Three little words
“We all make mistakes,” James Fallows begins his newsletter. “People, organizations, countries. The best we can do is admit and face them. And hope that by learning from where we erred, we’ll avoid greater damage in the future.”
Yet half the country has internalized what Donald Trump mentor Roy Cohn taught him: Never admit mistakes. Always attack your accuser. Win no matter what. Gloat when you do. “Roy was a master of situational immorality,” author Sam Roberts said.
We view Donald Trump as the author of the Republicans’ descent into amorality. But often the slide is long before the edge of the cliff. Even while letting out a Wilhelm Scream, we will not admit to falling. Only losers admit mistakes. The powerful never do. It has become reflex.
Fallows examines how news outlets have failed to arrest their slide into scandal mongering. The press has failed to confront past mistakes and thus failed to correct them.
The relentless coverage of the “Red Wave” that never came, for example:
Pundits and much of the mainstream press spent most of 2022 describing Joe Biden’s unpopularity and the Democrats’ impending midterm wipeout. As it happened, Biden and the party nationwide did remarkably well.
On the morning after the election, conservative pundit Henry Olsen had an opinion column in the Washington Post headlined “I Was Wrong About the Midterms. Here’s What I Missed.”
Olsen writes in the opinion section. Seven weeks after the election the New York Times ran a story on how predictions went wrong. “The only mention of the paper’s own months-long role in fostering this impression was a three-word aside, in the 13th paragraph of a thousand-word story,” Fallows notes: “mainstream news organizations, including The Times … amplified the alarms being sounded about potential Democratic doom.”
Fallows offers examples of how the news “frames” reporting with opinion both in headlines and in the stories themselves.
“1. Not everything is a ‘partisan fight’,” he writes, citing reporting on Republican hostage-taking using the debt ceiling.
“2. Not everything is a ‘perceptions’ narrative,” Fallows continues, pointing out lazy phrases such as “a picture emerges,” “paints a picture” or “sure to raise questions.”
Finally, “3. Not all scandals are created equal.” Here Fallows reaches nearly three decades back to “things enormously hyped at the time, that look like misplaced investigative zeal in retrospect.” That is:
The Whitewater “scandal.” For chapter and verse why this was so crazy, see the late Eric Boehlert, with a very fine-grained analysis back in 2007; plus Eric Alterman at the same time; plus Gene Lyons, who lives in Arkansas and wrote a book called Fools for Scandal a decade earlier.
I will be amazed if more than 1% of today’s Americans could explain what this “scandal” was supposedly about. I barely can myself. But as these authors point out, it led domino-style to a zealot special prosecutor (Kenneth Starr, himself later disgraced), and to Paula Jones, and to Monica Lewinsky, and to impeachment. It tied up governance for years.
“But her emails” is from the last decade, as was Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi.
Fallows raises Whitewater as a classic example. Digby’s Saturday post featuring a scoop by Murray Waas reminded me how back in dial-up days (late 1990s) before the IPO, Salon featured more investigative journalism. Waas did extensive reporting on the shit-stirring Arkansas Project funded by right-wing mogul Richard Mellon Scaife, and on the corrupt Arkansas judge who became a star “false witness” in the Whitewater investigation.
While the mainstream press was scandal-mongering, the off-Broadway press was doing real digging into the right-wing conspiracy dogging the Clintons which, if it wasn’t vast, was well-organized and well-funded. But those stories (IIRC) barely penetrated what has become the stenography press. The media helped Republicans spin up the Whitewater scandal into impeachment like Rumplestiltskin spun straw into gold. Even today, as Fallows reminds us, few can explain what Whitewater was about, much less give you the backstory that Waas and others laid out in what was then the alternative press.
Few news outlets today will admit their role in ginning up Whitewater. Or in abetting George W. Bush’s propaganda campaign to lie the country into invading Iraq. Or in advertising the Republicans’ Benghazi tribunals. Or in turning “but her emails” into a key tool for delivering the country into the hands of the Master of MAGA. Or in carrying water for Trump’s “Stop the Steal” campaign that led to Jan. 6. Nor have they corrected course.
And here we are.