Media accounts describe him as phony and calculating, incapable of making a heartfelt statement. His history is analyzed cynically, sometimes falsely: Misrepresentations of his statements and actions metastasize into myth. As a result, he is seen as the archetypal slippery, soulless politician. That much of the supporting evidence is false seems utterly beside the point.
That’s how Republicans caricatured Al Gore in 2000 — a line the media dutifully parroted. And as the 2004 presidential campaign gets underway, it’s happening again. This time the victim is Sen. John Kerry.
Like Gore, the Massachusetts Democrat has been characterized, with some justice, as being aloof and cold. On Saturday, when asked about his haughty image during the first debate among the Democratic candidates, he tried to laugh it off (in much the same way Gore unsuccessfully joked about being stiff in 2000) by suggesting he “ought to just disappear and contemplate that by myself.”
But the press has pushed its pseudo-analysis of Kerry far beyond the innocuous observation that he lacks charisma. And in so doing, it is following the same irresponsible course it did with Gore.
As Gore and now Kerry are learning the hard way, you can’t laugh off an image problem to a press corps that now almost always takes personality more seriously than policy. That reporting style has exploded in popularity ever since the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd took her acid observations on the presidential campaign trail in 1992 and became a household name. The Washington Monthly observed at the time that “Today’s campaign planes and buses are freighted with Dowd disciples: hyperliterate capital-W Writers with an eye for detail and an ear for the shuffling going on behind the curtain.” Over time, it’s created an even greater blood lust among political reporters for that canny observation or cutting insight — and whether they are true or not doesn’t always seem to matter.
Take Kerry’s recent statement at a New Hampshire town meeting that “we need a regime change in the United States.” In many ways, the quip illustrated much that might be seen as objectionable about Kerry. The slogan, after all, has been used to describe the U.S. effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power and implies that the regime in question is illegitimate, perhaps even fundamentally evil. Was this an inflammatory and crudely partisan effort to stir up the Demos’ Bush-hating base? You could make a pretty good argument that it was.
But the Weekly Standard’s Noemie Emery saw much, much more. Rather than just criticizing the implicit comparison of Bush to Saddam, she wrote that Kerry’s “turn of phrase can be put down to pandering, over-exuberance, or the wish to appear as too fiendishly clever”; described the “outburst” as motivated by polls showing Kerry tied with Howard Dean in New Hampshire; and announced that “Kerry is now brilliantly situated to make a run for President of France.” In one article, Emery demonstrated three of the key tropes built into the media’s coverage of Gore and turned them against Kerry: the assumed phoniness of everything he says, the assumed cold political calculation behind every move he makes, and the belief that individual gaffes demonstrate deep, fundamental character flaws.
It would be tempting to attribute these patterns to Emery’s basic ideological disagreements with Kerry if her tactics weren’t so eerily parallel with those of the press covering Gore three years ago. The absurd lengths the press went to in its coverage of Gore has been well documented (by no one more than Gore friend and partisan Bob Somerby, and also by Salon and others), and showed that, as the American Prospect’s Paul Waldman wrote, “In 2000, reporters hated Gore’s guts. They bristled at his inaccessibility, they derided his campaign’s strategy and, most of all, they thought he was a phony.” Mainstream, conservative and even some liberal journalists frequently portrayed Gore as an inveterate liar, harping on myths such as the false charge that Gore claimed he invented the Internet or that he inflated his journalistic experience by two years on his résumé.
No matter how untrue these claims were, they proved irresistible to the press, and were used by outlets such as the Boston Globe to justify conclusions like: “Gore has regularly promoted himself, and skewered his opponents, with misleading and occasionally false statements,” according to a story by Walter Robinson and Michael Crowley. Gore was also often portrayed as a cold and calculating political robot — at one point, CNN political analyst William Schneider suggested Gore might have “planned” to make himself perspire at a town hall meeting in New Hampshire in order to “make himself look like a fighter.”
This is not to say, of course, that Gore and Kerry have not engaged in their share of exaggerations and political calculation over the years. Kerry has been legitimately criticized, for instance, for taking unclear and seemingly contradictory positions on issues such as the Iraq war and affirmative action. He has also benefited from misconceptions in the media that he threw away his own medals during a Vietnam War protest, and that he is Irish. But these individual examples don’t come even close to justifying the dominant narrative that treats the candidate as a lying phony — nor the contortions journalists have used to support it.
