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In
foisting the Memogate hoax on the American people, CBS’ Dan Rather was motivated
by the desire for ratings, revenge, and power. (For two excellent chronicles
of how Rather misled his audience, see the reports here and here by Andrew Alexander, my editor at Intellectual Conservative.)
Ratings
Any journalist worth his salt wants to reach everyone, and blow away the
competition. Anyone who says otherwise, is either lying or in the wrong business.
The best way for a journalist to reach the largest possible audience is with
scoops on scandals. It’s good journalism, and it’s popular journalism. One
of the reasons why the pc journalism of the socialist mainstream media (SMSM)
and even some of the older, Republican mainstream media (RMSM) have been
losing audience share in recent years, is because editors kill or ignore
scoops that expose corruption among protected minorities and women, or make
those few reporters willing to report such corruption endure the death of
a thousand cuts. The best chronicle of such SMSM corruption I know of, is
William McGowan’s book, Coloring the News: How Crusading for Diversity Has Corrupted American Journalism.
Regarding the RMSM, consider National Review. In an interview last year with Enter Stage Right’s Bernard Chapin, NR
contributor John Derbyshire observed that in the magazine’s attempt to revitalize
its subscriber base, the younger, affluent Republicans it had attracted will
not tolerate articles that criticize blacks.
“They laugh with us when we lampoon the more outrageous kind of black race
hustler -- a Sharpton, a Farrakhan, a Johnny Cochran. They are, however,
determined to make the multiracial society work, they believe it can be made
to work in spite of the hustlers and liberal guilt-mongers, and they are
unwilling to read, say, or think anything that could be construed as unkind
towards people of other races. The pessimism and cynicism on this topic that
you rather commonly find among conservatives -- including NR readers -- born in 1930, or even 1950, are profoundly unappetizing to these younger conservatives.”
There is an abundance of scoops involving protected groups that are easy
pickins for anyone willing to do the work, and willing to endure the hate
mail from black and Hispanic racists and white leftists, and willing to face
the danger of one’s work being found “profoundly unappetizing” by certain
affluent Republicans. In addition to the moral outrage of the corruption
itself, I write so much on corruption by members of protected groups, and
the policies of police departments, newsrooms, schools and universities that
protect the groups in question, because the stories are there for the telling,
and MSM reporters won’t tell them. Often, cowardly, lazy reporters from the
RMSM refuse to tell them, as well, or don’t know about them, and don’t want
to know. I’ve made a personal cottage industry out of the “racist, incompetent,
black journalist” genre.
Double-standards and protection from scrutiny guarantee corruption, which
among human beings requires little encouragement, to begin with.
The SMSM have sought to compensate for their indifference and even hostility
towards so much news, by generating audience share through fabricating “scoops”
targeting safe groups (white, heterosexual, able-bodied, particularly conservative
males) that are either hoaxes or wild exaggerations.
The most common genre of such phony “scoops” is the race hoax. In recent
years, one of the two most notorious, media-generated race hoaxes has been
the claim by racist black leaders and organizations and alleged journalists
that white police engage in the “racial profiling” of innocent black males.
This hoax, which has been around in one form or another since the 1960s,
took its contemporary form in 1999. The other most effective contemporary
race hoax has been the myth of the 2000 disenfranchisement of black Florida
voters, which was fabricated the day after George W. Bush won the election.
The classic recent case of creating a scoop via hype and the perversely dishonest interpretation of facts would be the Abu Ghraib prison “scandal,” which was manufactured by none other than CBS News’
Mary Mapes, the same producer who gave us Memogate/Rathergate. In the Abu
Ghraib story, journalists demanded that the public see a little sexual degradation
of prisoners as “torture.” In any previous American war, including Vietnam,
no self-respecting producer would have seen a story in Abu Ghraib. That Mapes
will probably win every award in the book for it, is an unwitting statement
on the moral collapse -- or should I say, “transformation”? -- of American
journalism.
The “interpretational” aspect of the Abu Ghraib hype resided in outlets such as the New York Times lying
about the Geneva Conventions, in insisting that terrorists, who are expressly
denied Geneva Convention protections, were entitled to them.
