The Latest Attack Of The Wingnut Brigade

Amazingly enough, conservatives weren't satisfied by the resignation of Van Jones and the funding cutoff for ACORN. Seems they are trying to attack the Administration relentlessly, as if that was their singular objective! There have been a few clumsy stabs this week, like the mild song praising the President, or the lame tape of community organizers praying to "O God," not "Obama"; or attacking the President for wanting to bring the Olympics and $22 billion dollars of economic activity to America. But the right thinks they've found a target with a Department of Education official named Kevin Jennings. Sean Hannity has practically jumped on his desk and demanded Jennings' resignation for allegedly "covering up statutory rape." I say allegedly because only Sean Hannity thinks that, and it certainly doesn't meet with the facts of the case.

Despite evidence to the contrary, Fox News -- led by Sean Hannity -- and other right-wing media have claimed that Department of Education official Kevin Jennings "cover[ed] up statutory rape" and violated Massachusetts law by not reporting to authorities a 1988 conversation in which a high school student told Jennings about his relationship with an older man. In fact, Jennings' attorney wrote in a 2004 letter that the student was 16 years old, which is -- and was at the time -- the legal age of consent in Massachusetts.

Jennings' attorney: Conversation was "with a sixteen-year-old student"; "no factual basis" that Jennings was "aware of any sexual victimization of any student." In an August 3, 2004, letter, Constance M. Boland of the law firm Nixon Peabody -- which represented the organization that Jennings ran -- wrote that the "conversation" Jennings had was with "a sixteen-year-old student" and that there "is no factual basis whatsoever for" the "claim that Mr. Jennings engaged in unethical practices, or that he was aware of any sexual victimization of any student, or that he declined to report any sexual victimization at any time." [Boland letter, 8/3/04]

What happened was that Jennings wrote about a conversation he had while a teacher - 21 years ago - where a 16 year-old student told him about a relationship with an older man. Jennings, who is gay, didn't report the kid to the authorities for doing anything illegal, mainly because he... wasn't doing anything illegal.

Nevertheless, Hannity is outraged (but that's redundant) and the trumped-up scandal is seeping into the media. John Aravosis writes:

Allen went on a right-wing TV show this morning and falsely accused Department of Education official Kevin Jennings of a crime. He said - falsely - that Jennings failed to report "an assault" on a young man, twenty years ago, which would be a crime under Massachusetts law at the time. In fact, Jennings was never informed of an assault on anyone. He spoke to a student, of the legal age of consent, who had sex with a man. Ta ta ta dum.

Yes, you guessed - they were g-a-y. And one was older than the other. Ergo, it must have been one of those gay pedophile predator types who always go after young boys, because those gays are such perverts - right?

I'm not surprised that FOX News and the far right hate groups are going after a gay appointee in the Obama administration. Anti-gay bigotry is ripe at FOX, in the religious right, and in the GOP base that now controls the Republican party. So none of this should surprise us. What does surprise me is when real journalists, real reporters, like Mike Allen, swallow the bait from the ilk of Sean Hannity and the Family Research Council, and report their sludge as fact, when it's an outright lie. It really makes you wonder why the media smells a story here. I doubt they'd be as interested if the two legal adults, and the Obama official, were straight.

And another thing. Would Mike Allen, and any other media outlet covering this story, prefer if the kid had killed himself? From the REST of the story, if you bother reading it, the kid didn't exactly sound long for this world. Can you imagine, in the 1980s mind you (which is when this happened), had Jennings outed the kid as gay, not just to his parents, but to the entire state (which would include his school), which is what Allen is proposing? Assuming the kid didn't kill himself, would his parents have kicked him out of their house (which happened, and still happens, to a lot of gay kids)? Gee, I'll bet the media covering this fake story didn't think of that one. No, they had a "sex" story involving a gay guy - three gay guys in fact - and well, how you can top that?

Jennings' real crime in the eyes of his accusers appears to be that he's a gay man. After all, a famous director drugging and raping an underage white girl without consent - that's OK for the establishment, and he shouldn't be punished because he's in their social class. Someone like Jennings not turning in a ghey for his consensual relationanship - that deserves a burning at the stake.

This ticky-tack distractions don't even have to succeed. It's part of an effort to chip away at the legitimacy of the President, so that when the big story breaks, these zombie lies can fit an invented pattern. That's all.