In Gore’s case, the creation of the image of a phony opportunist took years of work, work that originated primarily in the world of conservative pundits and the Republican National Committee press operation. Indeed, Somerby has demonstrated that several of the most prevalent myths about Gore — such as the claim that he said he invented the Internet, and that he grew up in a fancy hotel — originated in RNC press releases. Conservatives were so successful in framing coverage of Gore’s persona during his later years as vice president that their version was in place in time for the 2000 campaign. In Kerry’s case, right-wing pundits such as Emerie have already had an impact on mainstream press coverage. But the Gore-ing of Kerry has been helped along significantly by the hostile coverage of his hometown newspaper, the Boston Globe.
It was the Globe, in fact, that signaled this past February that press coverage of Kerry was going to follow the Gore pattern. That’s when the paper ran a front-page Sunday story with a new revelation about Kerry’s roots. After an exhaustive investigation conducted by a genealogist hired by the Globe, it revealed that Kerry’s paternal grandfather was Jewish, a fact the senator never knew. The article did not specify exactly why this investigation was valuable to the public, but hinted at the rationale when it noted that some media outlets have incorrectly reported that Kerry, who shares a name with a county in Ireland, is Irish — an influential credential in Kerry’s home state, where Kennedy nostalgia still holds a certain sway.
A month later, the Globe went on the offensive with the revelation that, in 1986, Kerry entered a statement into the Congressional Record that began, “For those of us fortunate enough to share an Irish ancestry …” However, the fourth paragraph of the Globe’s article makes it clear that the statement was written by a Kerry aide and the senator never actually saw it, let alone read it aloud. Nonetheless, the Globe made this nonrevelation front-page news, stating, “Some observers have suggested a lack of clarity about his family origins reflects Kerry’s ill-defined identity and tendency to leave misimpressions that are politically advantageous to him.” That observation mirrored an earlier comment by Globe columnist Joan Vennochi, who wrote, “Kerry’s confusion about his heritage mirrors a larger confusion about his essence: Who is he? What does he believe in?” Just as Gore was constantly accused of “reinventing” himself, Kerry supposedly lacked a core “essence” because he didn’t know his grandfather was Jewish.
It’s also notable that while the Globe seemed to blame Kerry for this identity confusion, the only evidence that Kerry ever claimed he was Irish was the Congressional Record statement, a draft of remarks prepared for him in 1984, and a 1993 interview with the conservative pundit John McLaughlin in which, when asked if his father had any Irish ancestry, Kerry replied, “I don’t know the answer to that.” Indeed, that Globe article at least pointed out that Kerry’s spokeswoman said the senator “has corrected any misstatements he became aware of,” and that the Globe itself had made the false assumption that Kerry was Irish three times over the years (a figure the Globe later upped to eight).
A few days later, the Globe took Kerry to task in another article for not publicly discussing his family background before its investigation — although it’s not at all clear why voters need to know the intricate details of a candidate’s family background. “Never in his 21-year career in public life has Kerry gone out of his way to explain his complex roots,” Globe reporter Anne Kornblut wrote, “even though he discovered some 15 years ago that his paternal grandmother was Jewish, a point he has mentioned only occasionally in public.” The implication is clear: Because Kerry did not preemptively reveal personal information of questionable relevance, he had been deceptive.
The Globe, of course, is not alone in these sorts of attacks. Radio host Rush Limbaugh made it clear what he was trying to do when he recently said on his Web site that “Senator John Kerry has a bad case of the Algores.” The alleged lie in this case was that Kerry told a group of parents and children who live in a polluted area in Massachusetts that “Until I went to Washington, I had never had asthma in my life,” blaming pollution there for the condition. He later clarified that he infrequently uses an inhaler to treat springtime allergies. To most people, it may be obvious that Kerry’s clarification simply explained the extent of his asthma. To Limbaugh, the asthma flap deserved the “did he or didn’t he inhale?” treatment. “Kerry did what the press calls ‘clarified his remarks,’” Limbaugh told his listeners. “That’s what the press calls it when a Democrat admits he lied.”
