Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics (8 page)

Ponder what that really means—for our country and our political system. Our establishment political press, according to two of its most influential members, is
led by
a lowlife gossipmonger who, a mere ten years ago, was considered so unseemly and unreliable that he was the symbol of journalistic irresponsibility, that which was to be avoided. Yet now he is the “Walter Cronkite” of this era to our nation’s press corps, setting its agenda and dictating its coverage. And our political press, in turn, is defined, first and foremost, by the “attack-based personality-obsessed politics” that Matt Drudge perfected.

More significantly still, Drudge is no mere generic dirtmonger. He is a dirtmonger with a distinctly right-wing political agenda. He was the creation of Rush Limbaugh, who, in the mid-1990s, relentlessly promoted Drudge’s trashy anti-Clinton items at a time when Drudge was an obscure Internet gossip with fewer than a thousand daily readers. As a result of the attention paid to him by Limbaugh, Drudge became famous by virtue of serving as Innuendo Central for the most scurrilous sex rumors aimed at the Clintons. That he is now the leader of our political press means that he not only dragged it down to his level of “personality-based attacks,” but also has dragged it distinctly
to the right.

More incredibly still, not even the publication of outright fabrications have diminished Drudge’s credibility with, and influence over, our media elite. In the midst of the 2004 presidential campaign, Drudge, looking to recapture the Glory of the Clinton Sex Scandals, ran a screaming headline announcing that John Kerry had harassed a young campaign aide, Alexandra Polier, to the point where she fled the country to Africa in order to escape his unwanted advances:

A frantic behind-the-scenes drama is unfolding around Sen. John Kerry and his quest to lockup the Democratic nomination for President, the Drudge Report can reveal.

Intrigue surrounds a woman who recently fled the country, reportedly at the prodding of Kerry, the Drudge Report has learned….

A close friend of the woman first approached a reporter late last year claiming fantastic stories—stories that now threaten to turn the race for the presidency on its head!…

The report in its entirety was completely false. Polier was forced to issue a statement: “I have never had a relationship with Senator Kerry, and the rumors in the press are completely false.” Without ever apologizing or retracting the story, Drudge simply slinked away from it, eventually reporting that Polier was involved in a romantic relationship with a Kerry aide and then quietly whitewashing the reports from his site.

Even with the story having become completely discredited, right-wing pundits such as Rush Limbaugh continued to make use of it for months. In July—four months after the story was revealed to be a complete hoax—Limbaugh imitated the voice of Bill Clinton giving advice to Kerry:

John, whatever you do, keep that babe in Africa. Don’t let her come back here. I’ve been there, too, and this is not a good thing. What was her name? Alex? Yeah. (Laughing)…Stay away from any more of these. You don’t have to write a book like I had to write.

The Polier story was a lie. Limbaugh repeated it with the intent of depicting John Kerry as a lecherous menace to young women. And Drudge himself has a long record of publishing other blatantly false accusations, from falsely accusing Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal of spousal abuse to suggesting that a bump on John McCain’s head was a growing tumor. And in November 2007, Drudge prominently featured a report from a British tabloid accusing Hillary Clinton of having an ongoing lesbian affair with one of her young Muslim female aides. As part of that item, Drudge excitedly vowed: “The current campaign promises to become one of the dirtiest in modern history.” Yet two full years after the Kerry intern story and multiple fabrications, Mark Halperin and John Harris hailed Drudge as the “Walter Cronkite of their era,” the individual who—more than any other—sets the agenda for what our political press covers.

This
is why our political process has become so broken and corrupt. The worst elements of the far-right wing have been shaping and driving how national journalists view events, the stories they cover, and the narratives they disseminate. For Halperin and Harris to acknowledge that our political press—long deemed by the right-wing noise machine and therefore the press itself to be the “liberal media”—is in fact guided and shaped by a right-wing filthmonger and lowly gossip is extraordinary.

Indeed, Harris and Halperin explicitly acknowledge the incomparable influence that the right-wing smear machine now exerts over how the establishment press covers political issues:

The simultaneous stumble of the Old Media and the rise of the New have had a disproportionate impact on the two warring sides in American politics. While there are plenty of conservatives who have been singed (or even burned at the stake) by the Freak Show, on the whole, these
changes have been beneficial for conservatives and bad for liberals, since the New Media overwhelmingly favors conservatives.
There is no liberal equivalent of the Fox News Channel, or Rush Limbaugh, or the Drudge Report, all of which have significant audiences and
a demonstrated ability to promote controversies and story lines that affect the Old Media.

Imagine the uproar if Halperin and Harris instead had identified a figure associated with the Left—Michael Moore or an Air America personality—as the single most influential figure shaping coverage by the press, or if they had described a process whereby the most vicious ideologues on the Left, rather than the Right, can “promote controversies and story lines” virtually at will. Shrill protests over the “liberal media” would be even louder than they already are.

Yet the duo’s confession that they and their colleagues march to the lowly, right-wing tune of Matt Drudge and the rest of the right-wing “personality-based attack” engines received little attention, and understandably so. After all, anyone who pays even minimal attention to how our media covers political figures is already well aware that they operate just as their Leader, Matt Drudge, does—namely, by reciting right-wing personality attacks designed to make liberals and Democrats appear to be weak and Republicans strong. The sleazy personality-based attacks churned out by the right wing are able to dominate our political discourse and our elections only because the establishment press so hungrily gorges on them and then spews them back, thereby establishing the dominant narratives that dictate how our political leaders are perceived.

