SINCE DEFECTING FROM THE REPUBLICAN PARTY in the latter half of
the 1990s and publishing a confessional memoir in 2002, I’ve
discussed my right-wing past with politicians, political activists
and strategists, academic scholars, student groups, fellow writers,
and hundreds of readers of my book Blinded by the Right: The
Conscience of an Ex-Conservative. I’m rarely asked anymore
why I changed, or about the baroque intricacies of the anti-Clinton
movement, which I once participated in and then renounced and exposed.
After a presidential election decided by the Supreme Court, the
terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, and
the war with Iraq, politics has moved to a different place.
Nowadays, when I talk about Blinded by the Right, people
want to know not how I was blinded by the Right, but how so much
of the country seems to be in that position. For the first time
since 1929, the Republican Party controls all three branches of
government. Fewer people identify with the Democratic Party today
than at any time since the New Deal. Conservatism seems the prevailing
political and intellectual current, while liberalism seems a fringe
dispensation of a few aging professors and Hollywood celebrities.
People ask me, a former insider, how the Republican Right has won
political and ideological power with such seeming ease and why Democrats,
despite winning the most votes in the last three presidential elections,
seem to be caught in a downward spiral, still able to win at the
ballot box but steadily losing the battle for hearts and minds.
While it is not the only answer, my answer is: It’s the media,
stupid.
When I say this, in a more respectful way, to folks outside the
right wing, I usually get either of two responses. Those who receive
their news from the New York Times and National Public Radio
give me blank stares. They are living in a rarefied media culture—one
that prizes accuracy, fairness, and civility—that is no longer
representative of the media as a whole. Those who have heard snippets
of Rush Limbaugh’s radio show, have caught a glimpse of Bill
O’Reilly’s temper tantrums on the FOX News Channel,
or occasionally peruse the editorials in the Wall Street Journal
think I’m a Cassandra. They view this media as self-discrediting
and therefore irrelevant. They are living in a vacuum of denial.
Those who understand what I mean are either members of the media
itself, have read media-criticism books or Internet sites devoted
to the subject, or are in the political trenches every day dealing
with the media. The gap between those who recognize right-wing media
power for what it is and those who don’t is wide and deep,
as if they inhabit parallel universes. The gap is dangerous to democracy
and needs to be closed.
When I came to Washington fresh out of college in 1986, I got a
job at the Washington Times, the right-wing newspaper bankrolled
by Reverend Sun Myung Moon, the Korean-born leader of a religious
cult called the Unification Church. Though Moon’s paper was
said to be read in the Reagan White House, nobody paid much attention
to it. We were the proverbial voice in the wilderness. Considering
that the paper was governed by a calculatedly unfair political bias
and that its journalistic ethics were close to nil, this was a good
thing. That was eighteen years ago. Today, the most important sectors
of the political media—most of cable TV news, the majority
of popular op-ed columns, almost all of talk radio, a substantial
chunk of the book market, and many of the most highly trafficked
Web sites—reflect more closely the political and journalistic
values of the Washington Times than those of the New York
Times.
That is, they are powerful propaganda organs of the Republican
Party. For our politics, this development in the media represents
a structural change: a structural advantage for the GOP and conservatism,
and, I believe, the greatest structural obstacle facing opponents
of the right wing. I therefore think it is one of the most important
political stories of the era. I have sought to tell this story in
The Republican Noise Machine: Right-Wing Media and How It Corrupts
Democracy.
I know there is a Republican Noise Machine because I was once
part of it. From the Washington Times, to a stint as a “research
fellow” at the Heritage Foundation (the Right’s premier
think tank), to a position as an “investigative writer”
at the muckraking magazine The American Spectator, and as
the author of a best-selling right-wing book, I forwarded the right-wing
agenda not as an open political operative or advocate but under
the guise of journalism and punditry, fueled by huge sums of money
from right-wing billionaires, foundations, and self-interested corporations.
By the time I said good-bye to the right wing in 1997, what was
once a voice in the wilderness was drowning out competing voices
across all media channels. The most influential political commentator
in America, Rush Limbaugh, and his hundreds of imitators saturated
every media market in the country, providing 22 percent of Americans—not
only conservatives but independent swing voters—with their
primary source of news. Conservatives had changed the face of the
cable news business with the establishment of the top-rated FOX
News Channel, a slicker broadcast version of the Moonie Washington
Times. Pundit Ann Coulter and her fanatical ilk topped the best-seller
lists, becoming superstars in the world of political punditry. The
Spectator juggernaut—which had a circulation of three
hundred thousand per month at its height in the early 1990s—had
been replaced by Internet gossip Matt Drudge, who gets more than
6.5 million visitors to his site every day. Although enormous subsidies
were still being pumped into right-wing media that did not turn
a profit, right-wing media also had become a multibillion-dollar
business, a development that powerfully affected all other commercial
media.