Another myth that has made the rounds about Kerry is that, while serving in Vietnam, he filmed himself in an attempt to exploit his military service for future political use. New York Times columnist Bill Keller repeated this lie last August, when he wrote that “with all due respect for [Kerry's Vietnam] exploit, how utterly weird is it that he then took out his handy 8-millimeter camera and re-enacted his heroism on film?” A month later, Keller apologized to his readers, admitting, “The first thing to be said is that the senator’s movies are not self-aggrandizing. Kerry is hardly in the film, and never strikes so much as a heroic pose.”
Keller’s source for this mistake? None other than the “usually dependable Boston Globe,” which, as Bob Somerby has pointed out, wrote in a 1996 profile of the senator: “The young man so unconscious of risk in the heat of battle, yet so focused on his future ambitions that he would reenact the moment for film. It is as if he had cast himself in the sequel to the experience of his hero, John F. Kennedy, on the PT-109.”
Like much of the media dissembling that circulated about Gore in 2000, such as that he claimed to have discovered the pollution at Love Canal, it is disturbing not only that these myths circulate throughout the press, but, worse yet, that such falsehoods are used to reinforce the existing narrative of the candidate as a politically calculating liar.
These alleged lies touch on another favorite tactic in the Gore/Kerry story line: giving great weight to flimsy personal information. Gore, for instance, was frequently mocked for trying to appear more “authentic” when he began wearing more casual clothes on the stump. Kerry, meanwhile, has already, improbably, taken heat for the cost of his haircuts.
But it’s worse than that. A story last June by Michael Crowley in the New Republic, headlined “Can John Kerry Make People Like Him?” was full of enough psychobabble to make the coverage of Gore’s personal life seem hard-nosed. Crowley lets his readers know that Kerry “evinces a distinctly self-indulgent streak.” The evidence? “Kerry speeds around on a motorcycle and a convertible. Rollerblades and wind surfs, and he plays classical pieces and Broadway show tunes on his guitar.” Crowley writes, “[I]f the broad contours of Kerry’s biography suggest vanity and opportunism, it’s easy to find details that support that impression.” Such as? Apparently, “during his famous anti-war testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971, Kerry seemed to affect a Kennedy-esque accent,” and “early in his career he had surgery on his chin — a medical procedure, he said: gossip columns called it a cosmetic adjustment.” Kerry-led investigations into the fate of POW-MIAs in Vietnam and the BCCI banking scandals were “showy,” to Crowley. He then concludes by recounting a brief conversation he observed Kerry having with a black female conductor of a Capitol Building subway car. Some might see this as nothing more than a politician’s penchant for being genial, but Crowley felt that Kerry “saw this cultural chasm as an opportunity to practice his charm skills.”
To fully enter the woolly world of irrational Kerry rage, though, one has to read Slate blogger Mickey Kaus, who jokes that the Globe’s piece on the senator’s Jewish grandfather was really a plot hatched by Kerry — “a convenient bit of de-aloofifying drama” — and has run a “Kerry Mystery Contest” that asks, “Why is it that so many people, myself included, intensely dislike Sen. John Kerry?” Kaus’ own clever reason: “the phony furrowed brow.” Every aspiring Beltway smartass surely clucked along in appreciation.
Like all politicians, Kerry engages in his share of contradiction, truth stretching and opportunism. He should be nailed for it. But the creation of Kerry the Phony is a lazy conceit by journalists more interested in taking easy shots than raising real questions. It’s much easier to find dark significance in rollerblading, chin surgery and conversations with subway conductors.
And the campaign shows no signs of abating. According to a report in the Capitol Hill newspaper the Hill, the Globe is currently working on a new investigation of the 1980s dating habits of Kerry, who separated from his first wife in 1982 and didn’t remarry until 1995. Here’s a wild guess: Whatever information the intrepid reporters find, it may very well illustrate some fundamental character flaws in the senator. Quite possibly, it will show that Kerry is “aloof,” “self-indulgent,” or maybe even a “phony.”
There were days in AmeriCorps that I desperately wanted to quit.
Waking up at 7 a.m. for yet another day of intense manual labor in the thick humidity and hot sun of Mississippi or Alabama; nights spent in small towns where I hardly knew anyone and had no way of getting around. Nearly every waking hour spent with a randomly assigned team of people who were my co-workers and social network for 10 months straight — and all for what worked out to about $3 an hour.
