Pants on Fire!

Media finally start calling McCain on his lies

©Bryan Zepp Jamieson
http://www.wemagazine.org
09/26/08

Something’s going on with the media, formerly known as America’s free press.

For years, they’ve carried water for the GOP. There was no lie too egregious, no moron too idiotic, that the GOP vomited up at the American people that the media wouldn’t cover for.

In the Clinton years, they were consumed with a blow job and lurid rumors invented, for the most part, by a mad billionaire and his collection of hacks in Pittsburgh, and a demented sociopathic Korean self-styled god. It took a civic minded pornographer to force them to acknowledge that Clinton’s behavior not only wasn’t worth such attention, but wasn’t unusual among politicians, Republican and Democratic alike.

In 2000, they ignored the fact that even though he was wired for the answers, Putsch got hammered flat in debate by Gore, who had at least 50 IQ points on him, and instead, followed Rove’s lead and dwelled on Gore’s exasperated sighs that any normal person might exhale when confronted with a fool under frightening circumstances.

They covered for the White House having a gay whore pose as a reporter in the West Wing, humiliating themselves in the process.

They got in bed with the military for ratings, dutifully taking army propaganda and rewrapping it as news and feeding it to the public in a manner that the old Soviet Izvestiya would approve of.

They helped destroy one of their own greatest figures, Dan Rather, over a type of minor stagecraft employed routinely in newscasts but which was used by the frantic right to slash at the credibility of the entire piece (about what a hopeless screwup Putsch was while in the Texas Air National Guard, a piece that was entirely accurate), Rather, CBS, and the media in general.

They spent years pretending that the rise of the blogosphere had nothing to do with them, and didn’t acknowledge that liberals and centrists as well as right wingers hated them, and called them corporate whores for the GOP.

In the early days of the campaign, before Iowa, the NY Times had a carefully researched and well-written piece about McCain being unduly influenced by a lobbyist, and how he wound up appropriating $250 million to an outfit he had previously strongly opposed. The article contained an observation by ONE OF MCCAIN’S OWN CAMPAIGN STAFF that they had maneuvered to distance McCain from the lobbyist, one Vicki Ising, because they were spending so much time together that people were beginning to talk. The McCain campaign reacted, not by addressing the charges, but by accusing the NY Times of lurid sleazemongering by alleging that McCain was sleeping with the lady lobbyist. The Times had made no such accusation, but meekly rolled over and retracted the piece, while the rest of the mainstream media chorused against the dangers of “gotcha journalism.”

This was all at a time when so-called journalists would marvel publically at the close personal bond they enjoyed with McCain, and how he would have them over for barbeques and talk to them on a first name basis and ask after their kids. Even Jon Stewart fell into that trap.

As a result of all this, I was expecting the media to handle the 2008 campaign pretty much the same way they did the 2000 campaign. In that, nothing the Bush campaign said or did was ever questioned. Instead, media coverage was on a parade of sleazy hatchet job books from right wing hacks at Regnery Press, and on the newsworthiness of lies. This would be things like the falsity that Gore claimed to have invented the internet, and if questioned at all (and it wasn’t on Faux News), it would not be “Why are people telling this lie?” but “How is this assertion affecting the race?” That’s how they promoted the lies: “How are these allegations affecting news coverage of the race?” It gave them the opportunity to discuss the allegations non-stop without ever actually examining their veracities. They gave the trashier rank-and-file of the GOP a free pass, refusing to do more than chuckle over the Republicans who wore bandaids with purple hearts painted on them to mock Kerry’s service – perhaps one of the most disgraceful and unamerican moments in party history. Not newsworthy, though.

The GOP was getting the same kid-glove treatment this year, but in just the past few weeks, everything changed.

I can even point to the day the change began. It was the day after the Republican Convention ended, when AP had a list of the claims John McCain had made that simply weren’t true. The list was drowned out by all the bombast over Sarah Palin, but it was interesting. I don’t remember any similar lists appearing in the mainstream media in 2004.

