Killing the Messenger

by David Brock

  Part of the solution is to try to inoculate voters from being misled by the ads that money buys. Believe it or not, there are limits on what you can say in an attack ad. The law does, in theory, protect people from being libeled (although libel suits don’t generally fare well in the political world—they’re mostly filed for show by candidates who’ve been badly wounded by an attack to emphasize just how untrue the attack is and just how offensive voters should find it). More relevantly, TV stations can, and do, refuse to air falsehoods.

  But does that mean you can’t lie on TV? Of course not. For example: In an attack ad against Arkansas Democratic senator Mark Pryor, Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS claimed that the Affordable Care Act, which Pryor supported, “cuts over $700 billion from our Medicare.” By any reasonable definition of the word lie, this is a lie. The Affordable Care Act, as fact-checkers have gone hoarse repeating over the years, does not affect benefits for seniors on Medicare.

  What the law does is reduce future reimbursement payments to health-care providers under the Medicare Advantage program, which allows private insurers to compete with Medicare. This will put Medicare on sounder financial footing, extending the program’s solvency by several years.

  But the claim was a great way to scare seniors. And it was a great way to distract from the fact that Pryor’s opponent, Republican congressman Tom Cotton, supported Paul Ryan’s plan to eliminate traditional Medicare entirely, replacing it with a voucher that actually would have reduced health-care benefits for seniors. (Cotton ended up winning by double digits.)

  The Affordable Care Act was a complicated piece of legislation. For example, it set minimum benefit standards for insurance plans; flimsy plans that didn’t offer much in the way of actual benefits were canceled, and people who had those plans were given an opportunity to shop for better insurance in a regulated, subsidized marketplace. This allowed millions of Americans to improve their coverage—and it allowed Americans for Prosperity to run ads saying that “millions of Americans have lost their health insurance.”

  As Upton Sinclair, the muckracking journalist, famously observed, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” In 2014, the salaries of right-wing attack ad gurus—not to mention Republican hopes of winning the Senate—depended on these sorts of willful misunderstandings of the Affordable Care Act. In between the actual truth and the kind of lies that get you sued, there is a vast chasm, and Republicans love to operate in that space.

  It would be great if this kind of dishonest politics didn’t work—if the mainstream media reliably called out these falsehoods for what they are and forced Republican candidates to either answer for or disavow them, or if voters were able to easily discern truth from lies in slick political commercials. But until the day that our campaign finance laws are changed, it will be up to progressives to slug it out with the Kochs—running our own ads while aggressively fact-checking theirs.

  In the next chapter, I’ll talk about another process by which falsehoods are slid into the political debate: a sort of right-wing assembly line by which damaging stories are concocted out of thin air, given a patina of credibility by conservative operators posing as journalists, amplified by Republican politicians, and pushed into the mainstream media, where, without the kind of critical scrutiny that is often lacking in the press, they become legitimized as fodder for attack ads paid for by the Kochs.

  But before I do, it’s worth remembering that Harry Reid was right: Charles and David Koch did end up posing an insurmountable threat to the Democratic Senate majority in 2014—and making the Koch brothers themselves an issue did, in fact, work in one key contest.

  The Kochs had high hopes for Republican Terri Lynn Land in her campaign against Democratic representative Gary Peters in Michigan’s open Senate seat. She began the race six points up, and the Kochs spent millions hammering Peters on the airwaves.

  As in other states, Democratic researchers worked to expose the facts about Land’s backers: the American jobs they’d sent overseas, the environmental damage they’d caused, the havoc their business practices can wreak on local communities. But in Michigan, researchers dug up one special connection: a Koch-owned company was responsible for dumping petroleum coke on the shores of the Detroit River. The press jumped on the story. THE KOCH BROTHERS, one headline reported, HAVE BURIED AN AREA THE SIZE OF A CITY BLOCK UNDER 30 FEET OF OIL SANDS WASTE. The Peters campaign, backed by local environmentalists and Reid’s Senate party committee back in DC, decided to run against the Koch brothers as hard as they were running against Terri Lynn Land—and, in the end, that connection proved to be as toxic as their refinery’s waste.