Yet no matter how many frauds the SMSM perpetrate on the backs of heterosexual,
white men, they continue to hemorrhage market share.
Note that Mapes could not have sold Abu Ghraib as a “scandal,” were it not
for an SMSM subculture which is prepared to interpret anything and everything
connected to a Republican administration as … well, scandalous.
Consider, for a current example of hoax through hype, the attempt, beginning in August by the New York Times,
to conjure up a campaign by Florida law enforcement officers to intimidate
elderly blacks out of voting. In what had all the earmarks of a coordinated
campaign, within days of each other, columnists Bob Herbert and Paul Krugman
and the Times editorial board insisted that when detectives interviewed
the old folks in their homes as part of a voting fraud investigation, they
weren’t really trying to accommodate the senior citizens by relieving them
of the need to travel to police headquarters (which would have been much
more intimidating), but were actually trying to scare them to death. And
how did the intrepid Timesmen know this? Because the detectives were carrying
guns under their suit jackets! Imagine that, gun-toting detectives.
And so, the Times was not only inventing a race hoax, but piggybacking
on top of the older, discredited, Florida 2000 race hoax. Imagine a convicted
perjurer saying on the witness stand, “If you liked my former perjured testimony,
let me give you some new stuff!” -- but without the irony.
As the newspaper’s coordinated campaign last year to revitalize the Sally Hemings hoax had already shown, the Times has developed a specialty in reviving discredited race hoaxes.
To return to CBS News, for years it had been in a distant third place,
behind NBC and ABC. At 11 p.m., CBS’ New York affiliate has long been beaten
by Seinfeld reruns! And then, with the coverage of the Republican
National Convention, Fox beat all of the Big Three in the ratings, but it
whipped CBS worst of all. Rather was livid about that beating.
Revenge
The Fox media empire, known as News Corp., is the creation of 73-year-old, Australian-born mogul, Rupert Murdoch. (Since being a foreigner was a hindrance to Murdoch’s empire, in 1985, he became a U.S. citizen.) Fox News started broadcasting on October 7, 1996; it was founded and is still run by 64-year-old, Ohio-born Republican Roger Ailes,
who was media guru to presidents Nixon and Reagan. In 1988, while working
for Vice President George Herbert Walker Bush, Ailes laid a trap for Rather.
Ailes and Bush offered Rather an exclusive interview, but stipulated that
it had to be live. As I wrote on July 31, 2001:
And
then there was the Black Eye at Black Rock of the Bush interview. In 1988,
media guru Roger Ailes suckered Rather into conducting a live interview with
Vice President George Bush, then the Republican presidential candidate. Journalists
don't like to conduct live interviews, because they then lose the power of
the final cut. Being able to cut a story means being able to shape it. Instead,
Ailes and Bush did the shaping, with Bush, in a politician's fantasy come
true, going on the offensive, attacking Rather.
Dan Rather didn’t know what hit him.
If you don’t think Rather hasn’t sought ever since to avenge himself against
Ailes, then you haven’t left Kansas. And as the Web site RatherBiased.com
has shown, Rather has long been openly hostile towards George Bush the Elder,
going back to before the 1988 interview. That hostility extends to the current
President Bush.
But that
doesn’t mean Rather would knowingly participate in a hoax, just to harm the
President. It does mean, however, that in his desire to continue his Texas
vendetta, he let down his guard and his standards. My experience is that
most people can be pretty vindictive (and yes, that applies to yours truly
in spades), but powerful people are much more vindictive than the rest of
us, and are able to give vent to their vindictiveness.
As former ABC News reporter Bob Zelnick wrote on September 29,
Without
the documents there was no heart of the report, only thirty year-old hearsay.
Without them the report would never have made 60 Minutes, or the Evening News, or for that matter, the Podunk Press.
What was on display at CBS appears to have been a ‘get George Bush’ mentality
-- colleagues said Ms. Mapes had been working the story for five years --
compounded by the abdication of editorial responsibility by those who turn
meek in the presence of Mr. Rather.