The lies, smears, and vicious caricatures leveled against Bill and
Hillary Clinton by this right-wing media, and then repeated in virtually
every media venue in the country, have now been well documented,
not least in Blinded by the Right. In that book, I compared
the anti-Clinton propaganda to a virus as it seeped off the pages
of the Spectator into the minds of every sentient American.
My memoir ended in 2000; what I did not fully comprehend then, but
what is apparent to me now as I have watched the politics of the
last few years unfold, is that the virus was not Clinton-specific.
In fact, it had nothing to do with the Clintons per se; rather,
in different strains, it would afflict any and every political opponent
of the right wing, including Al Gore, Senate Democratic leader Tom
Daschle, and the mourners of Senator Paul Wellstone, every major
Democrat seeking the presidency in 2004, New York Times columnist
Paul Krugman, and the liberal advocacy group MoveOn.org. What we
have here, as a criminal investigator might say, is a pattern.
In the 2000 presidential campaign, the Republican Noise Machine,
which worked for years to convince Americans that the Clintons were
criminally minded, used the same techniques of character assassination
to turn the Democratic standard-bearer, Al Gore, for many years
seen as an overly earnest Boy Scout, into a liar. When Republican
National Committee polling showed that the Republicans would lose
the election to the Democrats on the issues, a “skillful and
sustained 18-month campaign by Republicans to portray the vice president
as flawed and untrustworthy” was adopted, the New York
Times reported. Republicans accused Gore of saying things he
never said—most infamously, that he “invented”
the Internet, a claim he never made that was first attributed to
him in a GOP press release before it coursed through the media.
Actually, Gore had said, “During my service in the United
States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet,”
a claim that even former House Speaker Newt Gingrich verified as
true.
The right-wing media broadcast this attack and similar attacks relentlessly,
in effect giving the GOP countless hours of free political advertising
every day for months leading up to the election. “Albert Arnold
Gore Jr. is a habitual liar,” William Bennett, a Cabinet secretary
in the Reagan and first Bush administrations, announced in the editorial
pages of the Wall Street Journal. “...Gore lies because
he can’t help himself,” neoconservative pamphleteer
David Horowitz wrote. “liar, liar,” screamed Rupert
Murdoch’s New York Post. The conservative columnist
George F. Will pointed to Gore’s “serial mendacity”
and warned that he is a “dangerous man.” “Gore
may be quietly going nuts,” National Review’s
Byron York concluded. The Washington Times agreed: “The
real question is how to react to Mr. Gore’s increasingly bizarre
utterings. Webster’s New World Dictionary defines ‘delusion’
thusly: ‘The apparent perception, in a nervous or mental disorder,
of some thing external that is not actually present...a belief in
something that is contrary to fact or reality, resulting from deception,
misconception, or a mental disorder.’”
This impugning of Gore’s character and the questioning of
his mental fitness soon surfaced in the regular media. The New
York Times ran an article headlined tendency to embellish fact
snags gore, while the Boston Globe weighed in with gore seen
as “misleading.” On ABC’s This Week, former
Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos referred to Gore’s “Pinocchio
problem.” For National Journal’s Stuart Taylor,
the issue was “the Clintonization of Al Gore, who increasingly
apes his boss in fictionalizing his life story and mangling the
truth for political gain.” Washington Post editor Bob
Woodward raised the question of whether Gore “could comprehend
reality,” while MSNBC’s Chris Matthews compared Gore
to “Zelig” and insisted, “Isn’t it getting
to be delusionary?”
The well-orchestrated media cacophony had its intended effect: The
election was far more competitive than it should have been—and,
indeed, was decided before the Supreme Court stepped in—because
of negative voter perceptions of Gore’s honesty and trustworthiness.
In the final polls before the election and in exit polls on Election
Day, voters said they favored Gore’s program over George W.
Bush’s. Gore won substantial majorities not only for his position
on most specific issues but also for his overall thrust. The conservative
Bush theme of tax cuts and small government was rejected by voters
in favor of the more liberal Gore theme of extending prosperity
more broadly and standing up to corporate interests. Yet while Bush
shaded the truth and misstated facts throughout the campaign on
everything from the size of Gore’s federal spending proposals
to his own record as governor of Texas, by substantial margins voters
thought Bush was more truthful than Gore. According to an ABC exit
poll, of personal qualities that mattered most to voters, 24 percent
ranked “honest/trustworthy” first—and they went
for Bush over Gore by a margin of 80 percent to 15 percent. Seventy-four
percent of voters said “Gore would say anything,” while
58 percent thought Bush would. Among white, college-educated, male
voters, Gore’s “untruthfulness” was cited overwhelmingly
as a reason not to vote for him, far more than any other reason.