Then it became clear that the McCain campaign wasn’t going to let the press anywhere near Sarah Palin. A lot of people in the media and press were tired to death of being manipulated by Republicans and then dumped on anyway (I know some reporters, including a couple who are fairly well known. They all have an even more negative view of how the press does its job in America than I do). This angered them. Finally, they let that old softballer Charlie Gibson interview Sarah Palin, and it turned out she couldn’t even field Charlie Gibson’s underhanded tosses. The Republicans reacted by accusing Charlie Gibson of trapping her into gotcha questions such as asking about the central tenet of Putsch’s foreign policy. This wasn’t “who’s the president of Albania?” stuff; this was “what approach would you take toward Russia?”

Even as she avoided the press, she kept repeating the egregious lie that she opposed the “bridge to nowhere,” and the inanity that she could deal with the Russians because Russia was visible from the tip of Alaska, 1,500 miles from Juneau. (Obama could have pointed out that Illinois and Delaware are closer to Moscow than Juneau is). The press started calling her on it.

Then there were the campaign ads, which were just one lie piled on another. When they weren’t falsifying Obama’s views, they were falsifying McCain’s. Even Karl Rove thought the lying had gone too far, and could no longer pass the verisimilitude test, and the media, agreeing with Rove, called McCain on it.

Then there was the matter of the campaign manager and the Freddie Mac payments. Rick Davis was receiving money – on the payroll – of Freddie Mac from 2005 until August 2008. $15,000 a month. Apparently he was being paid for nothing more than to be proximate to McCain, and hopefully influence the candidate. McCain denied it, said that Davis hadn’t been involved with Freddie Mac for several years, and viciously attacked the Times for what he tried to pass off as another gotcha attack from the hostile liberal media – that would be the same hostile media he put so much time and effort into inviting to his barbeques and stuff.

This time, not only did the NY Times fight back, but a dozen other news outlets openly called McCain a liar. And proved it.

This was mostly drowned out by the credit meltdown and bailout debate, But that didn’t do McCain any favors. Not only did he have to run against his own quarter century of being a deregulation advocate, but he had to pretend he could provide leadership in such a crisis, and failed miserably, and while he was at it, enraged the redoubtable David Letterman by blowing him off, supposedly for the crisis, but actually for a softball interview with Katie Couric.

The media in the US is in a crisis. Newspapers are folding, and less than 10% of Americans bother watching the evening news any more. People don’t trust or respect the media, and that’s largely the fault of Republicans, who started running against “the liberal media” (which never really existed) in the 1960s, and were able to manipulate the media from the 80s, and then destroyed the credibility of the media in the 90s with Faux and incessant demands that anything off a GOP fax machine be treated as news, and then by whipping around and dumping on them anyway.

Note to Republicans: If you don’t treat your slaves well, they will try to escape.

I suspect, finally, that the corporations that own much of the media and allowed it to become a sort of a sex toy for the GOP have finally realized that no matter how much the GOP talks about a business-friendly climate, their extremist notions of complete laissez-faire haven’t worked out. If anything, the market has shown that deregulation is pretty much the same as locking a bunch of pre-schoolers in a room with lots of sugared candy and live grenades. The market does not act from enlightened self-interest, cannot self-regulate, and will self-destruct if allowed to do so. I imagine that all of the parent corporations of America’s media are looking at their own prospects now, and realizing that they might have been brighter had laws they formerly found oppressive had remained in force to prevent them from making reckless moves and bad mistakes.

America still desperately needs to come to grips with wrestling control of their country back from the corporations and their pet media. But for now, those corporations have struck themselves a savage blow and, on the ropes, are allowing free speech in the media.

It’s America’s last best chance to reassert itself, and for Americans to take back control of their country.

Nothing grows back faster than Wall Street arrogance and lust for control. I suggest Americans act quickly.