Journamalism!

So Glenn Thrush of Politico, seeking to post a sexy headline and justify it, hid the context of a Tom Perriello quote with ellipses to make it seem like he was tarring everyone who attended his town halls as a racist. When questioned, Thrush restored the full text without commenting that he changed it.

Today, he rightly offers an apology - but the content of it is truly revealing:

A couple of days ago I ran an item on Rep. Tom Perriello (D-Va.), who appeared on MSNBC to talk about the town halls -- and commented that he had witnessed some racist comments over the summer.

The video, which had gone viral among conservatives, was sent to me by a tipster. I watched it, thought it was interesting, and began to transcribe the key parts. As I was transcribing, I got an email from a NRCC spokesman Andy Sere, who wanted to comment on it, appending what appeared to be a full a transcript of the exchange.

A time saver, I thought, so I cut-and-pasted. What I didn't immediately realize was that Sere had replaced key words -- that provided important context --with elipses. When the error was pointed out, I quickly fixed it.

Shorter Glenn Thrush - I was writing a story when a partisan operative passed me some text, so I dutifully copied it without checking.

I think this comment says it all: "did you WIN THE AFTERNOON though?"

They Used To Call This Dowdification

Politico's Glenn Thrush murders a quote from Tom Perriello to make it seem like he's saying that opposition to Obama's agenda is rooted in racism. Now, forget about the truth of that statement. In order for Thrush to meet the evidence promised in his headline and get eyeballs and make sure everyone passes around his link, he has to bury the context in an ellipse.

What Thrush provides:

Perriello: “Well, you know, making the comment or not making the comment doesn’t change the reality that clearly this is part of what’s going on…I conducted over a hundred hours of town hall meetings in central and southern Virginia…and there were…cases where very racist remarks were made. Sometimes they were called out by neighbors in the audience, sometimes they weren’t. Clearly, race remains a factor in America…there’s also a lot of disagreement here that is genuine here and not based on race, so I think we have to have both conversations.”

What Perriello actually said:

Well, you know, making the comment or not making the comment doesn’t change the reality that clearly this is part of what’s going on, but not all of what's going on. I conducted over a hundred hours of town hall meetings in central and southern Virginia…and there were the rare cases where very racist remarks were made.

he put "the rare" in an ellipse. That is just journalistic malpractice, deliberately sensationalizing a quote to elicit a response that puts a Democratic lawmaker into a flashpoint debate for no reason.

After getting some heat for it, Thrush returned the full context of the quote he took out of context without noting what he did.

He is a blogger, so you can't use the ever-ready phrase "Call a blogger ethics panel" with the requisite irony. Just suffice to say that this is what Politico calls "journalism."

...Here's the Google cache of that page, showing Thrush's ellipses burying the context of Perriello's remarks.

Wingnut Welfare Up For The Highest Bidder

Mike Allen has really advanced the cause of exposing pay-to-play media scandals over the past week. Fresh off the Washington Post salons, Allen catches a pillar in the conservative movement, David Keene of the American Conservative Union, trying to sell his own opinions:

The American Conservative Union asked FedEx for a check for $2 million to $3 million in return for the group’s support in a bitter legislative dispute, then the group’s chairman flipped and sided with UPS after FedEx refused to pay.

For the $2 million plus, ACU offered a range of services that included: “Producing op-eds and articles written by ACU’s Chairman David Keene and/or other members of the ACU’s board of directors. (Note that Mr. Keene writes a weekly column that appears in The Hill.)”

The conservative group’s remarkable demand — black-and-white proof of the longtime Washington practice known as “pay for play” — was contained in a private letter to FedEx , which was provided to POLITICO.

Politico is usually just link-bait, but if they want to expose the media and burn down all the knotty work being done in official Washington, I'll link away!

Note how the weekly column in The Hill is proffered right off the bat. It's also worth noting that FedEx rejected this offer, and right afterwards Keene backed UPS in the dispute. Whether UPS bought off Keene or Keene just got pissy is unclear.

The point is that you simply cannot believe the word of these conservative activists. Or really anyone - the moral here is to always check your sources. But we've seen too many of these kinds of scandals on the conservative side - Armstrong Williams, Maggie Gallagher, Jeff Gannon, etc. - to give them the benefit of the doubt at all.

