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.
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