-Caveat Lector-
Begin forwarded message:
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: March 2, 2007 11:18:33 AM PST
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Punish the Right-Wing Media Liars
Punish the Right-Wing Liars
By Matt Taibbi,
RollingStone.com, January 31, 2007.
http://www.alternet.org/columnists/story/47453/
If the right-wing media keeps spreading LIES like the one about
Barack Obama supposedly going to a madrassa as a child, it's time
to consider hiring the meanest lawyers on the planet to fight these
creeps.
"Are the American people ready for an elected president who was
educated in a madrassa as a young boy and has not been forthcoming
about his Muslim heritage?" -- From Hannity.com, long after the
"madrassa" story had been debunked
Nearly two years before the next presidential election, we've
already set the tone: Even the most outrageous media fictions about
candidates are apparently going to go unpunished.
At least that was my thought, after watching last week's unfolding
of the Obama-madrassa scandal -- the unofficial starting gun for
the Great Slime Race, as the 2008 presidential campaign will
someday be known. I found the entire affair puzzling. I know for
sure that if I made a journalistic "mistake" of that magnitude, I'd
be spending the rest of my life picking strawberries in the
Siberian tundra.
Most print journalists I know would expect the same thing; the
legal ramifications alone of intentionally going to print with a
story that missed by that much would guarantee that 80 cents out of
every dollar you made for the next ten years would go to the victim
of your libel.
That's unless you're Tom Friedman and you can use congenital idiocy
as a defense in court.
For some reason, however, we never see full-blown libel suits in
high-level political journalism. Moreover, there appears to be a
completely different standard for talk-radio and TV talk-show
hosts, who are somehow allowed to lie and fuck up with impunity,
and still remain employed. I get the feeling that as a society we
have decided to give a collective pass to serial media swindlers
like Sean Hannity simply because we never expect them to actually
document the "facts" that come spewing in mass volumes out of their
zoster-covered mouths every day. We actually expect them to pull
most of their material out of their asses, and are mostly content
to address the problem by pompously correcting their errata post-
factum in whiny media-crit outlets like...well, like this one.
Actual real punishment never seems to be forthcoming.
The Obama incident was a perfect example. After Fox outlets,
Insight magazine and the Roger Ailes morning vehicle Fox and
Friends erroneously reported that a source in "Hillary Clinton's
camp" had uncovered that Barack Obama had been schooled in a
"madrassa" in his youth in Indonesia, CNN dispatched a reporter to
the school in question and found that the tale was totally false,
that there were religion classes only once a week at the school and
that the school had not even a hint of Wahabbite influence.
Moreover, Hillary Clinton's camp denied having anything to do with
the story. "They made it up," Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson said.
Fox responded with a classic "Eat me you clowns!" send-off, with
Fox anchor John Gibson bitching that John Vause, the CNN reporter
who blew up their report, "probably went to the very [same]
madrassa." Ultimately there was a reluctant "retraction" of sorts
on Fox and Friends, but if you pay careful attention, the statement
read by Fox anchor Steve Doocy isn't a retraction at all. Here's
what he said:
Doocy: : One other thing. We want to clarify something: On Friday
of last week, we did the story from Insight magazine where we
talked about how they were quoting that Barack Obama, when he was a
child growing up in Indonesia, had attended a madrassa. Well, Mr.
Obama's people called and they said that that is absolutely false.
They said the idea that Barack Obama went to a radical Muslim
school is completely ridiculous. In his book it does say that he
went to a mostly Muslim school but not to a madrassa.
Obviously there is absolutely no admission of error here; they only
concede that Barack Obama himself claims the story is false, which
is what most people expect a politician to do even after a true
expose. Doocy read his text with the tone of a junior-high bully
wiseass ripping off a school-mandated "apology" in front of the
class; his tone clearly indicated that he, and Fox, were greatly
annoyed by the inconvenience of having to "clarify" anything for
anyone.
Not only that, but well after the story had been crushed by every
reputable news outlet in America, the Fox-affiliated Hannity
continued to have the Insight story up, uncorrected, on the front
page of his website. It's still there now, lingering like a
hemorrhoid, as I write this piece.
I'm not sure if people realize exactly how serious a situation this
is. The way our national media is currently constructed, a lie of
this magnitude broadcast on a major network becomes an irreversible
blow within, I would guess, about 24 hours after it appears. There
are rare cases of an unsourced hoax blowing up quickly enough that
it won't stick to a politician -- the John Kerry mistress story is
a good example -- but for the most part, once the lie is out there,
it's there to stay. This is especially true given the nature of the
audience for outlets like Fox and Hannity. Unless you force a
Hannity or a John Gibson to apologize by ripping his own still-
beating heart out on national television, their audiences will
assume that any "retraction" comes with a grain of salt, that the
original report was true.
Years after George Bush himself admitted that there is no link
between Saddam Hussein and 9/11, I continue to meet people who
believe just the opposite -- that the original implications
furthered by the White House and the talk-radio preachers were
true, and that the no-link concession was something somehow forced
on Bush and the likes of Fox by hyper-cautious media lawyers and
lefty journalists who, it is assumed, harbor some secret allegiance
to Saddam Hussein and/or the cause of Islamic terrorism in general.