Two years after the election, Gore gave an extraordinary interview
to the New York Observer that could be read as an explanation
of what happened to his presidential campaign. Gore charged that
conservatives in the media, operating under journalistic cover,
are loyal not to the standards and conventions of journalism but,
rather, to politics and party. Gore said:
The media is kind of weird these days on politics, and there are
some major institutional voices that are, truthfully speaking, part
and parcel of the Republican Party. Fox News Network, the Washington
Times, Rush Limbaugh—there’s a bunch of them, and some
of them are financed by wealthy ultra-conservative billionaires
who make political deals with Republican administrations and the
rest of the media.... Most of the media [has] been slow to recognize
the pervasive impact of this Fifth Column in their ranks—that
is, day after day, injecting the daily Republican talking points
into the definition of what’s objective as stated by the news
media as a whole....
Something will start at the Republican National Committee, inside
the building, and it will explode the next day on the right-wing
talk-show network and on Fox News and in the newspapers that play
this game, the Washington Times and the others. And then they’ll
create a little echo chamber, and pretty soon they all start baiting
the mainstream media for allegedly ignoring the story they’ve
pushed into the zeitgeist. And then pretty soon the mainstream media
goes out and disingenuously takes a so-called objective sampling,
and lo and behold, these RNC talking points are woven into the fabric
of the zeitgeist....
True to form, the right-wing media greeted this factual description
with yet another frenzy of repetitive messaging portraying Gore
as crazy. Speaking of Gore on FOX News, The Weekly Standard’s
Fred Barnes said, “This is nutty. This is along the lines
with, you know, President Bush killed Paul Wellstone, and the White
House knew before 9/11 that the attacks were going to happen. This
is—I mean, this is conspiratorial stuff.” Also on FOX,
syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer said of Gore, “I’m
a psychiatrist. I don’t usually practice on camera. But this
is the edge of looniness, this idea that there’s a vast conspiracy,
it sits in a building, it emanates, it has these tentacles, is really
at the edge. He could use a little help.” “It could
be he’s just nuts,” Rush Limbaugh said of Gore. “Tipper
Gore’s issue is what? Mental health. Right? It could be closer
to home than we know.” “He [Gore] said it’s a
conspiracy,” Tucker Carlson said on CNN’s Crossfire.
“I actually think he’s coming a little unhinged,”
The Weekly Standard’s David Brooks, now at the
New York Times, said of Gore on PBS.
As I write in early 2004, the Republican Noise Machine is primed
to run the same campaign of personal vilification in the 2004 presidential
election, no matter which Democrat wins the nomination. An op-ed
piece in the Washington Post by Charles Krauthammer has pronounced
former Vermont governor Howard Dean “the Delusional Dean.”
Krauthammer’s “diagnosis” rested on a transcript
of a Dean appearance on MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris
Matthews. Through the use of ellipses, Krauthammer doctored the
transcript to make his point. As Gore’s experience demonstrated,
Democrats ignore these attacks at their peril: Not only do such
attacks confirm the preconceptions of Republicans but they shape
the thinking of undecided voters and even of Democrats. One of the
most frightening experiences I have had in recent years in talking
with rank-and-file Democrats is the extent to which they unconsciously
internalize right-wing propaganda. To add insult to injury, too
many Democrats have a tendency to blame the victims of these smears—their
own leaders—rather than addressing the root of the problem.
For instance, when Senator Daschle made the factual statement that
“failed” diplomacy had led to war with Iraq, right-wing
media accused him of siding with Saddam Hussein. The ensuing controversy
caused many Democrats to think Daschle had put his foot in his mouth.
With the right-wing media now a seemingly permanent and defining
feature of the media landscape, if Democrats cut through the propaganda
and win back the White House in 2004, they still face the prospect
of being brutally slammed and systematically slandered in such a
way that will make governing exceedingly difficult. There should
be no doubt that the right-wing media’s wildings of 1993—which
led to Clinton’s impeachment four years later—will be
replayed over and over again until its capacities to spread filth
are somehow eradicated.
Excerpted from The
Republican Noise Machine byDavid Brock Copyright ©
2004 by David Brock. Excerpted by permission of Crown, a division
of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt
may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from
the publisher.
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