After years of denial, The Washington Post has acknowledged
the existence of the Right-Wing Machine.
Post national political correspondent John Harris came to
this epiphany grudgingly, never using those exact words.
But in a Sunday article in the Outlook section, Harris
recognized that U.S. conservatives have built a powerful
and well-financed apparatus that can dictate the tone of the
political discourse in Washington. The article observed that
there is no countervailing apparatus on the liberal side of
national politics.
In his article, Harris concedes that he’d still like to deny this.
Harris writes that his initial reaction to Democratic
complaints about the fawning press coverage of George W.
Bush was to dismiss the griping as “self-pity,” characteristic
of President Clinton and his allies.
Nevertheless, Harris does ask the question: “Are the
national news media soft on Bush?”
“The instinctive response of any reporter is to deny it,”
Harris writes, unintentionally revealing how widespread this
press corps’ defensiveness is. “But my rebuttals lately have
been wobbly. The truth is, this new president has done
things with relative impunity that would have been huge
uproars if they had occurred under Clinton.”
After ticking off a few innocuous reasons why the news
media might have gone a little soft, Harris then
acknowledges that “there is one big reason for Bush’s easy
ride. There is no well-coordinated corps of aggrieved and
methodical people who start each day looking for ways to
expose and undermine a new president.
“There was such a gang ready for Clinton in 1993.
Conservative interest groups, commentators and
congressional investigators waged a remorseless
campaign that they hoped would make life miserable for
Clinton and vault themselves to power. They succeeded in
many ways.” [WP, May 6, 2001]
As we have reported at Consortiumnews.com since we
went online in fall 1995, this Right-Wing Machine indeed
has succeeded in many ways. Beyond coloring the
immediate political environment, the Machine has altered
the nation’s understanding of its own recent history, creating
a mythology for the past quarter century. This has occurred
with the acquiescence of the national news media and
some leading Democrats.
The mythology also is not something of the past. It continues
to cost the nation dearly, from the hugely expensive plans to
construct Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars dream to rejection of
environmental alarms about global warming.
Nixon & Vietnam
The Machine’s origins can be traced back about a quarter
century, to the mid-1970s and to two key elements of
conservative dogma. One founding myth was the belief that
a “liberal” press lost the Vietnam War for the United States.
The second was that an innocent Richard Nixon was
hounded out of office through a bogus scandal called
Watergate.
As it turned out, neither point was true. Historical studies by
the U.S. Army concluded that poor strategy, high casualties
and overly optimistic battlefield reports were the chief
culprits in losing the Vietnam War. Nixon’s own words on
the Watergate tapes make clear that he was guilty, guilty,
guilty of gross abuses of power during his reign in the White
House.
Nevertheless, these twin articles of faith convinced the
conservative movement that it needed its own institutions –
think tanks, news media and activist groups – to counter the
perceived “liberal” bias that had led the public to see the
Vietnam War as a terrible mistake and to view Nixon as a
corrupt politician.
In the late 1970s, with the coordination of Nixon’s Treasury
Secretary Bill Simon, conservative foundations began
funneling millions of dollars to think tanks, media outlets and
attack organizations that would become the spearhead of
the Right-Wing Machine.
With Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, the power of the
federal bureaucracy was thrown behind this effort. Reagan
authorized what was called a “public diplomacy” apparatus
that spread propaganda domestically and targeted
journalists who reported information that undermined the
prescribed “themes.”
Also, in the early 1980s, Rev. Sun Myung Moon began
pouring in hundreds of millions of dollars a year from
mysterious sources in South America and Asia. He used
the money to build expensive media outlets, such as The
Washington Times daily newspaper, and to sponsor lavish
conferences for conservative activists. Though members of
Moon’s inner circle admitted that the Moon organization
was laundering money in from overseas to finance his
operations, few questions were asked about the source of
the cash.
Wobbly Press
During the 1980s, major news organizations began to
buckle under the pressure – from The New York Times and
Newsweek to National Public Radio and the national TV
networks.
Reporters who wrote straightforwardly about U.S. military
adventures in Central America, for instance, found
themselves under harsh attack from the Right-Wing
Machine and from the Reagan-Bush administration.
Gradually, these journalists were weeded out of the national
news media, leaving behind a residue of journalistic
quislings who won high-profile spots both in the news
columns and on the pundit shows.
Yet, since these journalists had grabbed the high-salaried
jobs at the expense of honest reporters who were targeted
by the Machine, this new journalistic elite had a powerful
self-interest in denying the existence of the Machine. To
admit its influence would amount to a self-condemnation.
So, over the years, this caste of top journalists evolved into
a bunch of sneering loudmouths who often moved as a pack
and would tear apart victims already bloodied by the
Machine. Conversely, these journalists and pundits
instinctively understood the danger of taking on allies of the
Machine. A few conservatives might overreach so much that
they became vulnerable but they had a far greater measure
of protection.
During the Reagan-Bush years, the Right-Wing Machine
mostly worked as a defensive mechanism, protecting
Ronald Reagan, George Bush and their subordinates
during such crises as the Iran-contra scandal or disclosures
of cocaine trafficking by Reagan’s Nicaraguan “freedom
fighters.” Even, lifelong Republican conservatives, such as
Iran-contra special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh, came
under withering attack when they dared to press for the truth
about Reagan-era scandals.
