Michael Isikoff was not available for comment late Saturday. NEWSWEEK was on voice mail.
The White House was busy checking the DRUDGE REPORT for details.7
I got into bed and stared at the ceiling. “Holy shit,” I said. “He did it.”
I was surprised to find a tear running down my face. I turned to Susie, who was lying beside me.
“Susie, history just happened,” I murmured. “Drudge just changed everything.”
CHAPTER 4
Hey, Old Media: It’s Not Your Business Model That Sucks, It’s You That Suck
On February 19, 2010, I spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). The day before I spoke, Kate Zernike of the New York Times reported on another panel at the conference. In particular, she wrote about a young author and investigative journalist named Jason Mattera: “How can conservatives win the youth vote that overwhelmingly went for Barack Obama in 2008? At the Conservative Political Action Conference, apparently, some are betting on using racial stereotypes.” What had Mattera done? He “mocked what he described, with a Chris Rock voice, as ‘diversity,’ including, he said, college classes on ‘cyber feminism’ and ‘what it means to be a feminist new black man.’… Offering up a slogan, he adopted the Chris Rock voice again: ‘Get your government off my freedom!’ ”1
Except that Mattera wasn’t doing a Chris Rock impersonation. He was doing a Brooklyn accent—because he’s from Brooklyn.
So when I spoke later that day, I called Zernike out by name. “Kate Zernike of the New York Times, are you in the room? Are you in the room? You’re despicable. You’re a despicable human being.” Then I said what I really feel about the media: “This is what these creeps do. I’m sick of having cocktails with them. I’m now at war with them. No more cocktails.”
I’m at war with the mainstream media because they portray themselves as objective observers of reality when they’re no such thing—they’re partisan “critical theory” hacks who think they can destroy everything America stands for by standing on the sidelines and sniping at patriotic Americans with all their favorite slurs. They have nothing but contempt for the American people. They use all the weapons they have at their disposal to intimidate every one of us and force us to shut up and not to speak our minds.
Their days of doing this are over. They’re dying because they hate much of America and what it has historically stood for. Then they moan that no one wants to consume their product, saying it’s their business model that has just sold them short.
News flash to the media: It’s not your business model that sucks. It’s you that suck.
My biggest experience yet with the mainstream media came after Drudge broke the Monica Lewinsky story.
As much as Lewinsky was a story, the story behind the story was the media’s determination to scuttle it as fast as possible. Newsweek had already tried to shut down Isikoff. The Friday before Drudge unleashed the scoop, Newsweek told Isikoff they might not run the story at all: “The first signal I got that the story might not go was when I was told we need a backup story on Clinton’s Paula Jones deposition in case we don’t go with the story,” Isikoff said later. Isikoff himself was concerned about the ramifications of releasing the story, since even the single Linda Tripp tape he had in his possession was supposedly “ambiguous. It neither confirmed nor undercut the most serious charge, that the president and Vernon Jordan, Clinton’s trusted friend and adviser, instructed her to lie. That was the serious federal crime that [Special Prosecutor Kenneth] Starr was investigating. The tape that we heard, which was only one tape, did not prove that.” Newsweek’s managing editor, Mark Whitaker, blamed killing the story on the fact that the Starr team hadn’t yet grilled Lewinsky: “Let’s say they came back and said, ‘We talked to her, she denied everything. We believe her.’ Or they said, ‘We questioned her. She sounds like a flake. We are dropping the whole investigation.’ Then we would have been irresponsible to write a wildfire story about sex in the White House.” At 4:45 p.m. ET on Saturday, Editor in Chief Richard Smith said that Newsweek was going to hold the story pending further investigation.
All of this reeked of Clinton-defending, even the tone of the comments. Whitaker characterized the Lewinsky scandal as “a story about sex in the White House,” which it wasn’t—it was a story about the president of the United States committing perjury. Isikoff was acting as though journalistic standards were the same as jury standards—beyond a reasonable doubt, when he could simply have run with the story and let the world know that there were tapes of a White House intern talking about giving the president of the United States blow jobs in the Oval Office. That’s a story in itself.