But there have been many more times when I consider AmeriCorps the best thing I ever did, a time when I played a small role in improving a park and an abused children’s shelter and the last few days of some terminally ill teenagers’ lives; when I learned to appreciate days spent in small Southern towns with a group of young people from all around the country who became my new family for a year; and when I saw that small groups of citizens dedicated to improving their communities with the support, but not the direction, of the government really can make a difference.
I finished my 10 months in the AmeriCorps’ National Civilian Community Corps (AmeriCorps is made up of hundreds of smaller programs; mine involved teams of young people who traveled around a region of the country doing short-term service projects) truly believing in the program. And that’s why, despite the talk of war and deficits and recession, I finished watching President Bush’s 2002 State of the Union speech with a smile on my face. “Our country also needs citizens working to rebuild our communities,” he said. “We need mentors to love children, especially children whose parents are in prison. And we need more talented teachers in troubled schools. USA Freedom Corps will expand and improve the good efforts of AmeriCorps and Senior Corps to recruit more than 200,000 new volunteers.”
Despite the continuing opposition of some in his party — a few of whom even laughably claimed AmeriCorps members are in it for the money! — I really believed that Bush got it. As a former governor, he had seen AmeriCorps programs working at the ground level. And as president in the wake of the greatest national disaster in decades, he knew that a renewed sense of national unity, one that took American’s patriotism beyond waving flags and shopping to stimulate the economy and actually put it into action, was needed. While he wanted to put the name of his own agency, USA Freedom Corps, over it, it seemed clear Bush believed in the ethic of service and the important role of government in fostering it.
A year and a half later, though, the headlines tell a very different story. “AmeriCorps Announces Major Cuts,” the Washington Post reported Tuesday. Bush has been promising to increase AmeriCorps by 50 percent, but now it turns out that a dispute over accounting and cuts in funding may force the program to do the very opposite of what Bush promised: shrink by almost half. Already, the director of AmeriCorps has sent a memo detailing how she would have to cut support for state programs from about 16,000 positions to just 3,000.
While Bush’s 2003 budget request did slightly decrease funding for AmeriCorps, he hasn’t been the prime mover in the decimation of national service. That honor belongs to the Republican Congress, which allocated subsantially less than the president even requested and set an enrollment cap of 50,000 members. A dispute between the General Accounting Office and the president’s Office of Management and Budget over accounting procedures has also not helped matters.
Throughout it all, though, Bush hasn’t uttered a word in public. While he brags about the benefits of service in speeches, there’s been no haranguing of Congress for its failure to reauthorize AmeriCorps, nor for its cuts in funding. Nor is the president taking any time to support those who are working hard to actually fulfill the promises that he made. While the White House is silent, Sens. Evan Bayh, D-Ind., John McCain, R-Ariz., and Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., are pushing a bill that would expand AmeriCorps by 25,000 members per year over the next five years, and link national service to the newly increased need for homeland security.
On Wednesday the Post reported that Bush is supporting a measure that would resolve the accounting dispute and allow AmeriCorps to enroll more members. (By late yesterday, that legislation had already passed both the House and Senate). Good news. But at the same time, the White House isn’t taking a position on a $200 million supplemental spending measure that is necessary to expand AmeriCorps as he has promised.
Despite his silence, the president’s promotion of tax cut after tax cut that primarily benefit the wealthy while allowing AmeriCorps to wither on the vine speaks volumes. AmeriCorps, after all, achieves a number of Bush’s professed goals at a cost of just a few hundred million dollars a year. All of the projects I worked on were about increasing the strength of nonprofits and local government agencies that help citizens in their communities. We worked with a Habitat for Humanity chapter in Alabama, for instance, to supervise the dozens of college volunteers who came over a six-week period to spend their spring breaks doing good. By supporting 13 AmeriCorps members, the federal government allowed one nonprofit to leverage the services of hundreds of volunteers and build about a dozen houses for working poor families.
Does AmeriCorps have problems like any other government program, nonprofit, or business? Of course. But I know AmeriCorps works because I saw it work. I saw the daughter of a dairy farmer from Wisconsin clearing foliage with the son of an army officer from Virginia to build a new trail at a state park in Tennessee and a devout Christian from Massachusetts who never drank or swore helping a straight-edge punk music lover from Ohio work with developmentally disabled pre-schoolers in Arkansas.
