The Awesome Spinners
by digby
I was reading Glenn Greenwald this morning and realized I’d missed this mind boggling exchange between Mike Allen of the Politico and Hugh Hewitt earlier, in which it is revealed that Allen is, first, a Hewitt sycophant of the worst kind (I wish I could figure out what these MSMers love so much about this lightweight hack) and second, believes that it is a good thing that the military has learned from Dick Cheney’s master of media manipulation how to, well — manipulate the media:
In the middle of the interview, Allen and Hewitt began discussing Bush/Cheney ’04 media strategist Steve Schmidt, a former top aide to Dick Cheney for communications strategy (i.e., media management). Allen and Hewitt both heaped great praise on Schmidt as a brilliant media strategist, and Allen claimed that the current GOP campaign operatives “are schooled in the Bush-Cheney school . . . all of them learned under Schmidt’s rules.”
[…]
The most significant revelation occurred during the following exchange, when Allen excitedly reported that Schmidt’s media management techniques have been adopted not only by the GOP presidential campaigns, but also recently by the U.S. military in Iraq, with one particularly large payoff this week:
HH: Schmidt’s — by the way, I’ve never met him. I’ve heard about him for years. He went out and he ran Arnold’s campaign, and he did a tremendous job.
MA: You have a great memory, and Steve is awesome.
HH: Where’d he go?
MA: He was a consultant to the McCain campaign, but he has his own business, they’re in Sacramento, California, and he works a little bit with the Mercury Public Affairs group. But Steve is awesome, he’s a bulldog, he’s intense. He will call you up about these stories like, remember the story about John Kerry’s house and the taxes on it?
HH: Yeah, yeah.
MA: I was so tired of hearing about that house, like I thought that whatever we were going to learn from that we’d already learned. But Steve was relentless about it, and —
HH: Why don’t they put him in charge of war message management, because the Bush White House is just not good at this.
MA: Right, and this is part of the talent drain that’s occurring in this White House –
HH: Yeah.
MA: – because as you know, Steve was a very high official in the Vice President’s office –
HH: Right.
MA: And he also went over to Iraq to look at the communications capabilities, and he came back with a number of recommendations about even some of the logistical things to help people get those stories out. Now I think the military’s getting smarter about it, as you know. . . .
HH: Yeah.
MA: The military organized the O’Hanlon-Pollack tour, and I didn’t know until I read your interview with Mike O’Hanlon that they’d had an interview with General Petraeus . . . .
HH: Right.
MA: That had not been reported before. That was very fascinating. But I think that shows you that the military’s getting better at this.
Think about that. You have Hewitt, a minor league GOP operative, who for inexplicable reasons is a favorite of the DC press elite, extolling the virtues of a professional GOP spin artist. Ok. Fine. That’s what GOP operatives value.
But how can we explain Mike Allen? He openly admits that he admires political operatives who push him so relentlessly that he will carry their message. He also admires the fact that this spin artist is training others to follow in his footsteps and he clearly believes it is a positive thing that the military has listened to this professional spin artist and is “getting better” at “getting their story out.”
This is not a political science professor or someone who analyzes media manipulation for corporate America. This is a journalist,
someone whose job it is to get to the facts and present the truth. In a sane world, journalists believe that people like Schmidt stand in the way of that. They are enemies of the truth — it’s their job to get Mike Allen to print stories that skew to their advantage, not to present “balance” or “fairness” or be “objective” which the news business claims to fetishize above all else.
He should not admire the fact that this “relentlessly” pushed him to write about John Kerry’s property taxes. He knows very well that it was not done in service of the public good — it was done in service of George W. Bush. The fact that he is advancing a well thought out negative narrative about John Kerry, even as he reports certain true facts, is apparently not of interest to him. He certainly never let his readers know that he was being relentlessly pushed to write the story by Dick Cheney’s top guy, did he? Not a lot of context there.
