Killing the Messenger

by David Brock

  Conservatives bought Klein’s book, Blood Feud: The Clintons vs. the Obamas, in droves. But the mainstream media, perhaps remembering our exhaustive debunking from a decade ago, ignored it. The book’s far-fetched tales were pretty much confined to the gossip pages of Rupert Murdoch’s trashy New York Post. You know you’re in trouble if even Rush Limbaugh casts doubt on the accuracy of the quotes in your book. So while the right-wing nuts brought the book to the New York Times best-seller list, this time we stayed largely mum, so as not to give the book any unnecessary exposure to a regular readership.

  We took pretty much took the same approach with the other two anti-Clinton books, with the same results. Clinton, Inc., written by a Weekly Standard editor, Daniel Halper, recycled old charges and repackaged them as a portrait of a ruthless and corrupt Clinton empire. We worked behind the scenes to debunk the book while depriving it of a public food fight that might have put Halper, a first-time, virtually unknown aspiring hack, on the map. When Bill O’Reilly canceled a planned interview, citing the book’s heavy reliance on anonymous sources, we knew it would sink quickly.

  The “Energizer” allegation came from a third book, The First Family Detail: Secret Service Agents Reveal the Hidden Lives of Presidents, written by former Washington Post reporter Ronald Kessler, who in addition to his mainstream credentials was at least at one time apparently well sourced in the intelligence community. But a little digging by Media Matters found that more recently Kessler had been a promoter of a series of wacky lost causes, ranging from Donald Trump’s 2012 presidential campaign to the claim that Hillary had driven former White House lawyer Vince Foster to suicide. Kessler had even proven too scurrilous for the right-wing site NewsMax, which parted company with him.

  A few days before Kessler’s book hit the stores, the pages involving the “Energizer” story started circulating among Clinton beat reporters, who quickly concluded it was all just anonymous gossip. None of them touched it, and Kessler’s book, too, disappeared.

  At this point, you may be wondering: Who cares? Why not let conservatives have their fan fiction?

  For the answer, let’s go back to 1995, when a White House aide named Chris Lehane wrote a 332-page document that, for the first time, attempted to describe how “fantasy becomes fact” by charting the flow of information from the whisper campaigns of the far right all the way into the pages of the New York Times and onto the evening news. Lehane called it the “Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce,” but it foreshadowed what Hillary Clinton meant when she described a “vast right-wing conspiracy.”

  Lehane described it this way:

  First, well funded right wing think tanks and individuals underwrite conservative newsletters and newspapers such as the Western Journalism Center, the American Spectator, and the Pittsburgh Tribune Review.

  Next, the stories are reprinted on the Internet where they are bounced all over the world.

  From the Internet, the stories are bounced into the mainstream media through one of two ways: 1) The story will be picked up by the British tabloids and covered as a major story, from which the American right-of-center mainstream media (i.e., the Wall Street Journal, Washington Times, and New York Post) will then pick the story up; or 2) The story will be bounced directly from the Internet to the right-of-center mainstream American media.

  After the mainstream right-of-center American media covers the story, congressional committees will look into the story. After Congress looks into the story, the story now has the legitimacy to be covered by the remainder of the American mainstream press as a “real” story.

  Take it from someone who was, at the time, skulking around Arkansas on Richard Mellon Scaife’s dime, looking for dirt or rumors of dirt on the Clintons: Lehane was 100 percent correct. The stories I’d “report” in the Spectator (based on information I’d been passed by Republican operatives) would be planted in certain British papers where standards were lower. Then the item would ricochet back across the Atlantic to right-wing papers in New York and Washington. Then it would be amplified on talk radio. Pretty soon, Republicans would find a reason to raise “concerns” about the story, and mainstream outlets would have a reason to write about it.

  I call it “scandal laundering”: Just as the mob uses a series of front businesses like dry cleaners and olive oil importers to turn dirty money into clean money, Republican operatives use friendly right-wing outlets—from book publishers to bloggers—to push false allegations into the mainstream, and thus give them the patina of truth.