[For a more detailed summary of this history, see
Democrats' Dilemma or Robert Parry's Lost History.]
The Clinton Switch
After Bill Clinton’s election in 1992, the Right-Wing Machine
switched from playing defense to playing offense.
The national media elite switched, too, eagerly joining in the
attacks against Clinton for relatively minor indiscretions,
such as the Travel Office firings and ill-timed haircuts. The
quisling journalists saw their opportunity to attack Clinton as
especially liberating because it was a way to free
themselves from the conservative label of “liberal media.”
As Clinton’s eight years rolled on, the mainstream press
corps increasingly merged with the right-wing apparatus.
Both elements obsessed on every Clinton indiscretion,
invading his personal life in ways that have never been seen
before in U.S. history.
In the early days of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, First Lady
Hillary Clinton complained about what she called a “vast
right-wing conspiracy.” Her comment provoked howls of
laughter and knee-slapping in the punditocracy. If a
“right-wing conspiracy” existed, surely the Washington press
corps would have written about it.
Yet, the behind-the-scenes story of the assault on the
Clinton Presidency remained a non-story, explained only at
Web sites like this one, at Salon.com and in books, such as
The Hunting of the President by Gene Lyons and Joe
Conason.
While going 24/7 on tales of Bill Clinton’s sex life, the
mainstream and conservative press joined in ignoring or
pooh-poohing convincing new evidence of major
Reagan-Bush crimes. The press corps barely noted in 1998
when the CIA itself admitted that scores of Nicaragua contra
units were implicated in cocaine trafficking and that the
Reagan-Bush administration had hidden the evidence.
These two journalistic standards existed simultaneously,
side by side: one protective of the right’s friends and one
destructive of the right’s enemies. Through it all, the
mainstream press insisted that it was behaving with
professional objectivity.
Campaign 2000
The parallel double standards continued through the 2000
campaign. While Al Gore was called to account for every
perceived misstatement – even some manufactured by
leading newspapers – George W. Bush and his running
mate, Dick Cheney, largely got free passes for lies,
distortions and hypocrisy.
For instance, while Gore got hammered for allegedly puffing
up his resume, Cheney dodged any significant criticism
when he insisted during a vice presidential debate that he
received no help from the federal government in his
business career at Halliburton Co. In fact, the giant oil
services firm had benefited from Cheney-arranged
government loan guarantees and juicy Pentagon contracts.
While avoiding criticism for this deception about his
business dealings, Cheney was allowed to lead the attack
on Gore for alleged petty lies about his achievements. The
news media made no mention of the hypocrisy.
This double standard was crucial in enabling the
Bush-Cheney campaign to remain competitive in the
election. Their campaign lost by only about half a million
votes nationally and snuck into office when five
conservatives on the U.S. Supreme Court effectively
awarded Bush 25 electoral votes from Florida.
Legitimacy
Though gaining the White House as the first popular vote
loser in more than a century and the first to reach the
presidency through the intervention of allies on the Supreme
Court, Bush found the Washington news media eager to
grant him a mantle of legitimacy.
In doing so, the press corps oohed and aahed over what
might have seemed like serious bungles, such as his
handling of a downed U.S. spy plane on a Chinese island.
As Harris noted in his Washington Post article, the reaction
would have been quite different if Clinton was the one who
claimed the crew members were not hostages and then
sent a non-apology letter saying “very sorry” twice to win
their release.
“What is being hailed as Bush’s shrewd diplomacy would
have been savaged as ‘Slick Willie’ contortions,” Harris
noted.
Similarly, Bush is allowed to reward his rich donors by
granting them closed-door meetings with top administration
officials, elimination of regulations and giveaways in his
budget. By contrast, Clinton faced months of hearings and
screaming headlines over White House coffees and
sleep-overs in the Lincoln Bedroom.
Harris ends his Washington Post article with a positive spin.
He writes that it is “good for Washington in giving a new
president a break at the start. And those people eager to
see this president face scrutiny can rest assured: The
opposition is sure to awaken.”
But there is little reason to think that Harris is right. He may
be pleased that the Washington press corps has been
generous toward Bush – as the press was to Ronald
Reagan and George H.W. Bush and was not to Clinton and
Gore. Harris might not be disturbed by the lack of
professional evenhandedness that is supposedly the
hallmark of American journalism.
Change?
It is harder to understand why anyone would expect this
pattern to change.
Why will the balmy breeze that has so far puffed out George
W.’s sails stop blowing? For nearly a quarter century, the
national news media has been drifting in the same
direction.
Virtually all the top news executives are products of this
system. Almost all have been rewarded handsomely by it.
Why would they suddenly change course, challenge the
right, and risk their careers?
Only a determined effort by Americans who recognize the
threat to democracy that this quisling media now represents
can change the direction.
Possibly, the only hope is to build an entirely new news
media dedicated to the real journalistic principles of honesty
and fairness. That will not be easy and will not be cheap. But
it should now be clear what the costs are of doing nothing.
Robert Parry is an investigative reporter who broke many of the Iran-contra
stories
in the 1980s for The Associated Press and Newsweek.