  By August, the Kochs pulled a million-dollar ad buy for Land, knowing their support for her was a liability. And polls were showing that the Kochs were overwhelmingly unpopular in Michigan; by the time the campaign was over, only 5 percent of voters had a favorable opinion of the duo, while 74 percent had an unfavorable opinion. On Election Day, Peters won a resounding victory, the only nonincumbent Democrat to win a Senate seat in the 2014 cycle.

  The Koch brothers are clearly aware that sunlight is their worst enemy because it is, as Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis said, “the best disinfectant.” The president of Americans for Prosperity has taken to accusing American Bridge of engaging in “the politics of personal destruction,” even though we’ve focused exclusively on their policy views and business practices. Koch PR operatives frequently warn reporters against using our research, even though they haven’t been able to challenge our facts. And keen-eyed Super Bowl viewers in January 2015 might have noticed what must have been a hugely expensive feel-good ad for Koch Industries—part of an unprecedented positive PR campaign the brothers are running to restore their image.

  When you’re spending that kind of money on damage control—“Hey, we can’t be all bad; we’re the guys who make your toilet paper”—you know you’ve got a problem. In fact, the Republicans have become so anxious about our plans to shine light on the Kochs that in the spring of 2015, they engaged in a bit of espionage to find out more about what we are up to.

  That April I was scheduled to deliver a talk in San Francisco to a conference of the Democracy Alliance—the big liberal-donor network—on the threat to democracy posed by the brothers’ spending and our organizational plans to turn their influence against the 2016 candidates they fund.

  Republican oppo research outfits and right-wing websites are known to stake out the DA conferences hoping to pick up political intelligence on its operations. For instance, in the café of the Four Seasons Hotel, a young tracker for America Rising followed me to a table where I was meeting with a potential donor and was able to film a short—and thankfully innocuous—portion of our interaction. Soon a video clip of me—in which I was seen and heard ordering a Diet Coke, of all nefarious things!—surfaced on the right-wing Daily Caller website.

  More serious was a successful effort to steal a document that pertained to my presentation. The weekend before the meeting, I sketched out the text of my talk on index cards and carried them with me to San Francisco. Separately, my staff produced a standard “question-and-answer” briefing to prepare me for queries from the audience after the talk. The document was faxed to my attention at the hotel, where it was intercepted and copied before it was delivered to my room. How do I know? Two months later, it surfaced on Politico, billboarded as a “secret memo” detailing a new $3 million effort to go after the Kochs.

  The memo was authentic, so I may as well let you in on all the trade secrets the Republicans were trying to pilfer. As I explained at the conference, in 2014 we only had six months to build and make our case against the Koch brothers; now, we’re working on taking that case again to voters in 2016. We’re hiring more researchers, launching new investigations, examining the brothers’ finances, and looking at their business practices, such as their use of known carcinogens like formaldehyde and asbestos, their questionable workplace
safety record, their international tax shelters, their history of outsourcing American jobs, and more. Most of all, we’ll be looking at how the Koch agenda would affect voters in individual states where their network will try to win elections this cycle.

  While exposing the Kochs isn’t enough to win an election, I believe it’s a critical component in creating a climate where Democratic candidates can win. And I look forward to seeing the Kochs’ self-serving version of economic patriotism up against the progressive one on the ballot in 2016. Let the sunshine in!

  Sometimes, even the Kochs’ philanthropy has a political edge. Despite spoiling the Columbus Zoo’s plans for expansion, they have a soft spot for animals—at least, extinct animals. And if you do, too, and you happen to find yourself in Washington, DC, then I have a tourist suggestion for you: the David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.

  In addition to the usual assortment of saber-toothed taxidermy and such, the Hall of Human Origins has an interactive exhibit where your kids can learn to stop worrying so much about climate change. After all, the exhibit argues, humans have always adapted to environmental instability and will continue doing so.

