Time To Stop This

Chris Bowers:

Both Democrats and the netroots won a big victory today when John Edwards refused to cave into the pressure of a right wing smear job [...]

Still, despite our victories, this is far from over. First, because he refused to cave to right-wing pressure and establishment campaign advice, Edwards will receive a significant amount of criticism. When this happens, we need to remember that he stood with us during this fight, and so we have to stand with him against the forthcoming attacks. This goes for everyone, whether or not you are an Edwards supporter. He didn't throw us under the bus, and so we can't let him get thrown under the bus, even--especially--if another Democratic campaign is trying to do the throwing.

Second, while Edwards did not cave into right-wing pressure, which was dutifully stenographed by the media, the power structure that allows Republicans to push any conceivable smear of Democrats and progressives into national focus is still fully operational. The current, bullshit attacks on Pelosi are a case in point. As such, it is time to turn our attention to how this story was reported on in the first place.

It is bitterly ironic that established news outlets are failed to provide context, do proper research, vet sources, and otherwise uphold basic standards of journalism on a story about bloggers. After all, bloggers often receive exactly the same criticisms from the established media. However, few people heard about William Donahue's long history of vicious religious intolerance--instead, they only heard that he was a Catholic who wanted Amanda and Melissa fired. Also, few people heard that John McCain's staff has been criticized for controversies far surpassing this--instead, most were given the impression that this was the first case of a blogger / campaign controversy. Others heard outright falsehoods about the story, such as the notion that Amanda tried to delete her past comments.

BlogPAC, to which I am a donor (little something called disclosure, media), has an email form for you to send the New York Times, AP, MSNBC, CNN, and the other news orgs. who willfully printed the words of William Donohue as if they were the Gospel, as if he's the arbiter of what constitutes moral behavior. I urge you to use the form and let these organizations know that we're not going to take this.

Matt Taibbi, one of my favorite writers working today (even if he speaks to my more cynical side), did a well-regarded article for AlterNet about punishing the right-wing smear merchants and liars. He was responding to the "Barack Obama studied at a madrassah" smear, and I don't know if it applies to this situation, but it's worth thinking about.

I know for sure that if I made a journalistic "mistake" of that magnitude, I'd be spending the rest of my life picking strawberries in the Siberian tundra. Most print journalists I know would expect the same thing; the legal ramifications alone of intentionally going to print with a story that missed by that much would guarantee that 80 cents out of every dollar you made for the next ten years would go to the victim of your libel. That's unless you're Tom Friedman and you can use congenital idiocy as a defense in court.

For some reason, however, we never see full-blown libel suits in high-level political journalism. Moreover, there appears to be a completely different standard for talk-radio and TV talk-show hosts, who are somehow allowed to lie and fuck up with impunity, and still remain employed. I get the feeling that as a society we have decided to give a collective pass to serial media swindlers like Sean Hannity simply because we never expect them to actually document the "facts" that come spewing in mass volumes out of their zoster-covered mouths every day. We actually expect them to pull most of their material out of their asses, and are mostly content to address the problem by pompously correcting their errata post-factum in whiny media-crit outlets like...well, like this one. Actual real punishment never seems to be forthcoming [...]

The lesson of all this -- and of the Iraq war, the Swift Boat controversy, and indeed the whole careers of swine like Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Michael Savage and the like -- is that unless you prevent the lie from coming out to begin with, it doesn't really matter what happens afterward. In the Internet age, and with no kind of regulation of the "facts" that are circulated on afternoon radio, once that genie is out of the bottle, he's staying out [...]

If the press is serious about saving itself as a social institution, it has to start policing its own business. We all have to encourage the likes of Barack Obama to hire the meanest lawyers on the planet and to file the hairiest lawsuits imaginable against the Hannitys, Gibsons, and Savages of the world. We have to impress upon the victims of these broadsides that choosing to ignore that style of libel is a betrayal of the public trust and an act of political cowardice that the rest of us end up paying for in spades. That's the ugly truth: Until one of those monsters goes down in a fireball of punitive litigation, we are all fucked. And it's not going to happen anytime soon.

Obama did appear to get the message by freezing Fox News out of any press availability. Edwards may have to do the same with any organization that continues to print blatant claptrap like the rantings of William Donohue, an anti-Semitic bigot who has the gall to lecture about decency.

Maybe it's by rewarding people like Congressman Anthony Weiner, who went on the floor of the House today and repeatedly used the phrase "Republic Party". Maybe it's contacting reporters directly (all their emails are public) and pitching stories to them the same way the right peddles their nonsense. We simply have to create an environment where those in the media who lie, or commit sins of omission, lose their place in the debate. There has to be an actual consequence for slander.