  The original scandal launderer, of course, was Matt Drudge. Drudge was an insatiable gossip scavenger who cared about little but attention. He maintained close relations with Republican operatives who knew that they could send him half-baked opposition research and see it up on his site within the day—and that reporters at the outlets they really wanted to get into were clicking Refresh several times an hour, not wanting to be the last to a hot story. Tipped by the right, Drudge would also often report that a media outlet was planning to run a particular story (or, more frequently, that liberal bias was compelling it to sit on a story), forcing its airing before full vetting.

  For the Clintons, this was a dangerous dynamic, one made worse by the fact that mainstream outlets, even those that actually were liberal in their editorial policies, were incentivized by the dynamic of scandal laundering to trash them. “Pro-Clinton” became an insult; reporters skewed to the right, fearful that conservatives would accuse them of being “in the tank.” Those few journalists who refused to take the bait and resisted recycling the pseudoscandals were stigmatized as “Clinton defenders.” And with so much organized conservative pressure to attack the Clintons—and such a large conservative audience eager to vote with their wallets for content that did so—all the mainstream media needed was an excuse. Drudge and his fellow scandal launderers provided that excuse by giving them a report to report on.

  In the 1990s, of course, this was something of a ragtag operation. Puffing on my pipe and meeting with state troopers in shady Little Rock bars, I wasn’t aware that I was pioneering what would become the dominant communications strategy of the Republican Party. But while the Arkansas Project may have begun on the fringes, the model worked—and it has been professionalized by today’s conservative movement.

  Opposition research has been mainstreamed, legitimized, and institutionalized. Young, enthusiastic operatives at the Republican National Committee—and at SuperPACs like America Rising—don’t hand their scoops to friendly outlets in the shadowy back corners of parking lots; they trumpet them on Twitter.

  The right has also pioneered a network of web magazines and blogs masquerading as news outlets that offer an important new media platform, one that progressives will never match. Sure, many left-leaning Americans choose to get their news from outlets, like Talking Points Memo or the Huffington Post, that share a progressive sensibility. But these websites actually practice journalism; they may pick up the phone when someone from, say, American Bridge calls to pitch something, but they ask tough questions and don’t run stories unless they pass journalistic muster. (As in the book market, conservatives who are engaged online see it more as a form of political activism than information seeking.)

  The new conservative sites I’m talking about—like the Washington Free Beacon, the Daily Caller, and the Blaze—exist to give right-wing propaganda a digital home—and rile up a new crowd of readers. They gleefully publish opposition research dumps that more credible outlets won’t touch, often disguising them as original reporting. They provide something for Republican politicians and SuperPAC ads to cite. They create enough noise around false stories that the mainstream media feels obligated to follow up. And if the right wing’s stories don’t get the play they were hoping for, they complain that media bias is to blame—and then the media writes up the bias claim, slipping the faulty stories through the back door.

  Today, faced with new online competitors, the Drudge Report has lost its edge, rarely breaking
“news” anymore. But it remains a powerful news aggregator, incentivizing mainstream reporters to treat right-wing Orwellian “newspeak” as news. The Drudge Report was still the top referrer of traffic to mainstream outlets like the New York Times, CNN, and Politico in 2015. For the cottage industry of scandal laundering, the more things changed, the more they remained the same.

  If anything, the right-wing media complex is much more powerful today than it was when Hillary Clinton described the “vast right-wing conspiracy” nearly twenty years ago—when Fox News was just gaining ratings traction and Rush Limbaugh was the only face of conservative talk radio. Now, Fox’s Bill O’Reilly not only has the number-one-rated show across the cable dial but its nightly audience of 3 million viewers has become so dedicated over the years that it has direct political power, delivering tens of thousands of dollars to the website of a campaign or right-wing cause off even a short guest segment.