Media Fine Whine

Nico Pitney has consistently provided the best coverage of any American journalist on the Iranian uprising. Better and more widespread than any major news organization, often based on primary sources, consistent, deep, and comprehensive. This is Huffington Post's finest hour, and they're not doing anything particularly revolutionary. They just set a reporter up with knowledge of social networking and liveblogging and put him to work. And he's performed brilliantly.

Today, he got to participate in the White House press conference, and before attending he solicited questions from Iranians on what to ask the President if he were called upon. The White House obviously noticed this, considering he's been the number one source for news and information about Iran, and wanted to reward him for his work as well as inject a different perspective into the questioning. So President Obama called on Pitney and was asked about what circumstances under which he would accept an Ahmadinejad victory, a difficult but necessary question to be asking a President who previously wanted to engage with the Islamic Republic.

“Under which conditions would you accept the election of Ahmadinejad, and if you do accept it without any significant changes in the conditions there, isn't that a betrayal of the — of what the demonstrators there are working towards?”

Out of this, the traditional media devises a conspiracy that Pitney is somehow the Jeff Gannon of the Obama Presidency, and that his question was chorepgraphed and therefore illegitimate. The White House quickly released a statement that they had contacted Pitney beforehand:

We did reach out to him prior to press conference to tell him that we had been paying attention to what he had been doing on Iran and there was a chance that he’d be called on. And, he ended up asking the toughest question that the President took on Iran. In the absence of an Iranian press corps in Washington, it was an innovative way to get a question directly from an Iranian.

That's the whole point that people like Michael Calderone don't want to face. Pitney asked the TOUGHEST possible question to the President about Iran. If the question was "coordinated," as Calderone darkly suggests, it would sound something like "isn't what you're doing on Iran completely awesome and shouldn't John McCain apologize to you?" Instead, Pitney offered a policy question, from an Iranian, that forced Obama to engage with his own rhetoric about justice and bearing witness to the events.

Notably, the last time a Huffington Post reporter got called on, putting the traditional media's panties in a bunch, San Stein ALSO asked a very tough question to Obama about establishing a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to investigate the Bush torture regime. Maybe the press corps isn't pissed about the Huffington Post getting called on, they're pissed about those reporters schooling them at the only thing they do all day.

Marcy Wheeler notes:

As to Calderone's bitching, it's out of line for several reasons. First, if I knew that Nico was hoping to ask a question from an Iranian, then chances are the people paid to know these things at the White House knew. What better tribute to democracy and free speech could the White House make than to allow this question to be posed to the President?

And, after all, one primary focus of the presser was Iran. There are few who would argue that Nico's reporting--his tireless compilation of news coming in from both traditional and citizen media--hasn't been far and away the best minute-to-minute news on the Iranian crisis (to take nothing away from the people offering superb commentary and expertise, which I consider something different). Maybe the Politico's media reporter has missed it, but Nico's doing something pretty historic with his reporting on Iran. So even assuming the White House isn't as up-to-speed as I am, how hard do you think it would have been for them to guess that Nico, who has been living and breathing the Iranian crisis since it started, would ask a question about Iran?

I mean, c'mon. To try to turn this into a scandal is to assume that both the White House and Politico itself are a lot stupider than I think they are.

I don't think you can possibly assume that about Politico.

I'm Not This Lucky

Politico could go into default?

Not to wish for the failure of any media organization - we can't afford to lose many more - but the right-wing link-trolling model of journalism ought to fail. It ought to fail badly.

Link-Baiting And How To Do It

I write a lot about the media's penchant for conflict and meaningless issues. I don't think that can be better expressed by the attempt to whip up controversy over an American President appearing on a stage with a flag. I mean, it doesn't get more petty than that.

What's funny is that Mike Allen of the Politico flagged this (pardon the pun) as something that "cable's gonna go cuckoo over." Of course, when he says that, he's basically setting the agenda, because cable news producers read Mike Allen's "Playbook" column daily to get story ideas. Cable actually passed on this one - too stupid for CABLE - but Politico dug it because it was a conflict-inducing non-story. Which is their mission statement - to provide a useful conveyance for the disseminating of B.S. spin.

