Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics by Glenn Greenwald Page A
Authors: Glenn Greenwald
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those who know how to get the media interested.
And after watching them for the past two decades very closely, I think it’s obvious that what interests the media more than anything is access and gossip and vicious little smears piled one atop the other. And why not? They are easy to report, require no mind-numbing shuffling of financial reports or struggling through arcane policy papers.
In fact, the press has made a virtue of the simplemindedness by calling what used to be known as gossip, “character issues,” which are used to stand in for judgment about policy.
The press, therefore, will go to great lengths to protect the people who give them what they crave, most of whom happen to be Republicans since character smears are their very special talent. There was a reason why Rove and Libby [in response to Ambassador Joe Wilson’s Iraq Op-Ed] used “the wife sent him on a boondoggle” line. Stories about Edwards and his hair and Hillary and her cold, calculating cleavage are the coin of the realm.
In the Washington Post, media critic Howard Kurtz responded to Digby’s essay. His reply provided great (albeit unintentional) insight into the mind-set of our political press.
Initially, Kurtz—who is married to GOP media consultant Sherri Annis—simply could not tolerate the notion that the press corps’ dirtmongering favors Republicans. One of the Central Principles of Beltway journalists is “equivalence”—always to insist that everything is the same between the two sides, regardless of whether it actually is. To demonstrate this claim of media balance, Kurtz refuted Digby’s description of how our political press functions:
I agree that leakers often get to set the story line, but I also know that Democrats are not unfamiliar with the practice. (Remember the Bush DUI leak just before the 2000 election?) And those who leaked information about domestic surveillance, Abu Ghraib and secret CIA prisons also had an impact.
Leave aside the fact that Kurtz is so desperate to defend Republican operatives that he just recklessly asserts things as fact here even though he has no idea whether they are true. Kurtz has absolutely no knowledge of who leaked the NSA surveillance story to the New York Times ’s Jim Risen and Eric Lichtblau, and cannot know whether the leakers are Democrats. The same is almost certainly true of the Washington Post ’s Dana Priest’s sources for her CIA “black site” story, whom Priest described as “U.S. and foreign officials” and “current and former intelligence officials and diplomats from three continents”—she did not identify them as “Democrats.”
Worse, the Abu Ghraib whistle-blower was U.S. Army Sgt. Joseph Darby, not a Democratic Party operative. And the Bush DUI story was uncovered by a local reporter in Maine through actual, old-fashioned investigative journalism—pursuing a copy of the arrest record and interviewing the arresting officer. But Kurtz, like most Beltway journalists, has such a compulsion to assert equivalencies that he literally just invented facts—Democrats leaked these stories—in order to support his balance mantra.
But far more significant than Kurtz’s willingness to invent facts is that he sees no distinction between (a) revelations that the Bush administration is torturing detainees, holding them in secret prisons, and spying on Americans in violation of the law and (b) what Digby described as “stories about Edwards and his hair and Hillary and her cold, calculating cleavage.”
The whole point here is that Republicans dominate political press coverage because they feed vapid, slothful, tiny-minded “journalists” with vapid, tiny-minded, malicious gossip that reporters eat up and spew out in lieu of reporting on actual matters of substance. To rebut this claim, Kurtz argued that Democrats do it, too—and then cited the leaks about torture, secret prisons, and warrantless surveillance as his proof.
The most
And after watching them for the past two decades very closely, I think it’s obvious that what interests the media more than anything is access and gossip and vicious little smears piled one atop the other. And why not? They are easy to report, require no mind-numbing shuffling of financial reports or struggling through arcane policy papers.
In fact, the press has made a virtue of the simplemindedness by calling what used to be known as gossip, “character issues,” which are used to stand in for judgment about policy.
The press, therefore, will go to great lengths to protect the people who give them what they crave, most of whom happen to be Republicans since character smears are their very special talent. There was a reason why Rove and Libby [in response to Ambassador Joe Wilson’s Iraq Op-Ed] used “the wife sent him on a boondoggle” line. Stories about Edwards and his hair and Hillary and her cold, calculating cleavage are the coin of the realm.
In the Washington Post, media critic Howard Kurtz responded to Digby’s essay. His reply provided great (albeit unintentional) insight into the mind-set of our political press.
Initially, Kurtz—who is married to GOP media consultant Sherri Annis—simply could not tolerate the notion that the press corps’ dirtmongering favors Republicans. One of the Central Principles of Beltway journalists is “equivalence”—always to insist that everything is the same between the two sides, regardless of whether it actually is. To demonstrate this claim of media balance, Kurtz refuted Digby’s description of how our political press functions:
I agree that leakers often get to set the story line, but I also know that Democrats are not unfamiliar with the practice. (Remember the Bush DUI leak just before the 2000 election?) And those who leaked information about domestic surveillance, Abu Ghraib and secret CIA prisons also had an impact.
Leave aside the fact that Kurtz is so desperate to defend Republican operatives that he just recklessly asserts things as fact here even though he has no idea whether they are true. Kurtz has absolutely no knowledge of who leaked the NSA surveillance story to the New York Times ’s Jim Risen and Eric Lichtblau, and cannot know whether the leakers are Democrats. The same is almost certainly true of the Washington Post ’s Dana Priest’s sources for her CIA “black site” story, whom Priest described as “U.S. and foreign officials” and “current and former intelligence officials and diplomats from three continents”—she did not identify them as “Democrats.”
Worse, the Abu Ghraib whistle-blower was U.S. Army Sgt. Joseph Darby, not a Democratic Party operative. And the Bush DUI story was uncovered by a local reporter in Maine through actual, old-fashioned investigative journalism—pursuing a copy of the arrest record and interviewing the arresting officer. But Kurtz, like most Beltway journalists, has such a compulsion to assert equivalencies that he literally just invented facts—Democrats leaked these stories—in order to support his balance mantra.
But far more significant than Kurtz’s willingness to invent facts is that he sees no distinction between (a) revelations that the Bush administration is torturing detainees, holding them in secret prisons, and spying on Americans in violation of the law and (b) what Digby described as “stories about Edwards and his hair and Hillary and her cold, calculating cleavage.”
The whole point here is that Republicans dominate political press coverage because they feed vapid, slothful, tiny-minded “journalists” with vapid, tiny-minded, malicious gossip that reporters eat up and spew out in lieu of reporting on actual matters of substance. To rebut this claim, Kurtz argued that Democrats do it, too—and then cited the leaks about torture, secret prisons, and warrantless surveillance as his proof.
The most
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