  Right-wing radio has become a more sophisticated political machine, too. Eclipsing Limbaugh in influence through not in audience, syndicated talk show host Hugh Hewitt has become the GOP’s “go-to pundit,” according to the National Journal. You can listen to his show the old-fashioned way, stream it online, or get it through Hewitt’s mobile app. Unlike his competitors, Hewitt, despite publishing a trashy anti-Hillary tome with the campy title The Queen, has made inroads with mainstream reporters who fall for his Harvard-educated, faux-cerebral on-air persona. As guests on his show, they give credence to the latest anti-Clinton conspiracies Hewitt is peddling, and thus taint themselves with anti-Clinton bias, whether they have one or not, simply by showing up and lending the credibility of their news organizations. In the first five months of 2015 alone, Chuck Todd, the host of NBC’s prestigious Meet the Press, CNN’s Jake Tapper, and Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post all appeared frequently on the show, a ten strike for the scandal launderers.

  For the most part, however, the scandal-laundering action has moved online. Here are the prime actors:

  The Daily Caller: Run by Fox personality Tucker Carlson, the Daily Caller has become one of the most prominent, and often least scrupulous, scandal launderers around. Much of the funding for the site comes from Foster Friess, the Rick Santorum Super-PAC backer who famously said, “Back in my days, they used Bayer Aspirin for contraception. The gals put it between their knees.” After the 2012 campaign, Friess decided to double down on fake journalism, and the Caller got even more cash. Much like Tucker Carlson himself, the Caller’s tone is smug and petty; they’re one part tabloid, one part Internet troll—and one part right-wing smear factory.

  The Washington Free Beacon: Originally part of Bill Kristol’s Center for American Freedom (which itself was intended to be the conservative answer to the Center for American Progress), the Free Beacon split off and became its own for-profit business with mysterious investors. The Beacon’s editor in chief is Kristol’s son-in-law, Matthew Continetti, but its guiding spirit is former Koch operative Michael Goldfarb, described by the New York Times as an “all-around anti-liberal provocateur” who delights in personal attacks against progressives. Their staff doesn’t practice journalism—indeed, Media Matters discovered that they paid an oppo research firm to dig through the Clinton archives in Little Rock for dirt that they then passed off as real journalism.

  Breitbart News: In 2010, the late right-wing gonzo agitator Andrew Breitbart posted a video clip showing a USDA official and civil rights movement hero named Shirley Sherrod seemed to make racially charged remarks. The story bubbled up to Fox News, then into the mainstream press, and Sherrod was forced out—all before it was revealed that Breitbart had deceptively edited the video to frame her. Breitbart is deceased, but the site that still bears his name has continued his tradition of low standards. In November 2014, it alleged that President Obama’s attorney general nominee, Loretta Lynch, had been part of the team defending President Clinton during the Whitewater scandal. I’ll let their correction provide the punch line: “Correction: The Loretta Lynch identified earlier as the Whitewater attorney was, in fact, a different attorney.”

  RedState: This blog’s proprietor, Erick Erickson, a Fox News contributor and host of a daily Atlanta-based radio show, is on the leading edge of utilizing both old and new media platforms to pack a powerful punch. In fact, Erickson is “arguably the most powerful conservative in America today,” according to the Atlantic. Erickson openly—and successfully—campaigns for Tea Party favorites running for office, and “his pronouncements can light up a congressman’s switchboard,” according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, which also noted that Erickson was not known for his “sensitive tastes.” Erickson questioned in a blog post whether President Obama was “shagging hookers” but decided he hadn’t, because his “Marxist harpy” wife Michelle would “go Lorena Bobitt on him should he even think about it,” according to the paper.