This unwillingness to believe the "reputable" media outlets' final
judgments about such controversies is now endemic and a result of a
number of factors, most of those having to do with the failure of
the mainstream media to perform vigilantly in the face of various
bald national deceptions.
After the debacle of 2000, for instance, many people automatically
distrust the published verdicts about election results, choosing to
assume that votes were stolen by one side or the other and that the
commercial media is a fellow-traveler tied to whichever side you
choose to think is rigging the game -- Republicans or Democrats,
both sides are regularly suspected. And though few people probably
register the issue consciously, there has to be some kind of
fallout when the population is fed "They hate us for our freedom"
by "reputable" media outlets as an explanation for the 9/11
attacks. When the media trades so blatantly in such egregious,
transparent bullshit, why shouldn't their audiences choose to make
their own decisions about truth and untruth?
The lesson of all this -- and of the Iraq war, the Swift Boat
controversy, and indeed the whole careers of swine like Hannity,
Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Michael Savage and the like -- is that
unless you prevent the lie from coming out to begin with, it
doesn't really matter what happens afterward. In the Internet age,
and with no kind of regulation of the "facts" that are circulated
on afternoon radio, once that genie is out of the bottle, he's
staying out.
Moreover, we live in an age in which an increasing number of
unscrupulous media creatures make phony/misleading rhetorical
arguments and cover themselves by "citing" media reports that may
be still floating around on the internet, long after they've been
debunked. Rush Limbaugh is the master of this technique. A classic
Limbaugh news-reference involved a mountain-lion attack in Colorado
(hyping alleged liberal overconcern for deadly mountain lions is a
surprisingly hardy staple of right-wing radio entertainment);
Limbaugh wanted to argue that PC-mad animal rights activists had
raised more money for the lion cub than had been raised for the
victim's family. "As of May 23, the orphaned mountain lion had
received $21,000 in donations and Barbara Schoener's two kids had
received around $9,000," was how Rush put it, way back in 1994. The
story was total bullshit and had been exposed as such for more than
a month at the time Rush came out with that story.
And once he realized he could do this without suffering
consequences, he just kept on doing it, which is why his listeners
over the years have been treated to such nuggets of wisdom as
"There's no such thing as an implied contract," "It has not been
proven that nicotine is addictive," "The condom failure rate can be
as high as 20 percent," "The poorest people in America are better
off than the mainstream families of Europe," "Banks take the risks
in insuring student loans," "Anita Hill followed Clarence Thomas
everywhere," and "$14,400 for a family of four-- that's not so
bad." There are endless lists of these casually-told lies that
stick long after debunking -- anyone interested in seeing the full
list can check out sites like fair.org.
Now we're seeing the same thing with the Obama story; it is
lingering, even after it has been totally discredited. Emboldened
by a generation that has refused to punish their libelous behavior,
these guys now just take whatever "facts" they like and run with
them. Hannity is one culprit. Michael Savage, a spineless little
fuckhead who should be torn apart by hyenas, responded to the
debunking of the Obama story by telling his listeners that Obama
"will not reply" to the original Insight report, a blatant lie. He
added, for good measure, that "assuming the world is still here"
after a Clinton-Obama administration, Obama would then run for
president with "Saddam Hussein's younger grandson" as his running
mate.
The very fact that the liars are allowed to continue their trade
unpunished is a sort of endorsement of their original versions of
the "truth." I have absolutely no doubt that many Americans believe
deep down in their gullible hearts that if people like Hannity and
Limbaugh were really liars, they would be pulled off the air, or
punished for some reason. They see that a Michael Savage can be
yanked from a lucrative job for gay-bashing, but there appears to
be no punishment at all for unchecked, intentional lying, which is
at least as serious an offense for a journalist.
The results of widespread public disenfranchisement with the media
are already out in the open for everyone to see -- wild conspiracy
theories running rampant on both sides of the political aisle,
great masses of the population eschewing reporting and appealing to
Biblical interpretations of world events, and the explosion of a
blogger movement that on the one hand has greatly enhanced press
freedom, but on the other has inspired "mainstream" media organs to
dispense with traditional fact-checking procedures in a desperate
attempt to compete with the speed of the Internet and cable news.
The direction all of this is traveling in is a future of pure
informational mayhem, in which people will have absolutely no
reliable means to make political decisions, leaving the political
landscape ripe to be seized by demagogues and swindlers of all
stripes, the public with no defense against political and
environmental corruption, etc.
If the press is serious about saving itself as a social
institution, it has to start policing its own business. We all have
to encourage the likes of Barack Obama to hire the meanest lawyers
on the planet and to file the hairiest lawsuits imaginable against
the Hannitys, Gibsons, and Savages of the world. We have to impress
upon the victims of these broadsides that choosing to ignore that
style of libel is a betrayal of the public trust and an act of
political cowardice that the rest of us end up paying for in
spades. That's the ugly truth:
Until one of those monsters goes down in a fireball of punitive
litigation, we are all fucked. And that's not going to happen
anytime soon.
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free from AOL at AOL.com.
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