The Clinton-defending carried over the next morning on ABC’s This Week with Sam Donaldson. Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol brought up the story on the panel, freaking out everybody else there: “The story in Washington this morning is that Newsweek magazine was going to go with a big story based on tape-recorded conversations, which a woman who was a summer intern at the White House, an intern of Leon Panetta’s—”2
Immediately, ABC commentator and former Clinton flack George Stephanopoulos jumped in, stating that the Drudge Report had been “discredited.” This was a position crafted by the Clinton White House—Stephanopoulos had in fact called up the White House that morning and spoken with John Podesta, Clinton’s chief of staff, who told him, “The only way you can respond to it is to say, ‘This is Drudge, he’s a rumormonger… and you can’t believe what you read in the Drudge Report.”3
Kristol responded, “No, no, no! They had screaming arguments in Newsweek magazine yesterday. They finally didn’t go with the story. It’s going to be a question of whether the media is now going to report what are pretty well-validated charges of presidential behavior in the White House—” At which point Sam Donaldson intervened and said that he didn’t think anyone should comment on the Drudge Report story until Newsweek had a chance to explain why it killed the story.4
It was typical baffling-with-bullshit from the Democrat-Media Complex. Stephanopoulos, by the way, has now been rewarded by ABC News, his employer, with the false label of a neutral, objective reporter—not once, but twice—for thwarting legitimate stories. Early in the 1990s, Stephanopoulos acted to prevent the #1 New York Times bestselling author Gary Aldrich from talking about what life was like coordinating FBI efforts to vet employees under Clinton. (Aldrich basically said it was like trying to vet a druggie fraternity house—a test I would have failed, but then, no sane person would have nominated me.) Sam Donaldson was saying it wasn’t even worth discussing until Newsweek got a chance to explain itself. The Democrat-Media Complex protects its own—and in the case of Stephanopoulos, it rewards former political hacks with journalistic firewall status. They get to pretend to be independent-minded people while actually acting as barbed-wire fences protecting their masters from insurgent campaigns from the right.
With This Week, the blackout had begun. Doyle McManus, Washington bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times, said, “I looked at [the Drudge Report] and thought, ‘If Isikoff wants to pursue that story, he’s welcome to it.’ ”5 On CBS’s Face the Nation and NBC’s Meet the Press, lawyers appeared to talk about Paula Jones’s legal strategy—and nobody mentioned the Drudge story. Tim Russert refused to touch it because, “There’s not enough there.” He asked James Carville, Clinton’s attack dog, whether there was “a pattern of behavior that those who support President Clinton are worried about?” then allowed Carville to respond, without rebuttal, “The president denies it, and… frankly, I know the president’s telling the truth.” That evening on CNN, the lead story was Clinton sexually harassing… Kathleen Willey, a story that was six months old. Carole Simpson on ABC’s World News Tonight led off with the story that Paula Jones was skipping out of DC. Sam Donaldson, the Clinton defender, spun the Clinton deposition as a Clinton win, somberly intoning, “Behind the scenes, the spinning of the story continued. Paula Jones and her group dined Saturday night wi
th champagne, professing to be pleased with the way things had gone. Friends of the President one-upped that by telling Time magazine the Clinton camp is ecstatic about the way the deposition went.”6
The media ran from the story in one mass stampede.
And the next night, at 11:52, Drudge released Lewinsky’s name.