Just as important as the work we did was surely the lessons we learned. There wasn’t a single person on my team whom I would have sought out as a friend during college, but when I was forced to live and work with them, I bonded in a way I never did with my friends at school. Just as in the military, hard work, cramped living quarters and identical uniforms help establish a closeness that no diversity program ever could. And not only did I see America’s problems of poverty, abuse, and environmental degradation up close, but I also saw how the communities that brought in AmeriCorps members to help were actually rallying together to improve things.
Opponents of AmeriCorps like to point out that millions of people volunteer without receiving any government support, and of course they’re right. But very few of us have the means to volunteer full-time, as AmeriCorps allows citizens to do that for a year. And, as with our Habitat project, most AmeriCorps members are devoted to leveraging the services of others, making part-time volunteering possible. What the federal government provides is the administration to select worthy programs, the stipends so volunteers can live (and not much more) while serving, and an education award of $4,725 to reward a year of service.
At the same time that AmeriCorps is slashing its spots for members, the number of applicants has doubled since Bush called on citizens to serve last year. That tens of thousands of Americans, many of them young people about to enter or just out of college, want to give a year of their lives to improve their country and are being denied the opportunity is a national tragedy.
After Sept. 11, the outpouring of emotional and financial support for victims and the rise in patriotism were clear signs that, when rallied, Americans are eager to give back and improve their country. President Bush’s pledge to expand AmeriCorps was a sign that he was going to turn those emotions into action, helping young people to see that service truly can make a difference and proving to the world that Americans are the generous people we claim to be.
Now, though, it’s clear the call to service was just empty rhetoric. National service could have been expanded to become a way of life, making it not just possible, but common for all citizens to follow through on Bush’s challenge to “commit at least two years — 4,000 hours over the rest of your lifetime — to the service of your neighbors and your nation.” Here’s hoping the president and Congress wise up and pass something like the Bayh-McCain-Kennedy bill so that hundreds of thousands more people will have the opportunity to see just how transformative an experience miserable, sweaty, low-paid work can be.
As the war in Iraq raged overseas, a battle also broke out between the rival cable news networks that might best be described as: Who can make White House press secretary Ari Fleischer happiest?
CNN, MSNBC and Fox News duked it out for the attention of a concerned public that, by and large, could get the same press conferences, attack footage and falling statues from every outlet. The competitive credo all three networks seem to have followed from the very beginning — when in doubt, wave a flag — was largely a reaction to Fox, which vaulted past CNN in the past year by embracing a conservative coloring of all news. CNN rallied with some shameless patriotism of its own, as did the major networks. But before long it was the struggling MSNBC that may have wrested from Fox the mantle of most blatant, schmaltzily jingoistic network in the land. MSNBC is still a distant third in the ratings race, but it tightened the slack between it and second-place CNN.
Ah, but why give MSNBC all the glory? All the networks have had their moments in the past month. It’s time for the highlight reel. So pin that flag on your lapel, and let’s survey the top 10 moments in jingoistic war coverage.
10. The “surgical strike”
A favored military term picked up by the most credulous media is the use of “precision” or “surgical” bombings. While bombs in the Iraq war are undoubtedly much more accurate than those used in the past, there were still reports of inevitable missed targets and civilian casualties in the current conflict, a number that might not be determined for some time. But the Pentagon fed that terminology to a willing media, and the more clueless reporters eagerly gobbled it up.
As the liberal media watchdog group FAIR reported, the term popped up frequently on NBC. Reporter Bob Faw described “a community which very much endorses that surgical strike against Saddam Hussein,” and “Today” co-host Matt Lauer, in reference to Baghdad, said, “The people in that city have endured two nights of surgical airstrikes.” The terms were also casually used on other networks, including CNN, Fox News and CBS.
9. Public Enemy No. 2: The French!
“What do you think of the French in general?” Fox News anchor Neil Cavuto asked Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ind., while interviewing him about how the U.S. should now deal with nations that opposed the war. “They’re not a power that I know of … Why do we even bother with them?
Joe Scarborough, former Republican congressman and host of the nightly “MSNBC Reports” (now called “Scarborough Country”), took a similarly gratuitous swipe at our erstwhile allies who opposed our war with Iraq. Introducing a news segment about U.S. victories over Iraqi troops, Scarborough intoned, “But first, Saddam’s French advisors taught him how to do one thing right: surrender.”