  Besides, the exhibit suggests, adapting to the new era of climate change won’t be so bad. We can build “underground cities”! Maybe we’ll develop “short, compact bodies” or “curved spines” so that “moving around in tight spaces will be no problem.”

  Here we are, at one of the nation’s foremost institutions for the advancement of science, learning about how we shouldn’t sweat global warming because we can always turn ourselves into mole people, scuttling around subterranean tunnels—in an exhibit financed by two of the men most responsible both for polluting our planet and for paralyzing our government’s ability to do anything about it.

  That’s the Koch brothers’ America. An American Hunger Games. But it’s not a dystopian sci-fi vision of the future; it’s a clear-eyed analysis of what they are doing to our country right now. And rather than letting them lead us to a future in which our salvation comes from our “curved spines,” Democrats need to stiffen the spines we have now and face down the Kochs. Remember, they hate sunlight.

  Chapter Four

  The Scandal Launderers

  The week I began making notes for this book, in the summer of 2014, Bill Clinton was accused of rape. Another story claimed that, in his postpresidency, he’d had an affair with a woman whom his Secret Service detail had code-named “Energizer.” Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton was accused of being a falling-down drunk and a drug addict.

  These allegations, all of them anonymous and none substantiated, were made in a trio of new anti-Clinton books, part of what Hillary shrugged off as a “cottage industry” of right-wing publications devoted to recycling discredited charges and peddling the familiar caricatures of the sleazy, womanizing Slick Willie and the ruthless, manipulative, even unstable Lady Macbeth.

  In addition to being riddled with innuendo and inaccuracies, these books simply weren’t very good. You could read all three of them (though I wouldn’t recommend doing so, much less in a single sitting) and not learn a single new verifiable fact about the Clintons. But that wasn’t the reason they were written, nor was it the reason people bought them.

  Conservatives (and I say this with some affection, given that I have sold a lot of books to conservatives) don’t buy books to be transported, or learn something new, or to open their minds. They seek to have their own prejudices reflected back to them. They want to see their political fantasies in print. They find comfort in knowing that someone else shares their suspicions about the liberal target of the day. And, most importantly for publishers and authors, right-wing audiences see buying the book as itself a political act.

  If you take a look at the New York Times best-seller list, you’ll often see a book or two you’ve never heard of about some conservative bugaboo of the day. There are two related reasons these books tend to be big commercial successes. The first is that conservative organizations often bulk-buy mass quantities of the books to help them make it onto that very list, an example of how conservatives see buying books as a form of activism.

  The second is that, even if a right-wing book never successfully finds a mainstream audience, the right-wing audience is large and concentrated enough that major publishers are willing to cater to it. For a long time, these screeds were published by right-wing outlets; ignored by mainstream publishers and reviewers, they rarely gained traction with mainstream audiences.

  But as talk radio and, later, Fox News, began to attract huge and homogenous audiences—and proved that they were willing to shill any idea that furthered the conservative cause—the big New York publishing houses began to see dollar signs, and established right-wing imprints to exploit this lucrative market. A publisher like Penguin Random House wouldn’t risk its venerable brand by lending it to a book full of gossip about the Clintons, but by publishing it through its conservative imprint, Sentinel, it could reap the rewards from giving conservatives a chance to scratch their incurable anti-Clinton itch.

  This business model helps to explain another unique feature of the conservative publishing industry, which is that nobody really cares if those books are true. The books themselves have far lower standards for accuracy than, say, the one you’re reading right now. But the difference isn’t just reflected in the fact-checking budgets of right-wing publishing imprints. Conservative authors, it seems, can get caught lying with absolutely no repercussions for their future viability among conservative audiences. Indeed, pretty much the only way they can lose their credibility among right-wing readers is to do what I did: Write something they don’t like—the truth.