Indeed,
Rather and his CBS colleagues are so openly hostile towards the President,
that on September 23, at the height of Memogate/Rathergate, when Iraqi Prime
Minister Ayad Allawi held a press conference in the White Hose Rose Garden,
ABC, NBC, Fox and CNN covered the story, but CBS boycotted it.
Power
Rather also wanted the power of having broken the story that would decide
the election. Again, although he is a socialist, that doesn’t mean he saw
himself as John Kerry’s personal “plumber” (though Rather’s 60 Minutes
producer, Mary Mapes, may be another story). And yet, any reporter who succeeds
at unearthing a major scandal, in which one of the major candidates is implicated,
might just tip the election in the other candidate’s favor, and guarantee
the reporter a place in journalism’s pantheon … as long as the scandal implicates
Pres. Bush!
Now, this may sound contradictory, but I believe that Rather sought to cost
President Bush the election; not, however, in the sense of consciously seeing
himself as a Democrat operative. Rather, he was -- along with many of his
colleagues at CBS, ABC, and NBC -- engaging in self-deception. Many of the
alleged journalists of the SMSM don’t see themselves as helping John Kerry
win the election because they are socialists in journalistic drag, but because
they believe that this is simply what any decent person in the same position
would do. That is how hermetically sealed off from the world their corrupt
subculture is.
At the same time, though, many alleged journalists from that world do see
themselves as political operatives, an attitude that is rooted in tradition.
For a little historical perspective, the Founding Fathers were aware of the
inherently political nature of the press, but felt that its positive contribution,
in permitting public political discussion, and exposing corruption, outweighed
its defects.
To my knowledge, America’s first journalistic hoax, which was also her first
race hoax, was perpetrated in 1802, by scandalmonger and extortionist James
Thomson Callender against Thomas Jefferson, when President Jefferson refused
to yield to Callender’s demand that the latter be named postmaster of Richmond,
Virginia. That was the Sally Hemings
Hoax, whereby Callender claimed that Jefferson had fathered a child with
a slave mistress, a hoax which 202 years later, still has “legs.”
During roughly the first half of the 20th century, the terms “journalist,”
“publicist,” and “propagandist” were used interchangeably in the U.S. and
Europe. It was only due to the Nazis and Josef Goebbels’ Reich Propaganda
Ministry, that the term “propaganda” became a pejorative term.
For an example of how today’s SMSM subculture operates, during the late 1990s, ABC News
reporter Bob Zelnick started working on a book on then-Vice President Al
Gore. Since Zelnick was not a socialist, and thus could not be relied on
to write a book with the “correct” omissions, evasions, and conclusions,
his bosses at ABC News ordered him to cease and desist from writing
the book. Zelnick, a 22-year veteran of the network, had to resign from ABC
in early 1998, in order to complete the book.
That’s called “zero tolerance.” Such repression would never have occurred,
had Zelnick been working on a book on a powerful Republican. Had anyone at
ABC News sought to muzzle such a book, the entire industry would have risen, outraged, in Zelnick’s support. Instead, there was silence.
By the way, though Zelnick was involuntarily “retired” from journalism, he
did manage to get work as the head of the journalism program at Boston University.
As reported by Howard Kurtz in the September 21 Washington Post, Zelnick said of CBS’ handling of Memogate:
‘There's
one word I haven't heard so far: retraction. They've yielded inch by inch
on the authenticity of the documents and the reliability of the source, but
without the documents there was no story.’ Until CBS retracts the story and
apologizes directly to Bush, ‘it mitigates the potential beneficial effect
of an independent board.’
The young
Dan Rather would not have done the Memogate story. Memogate is a product
of a time in which the media routinely publish as “news” insane accusations
and baseless rumors, and specifically of an election season in which alleged
journalists, often in collusion with Democrat party operatives, have engineered
fraudulent “October surprises” on a monthly, and sometimes weekly basis.
Over the past several years, journalism has been continually defined down,
so that the difference between a fraud and an expose has largely been lost.
Dan Rather was just going with the flow.
New York-based freelancer Nicholas Stix has written for Toogood Reports, Middle American News, the New York Post, Daily News, American Enterprise, Insight, Chronicles, Newsday and many other publications. His recent work is collected at The Critical Critic.
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