Politico, Too Cute by Half
by David Atkins
No, it’s not that big a deal in the grand scheme of things. But one can’t help briefly take note of the gall of Politico in reporting this:
Herman Cain lashed out at rival Rick Perry on Wednesday, accusing the Texas governor’s campaign of orchestrating the original report about allegations of sexually inappropriate behavior.
In separate appearances Wednesday evening, both Cain and his campaign manager, Mark Block, asserted that the Perry campaign was behind POLITICO’s report Sunday that, as head of the National Restaurant Association in the 1990s, at least two female employees complained about inappropriate behavior by Cain and ultimately signed confidential agreements that gave them financial payouts to leave the association.
“We’ve been able to trace it back to the Perry campaign that stirred this up in order to discredit me,” Cain said at a tele-town hall held by TheTeaParty.net. “The fingerprints of the Rick Perry campaign are all over this, based on our sources.”
Block delivered similarly pointed criticism to Fox News’s Bret Baier. “The actions of the Perry campaign are despicable,” he said. “Rick Perry and his campaign owe Herman Cain and his family an apology.”
Cain and Block also attacked POLITICO for printing the story. The GOP presidential candidate said POLITICO had no documentation and made “anonymous accusations.”
“Both Rick Perry and POLITICO did the wrong thing by reporting something that wasn’t true,” Block said.
Block’s claims came after Cain said in a Forbes online piece Wednesday that he had told strategist Curt Anderson, who’s now working for the Perry campaign, about one incident of a settlement involving a female employee while he was running for U.S. Senate from Georgia in 2003.
As his evidence, Block noted that Anderson was hired by the Perry campaign roughly two weeks ago.
“What else happened two weeks ago?” asked Block, who mostly read from a prepared statement as he sat in the seat. “POLITICO began this smear campaign.”
The story keeps going in this vein for the next page and a half, with Politico in a journalistic funhouse mirror, reporting on allegations the Cain camp is making about where Politico itself got the story about Cain.
In the whole article, never once do the writers at Politico even address the charges made by the Cain camp to confirm or deny, but simply report on “the story.”
No, the story itself isn’t terribly consequential. It won’t have policy implications like that awful Washington Post story on social security.
But few articles capture the depths of journalistic malpractice disguised as “objectivity” like this one. Politico isn’t covering this story: Politico is the story, even as they pretend to cover it with a bird’s eye view of a fracas below their perch on Mount Olympus. The coquettish pretension of the whole thing is infuriating–and I don’t even care much about Cain or Perry one way or the other. What I would like to see more than anything is for both the Cain and Perry camps to turn on Politico, reveal everything and do whatever it takes to expose them as journalistic hacks and frauds. It would be a great thing for democracy.
The myth of objectivity in journalism can’t die a fast enough death.
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