  There is no better example of the right-wing book racket than the author of one of 2014’s anti-Clinton books, Ed Klein (or, as his former editor Tina Brown used to call him, “Ed Slime”).

  Klein is a familiar character. Back in 2005, Klein wrote a book (published by Sentinel, the conservative imprint of Penguin) entitled The Truth About Hillary: What She Knew, When She Knew It, and How Far She’ll Go to Become President. The lie began with the title—The Truth About Hillary. Given the author’s credentials (he was a former editor of the New York Times Magazine) and the book’s rollout (excerpted in Vanity Fair), it stood a good chance of breaking out of the conservative ghetto—and thus laundering Klein’s tall tales into mainstream discourse. So, at Media Matters, we prepared to go over the book with a fine-tooth comb. As it turned out, we didn’t need the comb; the inaccuracies in this book were visible from outer space.

  Indeed, the very first revelation touted from the book turned out to be an embarrassing misfire. Two weeks before publication, the conservative website NewsMax issued a newsletter breathlessly previewing a bombshell from the upcoming tome: “The book will reveal Hillary’s struggle with New York’s Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan to get his seat. Though a Democrat, Moynihan had little use for Hillary.”

  Klein’s smoking gun for this claim? Moynihan’s remarks at the 1999 press conference where Hillary announced her candidacy. “Oddly,” the preview revealed, “Pat Moynihan never uttered Hillary’s name—not even once—during this event. He could not bring himself to mention Hillary by name—but the press reported his ‘endorsement’ just the same.”

  In Klein’s write-up of the event, Moynihan is quoted as saying:

  God, I almost forgot. I’m here to say that I hope she will go all the way. I mean to go all the way with her. I think she’s going to win. I think it’s going to be wonderful for New York.

  And in case that doesn’t strike you as particularly strange, Klein helpfully offers his interpretation: “For Moynihan, apparently, it was easier to say ‘she’ than ‘Hillary.’”

  For Klein, apparently, it was easier to read the late senator’s mind than to read the transcript—because here’s how Moynihan actually introduced Hillary at the event:

  Now, I have the great pleasure to welcome Mrs. Clinton to the fa
rm and turn over the microphone to our candidate.

  Before you do—before I do, and, my God, I almost forgot—yesterday, Hillary Clinton established an exploratory committee as regards candidacy for the Senate, United States Senate, from New York, a seat which I will vacate in a year and a half.

  I’m here to say that I hope she will go all the way. I mean to go all the way with her. I think she’s going to win. I think it’s going to be wonderful for New York, and we’ll be proud of our senator and the nation will notice.

  The next day, I wrote a piece for the Media Matters website debunking the claim. It wouldn’t be the last time we had to correct Klein on something that only an incorrigible fabricator could have gotten wrong.

  For example: Klein claimed that, after her 1999 embrace of the wife of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat raised eyebrows (the reference itself an attempt to give new life to a manufactured, then six-year-old controversy), Hillary sought to “pander” to Jewish voters by “suddenly turn[ing] up a long-lost Jewish stepgrandfather”—except that the news about Hillary’s Jewish ancestor had received extensive media coverage three months before the incident with Arafat.

  It went on and on. The thing was just chock-full of falsehoods, and easily exposed ones, at that. At Media Matters, we published dozens of debunking research items. We also called on the publisher to withdraw the book. And we made sure that as Klein peddled the book, he was called to account for his hackery. At one point, Klein inexplicably agreed to appear on Air America Radio’s The Al Franken Show, where the future senator, along with cohost Katherine Lanpher and liberal columnist Joe Conason, proceeded to tear the book apart, in one of the most excruciatingly awkward and hilarious radio segments you’ll ever hear.

  You would think that Klein, having been so thoroughly discredited in 2005, wouldn’t have much of a market for more of his unsubstantiated Clinton scandalmongering a decade later. But you’d be underestimating not just the right’s appetite for anything critical of the Clintons, but also the complete and total irrelevance of facts within the conservative media marketplace.