The Village’s garden path is littered with journalistic sins
by digby
I wrote a piece for Salon today about the right wing’s latest coup, the publishing of a book called “Clinton Cash” by a far-right GOP operative and the mainstream media’s eager excitement at partnering with them. Let’s just say it’s not the first time:
The fact that a right-wing propagandist would publish an “exposé” on Hillary Clinton is as unsurprising as Bill O’Reilly proclaiming himself to be a war hero. This is just how the right rolls. You’ll undoubtedly recall the work of fiction called “Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry” by another far right operative by the name of Jerome Corsi which, when it was published in 2004 took the election by storm. It was an audacious move and it paid off. One can certainly understand why they’d try it again.
But there’s another twist with this particular book. As Dylan Byers at Politico reported:
The New York Times, The Washington Post and Fox News have made exclusive agreements with a conservative author for early access to his opposition research on Hillary Clinton, a move that has confounded members of the Clinton campaign and some reporters, the On Media blog has confirmed. […]
Fox News’ use of Schweizer’s book has surprised no one. The bulk of the network’s programming is conservative, and the book’s publisher, HarperCollins, is owned by News Corporation. But the Times and Post’s decision to partner with a partisan researcher has raised a few eyebrows. Some Times reporters view the agreement as unusual, sources there said. Still others defended the agreement, noting that it was no different from using a campaign’s opposition research to inform one’s reporting — so long as that research is fact-checked and vetted. A spokesperson for the Times did not provide comment by press time.
It’s also no different than the way the press took every little tidbit of Whitewater gossip and ran with it back in the 1990s. And the reporting from the Times and Washington Post pretty much across the board was found to be sloppy gossip and unproven innuendo. This year they may be using what the publisher calls a “meticulously researched” investigation into the Clinton Foundation while in the past they relied upon a little known group called — wait for it — Citizens United.
As early as 1994, responsible journalists were questioning the major media’s use of the material provided by the group and its leader, a young man named David Bossie and his partner, a longtime conservative operative named Floyd Brown, known at the time for his role in making the notorious “Willie Horton” ad in the 1988 campaign.
Trudy Lieberman of the Columbia Journalism Review wrote one of the earliest pieces about this Citizens United campaign called “Churning Whitewater”.
There’s lots more at the link. I know that journalists are all insisting that they will follow up and ensure that the facts are correct. I don’t believe them. As Lieberman showed back in 1994, they promised then that they would do that and they didn’t, and once something was published by the papers of record it became “established” and that was the end of it, true or not. As I point out in the piece, it’s not as if their work was never checked elsewhere. We had the Department of Justice, the US Congress and the Office of Independent Counsel all running limitless investigations for years and the only thing anyone came up with that ever remotely matched the press’s breathless insinuations of corruption was the president’s alleged lies in one deposition about some furtive fellatio in a hallway.
But that hasn’t stopped the “narrative” of wrongdoing from being taken as an article of faith by the media. Indeed, one gets the idea from the reactions of some to this latest Clinton book that they see it as a challenge — no, the press couldn’t “get them” the last time and neither could the FBI, the US Congress and Ken Starr. But, by God, they’re going to succeed this time out because everybody just “knows” that there must be something to these corruption charges since everybody’s always talking about it, right?
The saddest thing about all this is that there’s plenty to criticize both Bill and Hillary Clinton for on legitimate political and ideological grounds. There may even be some other scandals that are legit for all we know. But they just can’t quit these wingnut psuedo-corruption scandals despite their failure to prove them over the course of decades. It’s Village catnip.
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