TNR has posted an internal Politico memo "revealing the organization's formula for 'must-read' coverage." Reading through CAPS-laden passages like these, I couldn't help imagining them read by Alec Baldwin's character in Glengarry Glen Ross:

"We are not the AP or the New York Times" ... If we ONLY do what those two great organizations do, WE WILL NOT SURVIVE AND WE WON'T HAVE JOBS." [...]

"Speed kills. Velocity - SPEED + POWER (good sources, smart thinking) - will make you a winner."

And like Mamet's salesmen trying to talk their marks into investing in swampland, it seems the Politico is little more than a con. See, the Politico memo has a lot of instructions for reporters, including a list of questions Politico employees should ask themselves about prospective stories. Things like "Would this be a 'most-emailed' story?" and "Will a blogger be inspired to post on this story?" But it omits any mention of striving to ensure accuracy or quality. No questions like "Do I have the story right?" or "Am I being spun by my sources?" or "Is this story important?" (And certainly no "Does it really matter how much someone paid for a haircut?")

Maybe those questions aren't included because they aren't relevent to Politico's extraordinary mission statement, presented at the top of the memo:

THE MISSION: Politico journalism drives conversation in official Washington, making us ESSENTIAL READING for anyone who is or wants to be a player, and a KEY OUTLET for anyone who is trying to shape a political or government debate.

That's it. That's the whole mission. Nothing about informing people, or finding the truth. Instead, Politico sees its mission as being a "key outlet" for the "players" trying to shape political debates. With that as the Politico's mission, it seems unlikely they even care whether they're being spun, or getting the story right.

It's really quite unbelievable. It's like Karl Rove invented a news outlet and made sure the cable universe paid attention to it, so his smears could be once-removed.

You can see this mindset at work in Politico's latest story about Barack Obama's tour of the country (no link because that's what they want), which they intimate is Obama "pitting Washington Insiders against Real People," which is a fallback position for Presidents who have received critical coverage. In other words, Obama just hates us cuz he ain't us. Or, as Josh Marshall put it, "Citizens increasingly out of touch with Beltway Media."

Now this makes me mad, and I want to write about how foolish it is and how warped the mindset. But that would basically be playiing into Politico's hands. They don't want to inform, they don't want to be accurate. They want to generate "buzz." They want to make me angry. And they want a link.

A mass-boycott from the progressive blogosphere, if only for a day, would be nice.

Twilight Of The Fourthbranch

Dick Cheney should be holding a cup for handouts in front of the 14th Street Bridge, not feted in the Politico (some would say fellated). He's been totally discredited and properly villified by every sentient person in the country, and the only people that should be knocking on the door to his new office are cops with handcuffs. Of course, inside the Beltway, there is nothing a Republican can do that would disqualify reporters from taking seriously their thoughts on all matters.

And thus we have Fourthbranch intoning that we'll all be killed within weeks if we listen to that Muslim guy in the White House.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney warned that there is a “high probability” that terrorists will attempt a catastrophic nuclear or biological attack in coming years, and said he fears the Obama administration’s policies will make it more likely the attempt will succeed.

In an interview Tuesday with Politico, Cheney unyieldingly defended the Bush administration’s support for the Guantanamo Bay prison and coercive interrogation of terrorism suspects.

And he asserted that President Obama will either backtrack on his stated intentions to end those policies or put the country at risk in ways more severe than most Americans — and, he charged, many members of Obama’s own team — understand.

“When we get people who are more concerned about reading the rights to an Al Qaeda terrorist than they are with protecting the United States against people who are absolutely committed to do anything they can to kill Americans, then I worry,” Cheney said.

Protecting the country’s security is “a tough, mean, dirty, nasty business,” he said. “These are evil people. And we’re not going to win this fight by turning the other cheek.”

Citing intelligence reports, Cheney said at least 61 of the inmates who were released from Guantanamo during the Bush administration — “that’s about 11 or 12 percent” — have “gone back into the business of being terrorists.”

It just goes on and on like this. And the three bobbleheads - Mike Allen, John Harris, and Jim VanDeHei - who wrote this, might as well have posted the transcript, they add so little.

For instance, when Cheney gravely rumbles that zombie lie about the 61 inmates who were released from Gitmo and became terrorists - including pulling off the devious terrorist activities like writing letters to the editor and appearing in mainstream movies - would it have occurred to any of these three to mention that Cheney and his boss Bush DID THE FUCKING RELEASING?