And for the next day and a half, the media maintained their silence. Finally, on Wednesday morning, perhaps sensing that with the name out there the dam would burst soon, the Washington Post ran a story. The Los Angeles Times followed suit. At 8 p.m. on Wednesday night, Michael Isikoff’s four-thousand-word piece on the Lewinsky scandal posted at Newsweek’s website—or rather, at the AOL website, since Newsweek still didn’t have its own website.7
By the time the media finally broke their blackout, it had been all day Sunday, all day Monday, and all day Tuesday. That was four days of the story existing in the undermedia—the Internet and talk radio—and Drudge reporting on the story one bit at a time, giving more and more evidence, messaging, “We’ve got the goods.” Even as the media were finally starting to recognize the story, Drudge was breaking new ground. That Wednesday, he ran a headline: REPORT: LEWINSKY OFFERED U.N. JOB; INVESTIGATORS: DNA TRAIL MAY EXIST. And just to stick the knife in, he added the notation, CONTAINS GRAPHIC DESCRIPTIONS. The report revealed that “investigators have become convinced that there may be a DNA trail that could confirm President Clinton’s sexual involvement with Lewinsky…. Tripp has shared with investigators a conversation where Lewinsky allegedly confided that she kept a garment with Clinton’s dried semen on it—a garment she said she would never wash!”8
It was a media frenzy by now. Four days after the story broke, and after thinking the story had been killed by George Stephanopoulos, Hillary Clinton had to appear with Matt Lauer on the Today show to try to put the scandal to rest. On January 27, 1998, an unnaturally balanced Matt Lauer grilled Hillary Clinton over her husband’s reported indiscretions. First she blamed the “vast right-wing conspiracy” to get her husband. Lauer asked her whether the charges “came as big a shock to you as anyone.” The rest was history:
Hillary: And to my husband. I mean, you know, he woke me up Wednesday morning and said, “You’re not going to believe this.”
Lauer: And so when people say there’s a lot of smoke here, your message is… Where there’s smoke…
Hillary: There isn’t any fire.
Lauer: If an American president had an adulterous liaison in the White House and lied to cover it up, should the American people ask for his resignation?
Hillary: Well, they should certainly be concerned about it.
Lauer: Should they ask for his resignation?
Hillary: Well, I think that if all that were proven true, I think that would be a very serious offense. That is not going to be proven true.9
But there wasn’t just smoke. There was fire. It wasn’t just a triumph for Drudge. It was a triumph for the truth-seeker seeking to challenge the insurmountably complex media behemoth that, over time, had tried to kill a legitimate story for political purposes. Drudge leaked it little by little by little. And when they started to attack him over the course of the next few months, that was when Drudge dropped the cigar story as a “fuck you” to the Democrat-Media Complex. On August 22, 1998, Drudge bombshelled, SHE HAD SEX WITH CIGAR: MEDIA STRUGGLES WITH SHOCKING NEW DETAILS OF WHITE HOUSE AFFAIR. Again, he headlined that the story contained graphic descriptions. “In a bizarre daytime sex session, that occurred just off the Oval Office in the White House, President Clinton watched as intern Monica Lewinsky allegedly masturbated with his cigar. It has been learned that several major news organizations have confirmed the shocking episode and are now struggling to find ways to report the full Monica Lewinsky/Bill Clinton grossout.”10
Clinton’s carefully crafted media defense was going down, and Drudge was dismantling it as brilliantly as anyone in media history.
But the Democrat-Media Complex isn’t enormously powerful because they give up easily. Over the course of the next eight months, they took an open-and-shut case of sexual harassment, of perjury, of intimidation of witnesses—they took that epic slam-dunk and used a coordinated media propaganda campaign of monumental proportions to split the country apart. They went after all their political enemies to try to draw blood regardless of what the infraction was; they used the media, a critical part of the Complex, to legitimate it. Over the next eight months, I learned all I needed to know about the ethics of journalism. The rules were created by the left to be applied exclusively as a weapon against the right.
For the next eight months, the Clinton administration and their media parrots devised a strategy that assessed, through polling, every possible aspect of the story.
They asked the American people: “What do you feel about the intimidation of Monica Lewinsky and Linda Tripp not to testify truthfully in the Paula Jones civil trial?”
“We don’t like that.”
“What do you think about the president lying under oath?”
“We don’t like that.”
