted Baxter Syndrome?
Ted Baxter, for the uninitiated, was the comically
pompous anchorman on
"The Mary Tyler Moore Show." Like many celebrity
pundits of the cable
TV era, he thought the news was about him.
But hold the sociology. First, a quick outline
of the ill-fated effort to portray
Clark as a two-faced opportunist. Whether or
not the incident shows GOP
fear of facing the former four-star general in
the November election, as Clark
insisted, it definitely indicates that turning
the Democratic nominee into a
caricature won’t be as easy as lampooning Al
Gore with phony stories like
"inventing the Internet," " earth-tone clothing,
"etc.
What happened was that on the same day RNC Chairman
Ed Gillespie had a
speech scheduled in Little Rock, Clark’s hometown,
the infamous" Drudge
Report" just happened to produce one of its "worldwide
exclusives" claiming
to show that, contrary to his campaign rhetoric
in New Hampshire, Clark
supported Bush’s rush to war with Iraq during
congressional testimony in 2002.
In his speech, Gillespie portrayed Clark as a
hypocrite and turncoat.
"There was no stronger case made than that expert
testimony, the
testimony of Gen. Wesley Clark," Gillespie claimed.
Drudge "reported" a passage from Clark’s testimony
that was suspiciously
like to that in an RNC fax. "There’s no question
that Saddam Hussein is
a threat," Clark supposedly said. "... Yes, he
has chemical and biological
weapons. He’s had those for a long time. But
the United States right now
is on a very much different defensive posture
than we were before
September 11 th of 2001.... He is, as far as
we know, actively pursuing
nuclear capabilities, though he doesn’t have
nuclear warheads yet. If he
were to acquire nuclear weapons, I think our
friends in the region would
face greatly increased risks as would we."
But the quote turned out to be problematic, as
Knight-Ridder reporters
Dana Hull and Drew Brown determined in an article
headlined: "GOP chair
claims Clark supported war; transcripts show
otherwise."
Clark’s words had been taken completely out of
context. In fact, he had
pointedly argued that Iraq was a manageable problem
and no imminent
threat existed. He’d urged that Bush form "the
broadest possible
coalition including our NATO allies.... [Force]
should be used as the
last resort after all diplomatic means have been
exhausted."
The reporters also noticed that the Drudge/RNC
quote "further distorted
Clark’s testimony" by adding sentences they were
unable to find in the
transcript. Dogged research by the estimable
Josh Marshall on his
Talking Points Memo Web site subsequently determined
that the first and
last sentences appeared on Page 6, the bit about
post-9/11 defensive
posture on Pages 25-26. Indeed, Clark argued
that the U.S. was actually
in a better strategic position vs. Iraq, leaving
ample time for diplomacy.
In short, Clark’s words had been yanked out context
and their order
jumbled to alter their meaning. The ellipses
concealed gaps of 11,500
words, roughly a dozen times the length of this
column. I’d argue they
were essentially manufactured quotes, a firing
offense at any
self-respecting journalistic organization—not
a phrase which describes
"The Drudge Report."
The heartening part was that it wasn’t only Knight-Ridder
and Josh
Marshall and liberal watchdog sites like mediawhoresonline.
com that
blew the whistle. While some of the usual suspects
such as The
Washington Times and The Wall Street Journal
Editorial page got taken
(or pretended to get taken) for a ride, many
others did not.
According to the Columbia Journalism Review’s
brand-new Web site, The
Campaign Desk, "most of the major newspapers
including the Washington
Post, the New York Times and the Boston Globe
ran pieces reflecting the
whole story." (The Democrat-Gazette also got
it right.)
The brainchild of the renowned journalism school’s
new dean, Nicholas
Lemman, CJR’s new enterprise means to provide
"real-time" media
criticism putting the Paula Zahns of the world
on notice. (On her CNN
broadcast, Zahn treated the Drudge quotes as
factual.) Next time,
sweetheart, do your homework and get the facts.
Your professional
reputation may once again depend upon it.
Free-lance columnist Gene Lyons is a Little Rock author and recipient
of the National Magazine Award.