And that's just a sample. Cheney says that "we're not going to win this fight by turning the other cheek," and isn't asked why his White House turned the other cheek in Afghanistan to focus on Iraq. He worries about the big deficits racked up by the recovery package, and isn't asked about how his White House doubled the national debt and was quoted as saying "deficits don't matter." He snarls “The United States needs to be not so much loved as it needs to be respected" and isn't asked about how torture, indefinite detention, and a host of other illegal actions has catastrophically lowered our respect in the world.

It's disgusting that any self-respecting news organization would even interview this guy and let his lies go unchallenged. But Matt Cooper finds one revealing moment.

Second, one of the best lines in the piece is where Mike Allen, my old partner covering the White House for Time, along with John Harris and Jim VandeHei ask Cheney about the economy. I'll let it speak for itself:

Whether the Bush administration should have done more about the economy: "We did worry about it, to some extent. ... I don't think anybody actually foresaw something of this size and dimension occurring. It's also global. We only control part of the world economy - a very important part."

We did worry about it, to some extent. Even if you see that as a verbal tick of Cheney's it's still a phenomenal line as in, "We did worry about succession, to some extent," said Andrew Johnson.

The proper way to address Cheney is by turning your back and shunning, not licking his boots.

Jesus, How Small A Town Is Washington?

In this Think Progress post about war supporters' Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack's pro-war op-ed on Iraq and the blogosphere's reaction to it, Amanda revealed that O'Hanlon is the brother-in-law of Politico editor-in-chief John Harris. Yesterday Matt Yglesias mentioned that O'Hanlon and David Petraeus are college buddies.

Is EVERYONE in the DC commentariat somehow related or connected at the hip? It would certainly explain a lot.

Jack Murtha ripped the op-ed this morning, by the way. I guess he doesn't have relatives in DC.

UPDATE: Unbelievable. O'Hanlon doesn't mind lying on the op-ed pages of the New York Times, but when he is testifying under oath, he changes his tune.

Totally backed down. Said the progress has only been against aqi, that sectarian violence and the civil war is as bad as ever, and that the current strategy will probably fail. He thinks we should partition the country. Why the turnabout from the optimistic op-ed? He didn't say.

The turnabout is because, unlike the Bush Administration, he cares about perjury. Not about the country, because he'll say things like "best war ever" in elite media appearances to deceive people.

Great Moments In Journalism

CNN right now is reporting on this allegation that Harry Reid called Peter Pace and David Petraeus "incompetent" in a discussion with liberal bloggers. The Politico reported it originally; CNN called it a "newspaper," when it's a website owned by a far-right Reagan-era official. The right is having a field day with the story.

Only it maybe didn't happen.

We asked Joan McCarter, who blogs at DailyKos under the name McJoan and wrote about being on the call here, if she recalled Reid calling Pace "incompetent."

"I don't remember him saying anything like that," she answered. "I can't swear he didn't say it. But I have no memory that he actually did. It's not in my notes."

Asked if Reid had disparaged Petraeus at all, McCarter said: "No. He said something about [Petraeus] coming back in September to deliver a report." But on the question of whether he'd said something disparaging, McCarter said: "Not that I recall, no."

"I don't even recall Pace's name specifically being mentioned," adds Barbara Morrill, who blogs at Kos under the name BarbinMD and says she was on the call. "If it was, he did not say that he was incompetent."

Asked if he'd criticized Petraeus, Morrill said: "Not that I recall. I checked my notes," and there was nothing like this. "He mentioned the report that Petraeus is supposed to be coming out in September. I only recall him saying something along the lines that the Bush administration had run the war poorly. Any criticisms were against the Bush administration."

Finally, here's what MyDD's Jonathan Singer, who wrote about the call here, told us: "I don't remember him calling Pace incompetent." He added that while he couldn't promise that he hadn't done it, "I just don't recall those statements."

The Politico runs an unsourced story about Reid making comments on a blogger conference call, reports that no blogger remembers or ever made in their postings on the subject, and that's... good enough for everybody! There was nobody on the call except for bloggers and staff aides, so you have to wonder where the Politico got its information. And I love how the fact that Reid "didn't deny" the charge means that he absolutely said it.

I think that the Politico is going to end up with egg on their face on this one - again.