John Harris has gone far beyond mere words in recognizing that the political press is dominated by the sort of right-wing attacks in which Drudge specializes. In 2006, Harris announced that he was leaving his prestigious position at the
Washington Post
to found and serve as editor in chief for a new political daily newspaper, to be called
The Politico.

Harris quickly recruited some of the most establishment political journalists in the country to leave their positions and join
The Politico,
including
Washington Post
reporter Jim VandeHei and
Time
magazine White House correspondent Mike Allen. When
The Politico
was launched, VandeHei vowed to assemble “the best political reporting team in the country today and deliver the news the way people want it: fast, fair, and first.” But it quickly became apparent that
The Politico
would follow completely in Drudge’s footsteps, specializing in the types of right-wing personality-based attacks that, as Harris himself acknowledged, dominate our political discourse.

The Politico
is funded almost entirely by the Albritton Corporation, whose founder and CEO, Joseph Albritton, was a longtime right-wing fixture in Washington. And the publication hardly sought to conceal its leanings, as the Albritton Corporation named as
The Politico
’s CEO Frederick Ryan, an official in the Reagan White House, longtime confidant of the Reagan family and the current chairman of the board of trustees of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library Foundation.

Virtually from the first day it began publishing, it was inescapably clear that
The Politico
would devote itself to the same types of vapid, base personality attacks on liberals and Democrats that drive our political and media culture generally. As John Harris,
The Politico
’s editor in chief, recognizes, political media outlets receive attention (and therefore readers and page hits) only by adhering to the standard script, whereby “journalists” take their cues from the Drudge/Limbaugh right-wing noise machine, ignoring substantive policy disputes and focusing obsessively on shallow personality issues and smears.

Almost immediately,
The Politico
became the prime beneficiary of the gossipmonger whom its editor in chief flattered as “the Walter Cronkite of our era.” A link from The Drudge Report is like no other on the Internet; a single Drudge link generates traffic at the linked site magnitudes above any other political website’s ability. Drudge is notoriously reluctant to link to new online ventures, reserving links almost exclusively for established newspapers. Yet virtually from its inception
The Politico
became one of the most linked-to—if not the single most linked-to—sites on Drudge. Sometimes on a daily basis, whatever story
The Politico
happened to churn out, The Drudge Report prominently promoted. From the most banal stories carried by every other news outlet and wire service, to the pettiest personality attacks published only by
The Politico,
the millions of daily Drudge readers were continuously sent to
Politico
stories.

On March 28, 2007, Media Matters published an analysis documenting that it had “reviewed the Drudge Report Archives and found that since
The Politico
launched on January 23 [a mere sixty-four days earlier], Drudge has linked to
Politico
items on at least 45 separate occasions.”

On some occasions, Drudge promoted and linked to
Politico
stories even before
The Politico
published the story on its own site. The two websites worked in perfect tandem with each other, and no publication promoted the gossip-obsessed, right-wing Drudge agenda as extensively as did
The Politico.
Drudge, in turn, repaid
The Politico
with links so numerous and continuous that one Web analyst estimated in March 2007 that Drudge accounted for 65 percent of
The Politico
’s traffic (the next-highest source of traffic for
The Politico
was Google, at a mere 3 percent).

And it was not hard to understand this coordinated linking strategy between Drudge and
The Politico.
The latter churned out one petty, personality-based attack story after another, aimed primarily at Democrats and liberals, exactly the type of shallow and vapid smears that already pervade our political landscape and that Matt Drudge eats up.

That
The Politico,
as well as numerous other publications, crafts its stories with the hope of attracting Drudge’s attention is conceded by Harris himself in
The Way to Win,
describing the perception of Drudge’s importance:

Meanwhile, although there is no system for authorized leaks to the Drudge Report at the
Washington Post,
editors at the website and main newspaper are delighted when Drudge does link to stories at washingtonpost.com. Invariably, traffic to the site soars. And there is evident frustration when the Drudge Report does not acknowledge significant
Washington Post
pieces.

Harris goes on to recount how a mere mention from Drudge single-handedly enabled Harris to get invited on major news shows to promote his new book.

The Politico
has followed this Drudge-based strategy tenaciously. The most attention-generating, petty
Politico
attack began on April 16, 2007, when former
New York Daily News
reporter Ben Smith, assigned to cover Democratic presidential candidates for
The Politico,
published an item regarding John Edwards’s haircuts. The item was titled “The Hair’s Still Perfect,” and at the top displayed a large, informal photograph of Edwards, grinning widely. Underneath the photograph, Smith wrote: “How much you ask [
sic
] does it cost to look like that?” Smith continued:

Well, John Edwards’ campaign for president spent $400 on February 20, and another $400 on March 7, at a top Beverly Hills men’s stylist, Torrenueva Hair Designs.

The expensive haircut is, of course, a perennial. Bill Clinton got zinged for getting a cut from Cristophe, and Hillary was found at one point to have buried a stylist on her campaign payroll.

Obama, on the other hand, gets his cut cheap and frequent—but he does take the process seriously enough to hold his calls.

Only Edwards, however, has had the care he takes with his hair memorialized on YouTube.

Edwards’ campaign also spent money at two spas: Designworks Salon in Dubuque, and Pink Sapphire in Manchester.

Over the phrase “memorialized on YouTube,” Smith provided a link to a widely disseminated video of Edwards from the 2004 presidential campaign where, prior to a television appearance, he brushes his hair in front of a mirror for thirty to forty seconds. That video was endlessly deployed by right-wing pundits and bloggers to mock Edwards during the campaign as an effeminate, vain girly-man obsessed with his hair. Not only did Smith link to the video as part of his haircut item, but the specific video he chose shows Edwards brushing his hair while blaring in the background is the song “I Feel Pretty.”