  In the media wars to come in 2016, look for even newer players using newer technologies to stir up trouble. One usual suspect is conservative rabble-rouser James O’Keefe. He specializes in running video “sting” operations designed to catch low-level employees at organizations like Planned Parenthood doing something made to look embarrassing on tape. O’Keefe tries to snooker the media by releasing only heavily edited—and totally misleading—portions of his videos, leaving the fact-checkers at Media Matters trying to beat the clock to publish the full context before a smear takes flight. Another is right-wing blogger Michelle Malkin, who originally founded Twitchy, a network that mobilizes outraged conservatives to harass real journalists on Twitter. Then there is Glenn Beck’s online Blaze and the Independent Journal Review, one of the most highly trafficked websites in the world that you’ve probably never heard of. Finally, there is the America Rising SuperPAC, which uses a Tumblr account to further blur the distinction between oppo research and reporting.

  It’s all happening now at such warp speed that the opportunities for injecting misinformation into the bloodstream of the public conservation have dramatically increased since Drudge’s heyday. Media Matters’ watchdogs are constantly innovating with new techniques and technologies of our own to keep pace with the deluge. On some days we stop lies in their tracks; but in the flood of falsehoods, some lies inevitably seep through the cracks.

  Soon after President Obama nominated Republican senator Chuck Hagel to be defense secretary, a story broke on Breitbart. It was written by Ben Shapiro, the website’s editor at large and, as his byline notes, the author of the book Bullies: How the Left’s Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences America (published by Simon & Schuster’s conservative imprint, Threshold Editions).

  The first paragraph of the story:

  On Thursday, Senate sources told Breitbart News exclusively that they have been informed that one of the reasons that President Barack Obama’s nominee for Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel, has not turned over requested documents on his sources of foreign funding is that one of the names listed is a group purportedly called “Friends of Hamas.”

  If the story was true—if the president’s nominee to be defense secretary really had accepted money from a group called “Friends of Hamas”—then it was news, indeed. Shapiro made sure to create a sense of drama:

  Called for comment and reached via telephone, Associate Communications Director at the White House Eric Schultz identified himself, heard the question, was silent for several seconds, and then hung up the phone immediately without comment. Called back via the White House switchboard, Schultz’s phone rang through to his answering machine. Called on his cell phone, Schultz’s phone rang through to his answering machine.

  That was the third and final paragraph. There was no evidence to support the claim that Hagel has been palling around with Hamas—if there was, the story would have been written in a real newspaper and Breitbart wouldn’t have had its exclusive.

  Writing in Slate, David Weigel tracked how the story “caught fire on the right in no time”: from the conservative blog RedState, to the National Review,
to Hugh Hewitt’s radio talk show, and beyond. It was picked up by Fox News and appeared in the Washington Times. Mike Huckabee, at the time a Fox News host, speaking in Israel, said that “rumors of Chuck Hagel’s having received funds from Friends of Hamas” could “disqualify him.” Jennifer Rubin, the shrill conservative blogger for the Washington Post, jumped on it with both feet, tweeting (with the hashtag #extreme) that Hagel had once spoken to a group that defended reporter Helen Thomas after she made a controversial comment about Israel (a real bank shot, even by conservative standards). And when Republican senator Rand Paul began making noises about it, Friends of Hamas was thrown into the media mosh pit—and became a potential endgame to Hagel’s confirmation.

  Weigel did note one little hiccup in the rush to condemn Hagel’s ties to Friends of Hamas: there was no such organization as “Friends of Hamas.” “Hint No. 1,” Alex Pareene quipped in Salon, “should probably have been that a pro-Hamas front group would not call itself ‘Friends of Hamas’” (emphasis in the original).

  It eventually emerged that a reporter from the New York Daily News, fishing for leads on any controversial groups Hagel may have spoken to, jokingly asked a Republican Senate staffer if Hagel had received a speaking fee from “Friends of Hamas” (or the “Junior League of Hezbollah,” which was funnier). By the next day, whether intentionally or unwittingly, the GOP aide was treating the joke as a real scoop, and the entire right-wing food chain was eager to gobble it up.