Once again, you have to be impressed by the sheer volume of information the media knows that they never share with their readers. Obviously, there is a tacit agreement among all these players to keep us in the dark — at least until they drop it casually into a conversation among friends. Friends like GOP operative Hugh Hewitt, who agrees absolutely that GOP operatives like Steve Schmidt are just “awesome.”
But however distasteful the political reporting, that Allen thinks this is “smart” in terms of war reporting is really quite shocking. Politics is a dirty game and I suppose you can find some justification in the press consorting with “talented” smear artists for a good story. But really, what possible justification can a journalist have for thinking that it’s “better” that the military has now successfully learned how to manipulate the press with propaganda in service of … lying about the Iraq occupation.
In a sane world, you would expect Allen to be impressed with journalists who are over there in the war zone, bringing home the stories. They are the professionals, the war correspondents who do the hard work of telling us what’s really going on under difficult circumstances. Even if they are bad (like Michael Gordon) at least they are members of the fraternity. But no, he’s impressed with some political hack who has taught the military how to successfully spin the press. WTF?
There is only one explanation. In the DC hive, Mike Allen and the spin artists work the same side of the fence. He respects good spin and he clearly thinks it is the function of journalists to be manipulated by the best spinners. If you relentlessly push him to write hit pieces on the opposition, he will think you are very “awesome.” He also believes it is a good idea for PR flacks to go over to Iraq to help the US military spin the war in their favor. And the fact is that if he really thinks that, he must be assuming that his reporter colleagues in Iraq are either not telling the truth — or that the American public is better served when their government lies more effectively. You cannot have it both ways.
It wasn’t always this way:
When Halberstam applied his enormous energy to uncovering the failures of the South Vietnamese Army in the Mekong Delta and was met with denials and disdain from American officials, he responded with a personal, vengeful rage. At a Fourth of July party at the United States Ambassador’s residence in Saigon, he refused to shake hands with General Paul Harkins, the fatuously optimistic commander of the American advisory effort. Halberstam’s wartime work will last not just because of its quality and its importance but because it established a new mode of journalism, one with which Americans are now so familiar that it’s difficult to remember that someone had to invent it. The notion of the reporter as fearless truthteller has become a narcissistic cliché that fits fewer practitioners than would like to claim it. “David changed war reporting forever,” Richard Holbrooke, who had known him in Vietnam, said last week. “He made it not only possible but even romantic to write that your own side was misleading the public about how the war was going. But everything depended on David getting it right, and he did.”
No, sadly, he didn’t change it forever. There are obviously some great reporters over in Iraq who are telling the story or the bush administtration wouldn’t feel the need to produce propaganda to counter it. But the political journalists back at home treat those reporters like dirt every time they appear on shows like Hewitt’s and bow and scrape to the almighty political hacks who lie for a living and treat the truth like toilet paper. Today, a large faction of the DC political media function as the publishing arm of the Republican PR industry and they actively promote the idea that it is a positive good that the news media be manipulated by the government and “awesome” political hacks. They court and fete useful idiots like O’Hanlon and Pollack when they come home, knowing full well that some operative like Steve Schmidt arranged their little junket for the express purpose of spinning the occupation. Halberstam is howling in existential despair from the great beyond.
Halberstam went on to write twenty books on almost as many subjects, but historical memory, more ruthless than any of his editors, will eventually cull from them one enduring achievement. “The Best and the Brightest,” which consumed Halberstam from 1969 to 1972, has the feverish atmosphere of an obsession, and if its prose shows the excesses that later subjected him to criticism and parody, in this instance the subject fully deserved his passionate treatment. “The basic question behind the book,” he later wrote, “was why men who were said to be the ablest to serve in government this century had been the architects of what struck me as likely to be the worst tragedy since the Civil War.”
It’s even harder to believe that the US would turn around and do it again. I’ll be looking forward to somebody asking that question about the Bush administration “grown-ups” and writing about it. Somehow, I don’t think it will be Mike Allen or any other member of the elite political press doing it. Not unless some “awesome” GOP spin artist relentlessly forces them to, and I don’t think that’s likely, do you?
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