“What do you think about the president lying to Donna Shalala and the rest of his cabinet?”
“We don’t like that.”
“What do you think about the exploration of the president’s sex life?”
“We don’t like that.”
“Aaaaah,” said the Democrat-Media Complex. “Good! There’s our wedge.”
They crafted a wedge from Clinton’s sex life and they went to their messengers in the intellectual circles to shove that wedge between Americans’ shoulder blades. They knew that most Americans still thought that Clinton was a liar and a sexual predator, but they knew that if they could only convince Americans that “everybody lies about sex,” everything would turn out fine for their man, no matter how hypocritical and manipulative they were being to save him.
They started with the classic leftist tactic: the politics of personal destruction applied to Lewinsky. This effort was spearheaded by Sidney Blumenthal, a former mainstream media journalist. According to Christopher Hitchens, who testified before Congress in 1999, Blumenthal attended a Washington luncheon soon after the revelations broke, at which “Mr. Blumenthal stated that… the President was ‘the victim’ of a predatory and unstable sexually demanding young woman.” In other words, Blumenthal used his Rolodex to distribute the dirt that the reason Bill Clinton was in the proximity of Monica, with whom he “did not have sexual relations,” was because she was a stalker.11 In fact, Blumenthal used the word stalker several times during a March 19, 1998, luncheon at the Occidental restaurant in Washington, DC, explaining that “this version of the facts was not generally understood.”12
Blumenthal later blamed Lewinsky herself for this version of the story; in his book The Clinton Wars, he stated, “Beginning with Isikoff’s publication of the Talking Points on January 21, in which Lewinsky called herself a ‘stalker,’ newspapers around the country and all the television networks and cable stations expanded upon the stalker theme.”13 Except that only Blumenthal took that claim seriously enough to actually label Lewinsky a stalker in the menacing rather than colloquial sense. According to Hitchens, Blumenthal told Hitchens’s wife that he only gave credence to the “stalker” account because “the President told me.” He then followed up that stunning admission with an even worse admission: “I could go to jail for what I’m doing now.”14 Apostates like Hitchens are given the most egregious treatment by the Complex; the Clintonistas labeled him a drunk and a traitor to the cause.
The next step was for Blumenthal to recruit some of his intellectual friends to write that the Republicans were somehow engaging in a “sexual inquisition,” despite the fact that it was Clinton who had made the details of his sexual peccadilloes relevant by committing perjury about them. Blumenthal instructed friends of Clinton’s to write long pieces that all had the same meme: that the repressed conservatives were obsessed with a president who had a “European” view of sex. These pieces opened th
e door for the academic and pop-cultural worlds to begin echoing the slogan: “It’s just about the sex.”
One of Blumenthal’s buddies was Colombian Nobel Prize–winning novelist Gabriel García Márquez. On January 30, 1999, García Márquez penned a piece for the UK Guardian defending Clinton. The title of the piece: “Why My Friend Bill Had to Lie.” García Márquez began by discussing Clinton’s magnetism, then his status as a cultural icon: “At 49, he was a glorious survivor of the generation of ’68, someone who had smoked dope and sung along to the Beatles, someone who had taken to the streets in protest at the Vietnam war.” What any of this had to do with Clinton ejaculating his DNA into and onto a White House intern was left unspoken.
At last, García Márquez tackled the question of the hour: why did Clinton have to lie? Clinton had to lie, García Márquez said, because, as Clinton himself told García Márquez, “My only enemy is right-wing religious fundamentalism.” Then García Márquez got into full bore: “Is it right that this exceptional human man should have his place in history distorted because he couldn’t find a secluded spot in which to make love?… The President only wanted to do what the common man has done behind his wife’s back since the world began. Puritan stupidity did not only refuse him that, it withheld his right to deny it.” But what of his perjury? García Márquez dismissed it out of hand: “Surely it is more dignified to perjure yourself in defence of carnal desire, than to condemn love altogether?”
Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World! Page 6