8. Public Enemy No. 3: Entertainers!
The worst in this department was most certainly Scarborough, who devoted regular segments on his show to mocking celebrities after it became clear the war was nearly over. He showed a clip of Jessica Lange saying, “The path this administration is on is wrong, and we object. We object in our hearts, in our minds. It is an immoral war.” Similarly, he showed Ed Asner saying, “I would never give this administration any sign of approval, because I think that they’ve ripped up this war to satisfy their own needs, not the nation’s needs.”
Neither of these actors, of course, predicted the U.S. would lose the war. The fact that the U.S. won doesn’t make their arguments that the war was immoral or that President Bush is not to be trusted more or less arguable. But Scarborough was undeterred. “I’ve always found it so remarkable that these leftist stooges, for anti-American causes, are always given a free pass,” he said April 10.
7. Public Enemy No. 4: The media!
Among the favorite targets: the New York Times, and especially its elder news analyst R.W. “Johnny” Apple. Criticism of Apple has become so constant as to become a clichi, one often unexamined. As the Web site Daily Howler pointed out, for example, Fox News’ Brit Hume complained on April 10, saying, “Let me mention one other person who deserves special mention. And it’s R.W. ‘Johnny’ Apple, legendary reporter of the New York Times. This is what he wrote today. ‘News of fierce fighting in Hilla, 50 miles south of Baghdad, and on the eastern and southern sides of the capital belies talk of collapse.’”
The headline of Apple’s piece? “Bush’s War Message: Strong and Clear.” And it featured such fiercely antiwar statements as “Bush has carried the country with him, and most of the second-guessers among Washington’s policy experts are keeping their voices down these days.”
Fox’s Sean Hannity busily trashed the media with statements like, “If you read the New York Times [or] the Washington Post at any point during that three-week period [since the war began], you would think we were losing this war.” Of course, when it suited his needs, Hannity was happy to turn tail. While arguing with Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., about whether Iraqi citizens were welcoming U.S. troops, Hannity chided the congressman, “You’re not reading the New York Times.”
6. “Coalition of the willing”
Another Bush administration catchphrase, it is, understandably, a hotly contested term. But that didn’t bother several cable news anchors. “Some world leaders, even close allies, criticized the U.S. and its coalition of the willing prior to the war in Iraq,” said CNN’s Paula Zahn. “When we come back, we’ll hear and see some of the other reaction in the world to what has been happening in the last several days, including the reaction in the coalition of the willing,” previewed Peter Jennings on ABC. And Fox’s Sean Hannity was more than happy to make statements like, “Look at the coalition of the willing.”
5. When “war” just doesn’t do the trick
Ever forget the name the government has given to the war? Not if you watched Fox News or MSNBC. Unlike CNN, which used a more neutral “War in Iraq” graphic, the two networks seemed locked in a tight competition over who could show the phrase “Operation Iraqi Freedom” more often and more prominently.
Fox News won the contest for quantity, with the words on the screen nearly 24/7. MSNBC, however, scores points for size, with huge hanging signs and wall graphics screaming “Operation Iraqi Freedom” emblazoned throughout its warehouse-like studio.
4. That big clock
MSNBC placed a “deadline” clock on its graphics-heavy screen, counting down, second by second, President Bush’s 48-hour deadline for Saddam Hussein and his sons to leave Iraq. Perhaps the network missed the president’s statement that war would be “commenced at a time of our choosing”? The clock ultimately ran out, disappearing before any significant invasion news.
3. And now, a word from our sponsor …
Rather than stick to its version of “fair and balanced” news coverage, Fox News often opted for a much simpler, direct route: looping gratuitous speech excerpts by President Bush, including agitprop like, “The vise is closing, and the days of a brutal regime are coming to an end” and “Against this enemy we will accept no outcome except complete victory.” The clips were not related to any story or feature, they were usually just used to lead into or out of commercial breaks, to make sure they maintained a pro-war state of mind, we guess.
2. The war promo
House ads MSNBC ran between programs and during commercial breaks functioned like movie trailers, both promoting the war and touting its heroes in such heart-tugging cinematic style they could have been produced by the Defense Department’s Tori Clarke. MSNBC ran one promo, scored with “The Star-Spangled Banner,” that flashed phrases like “land of the free” and “home of the brave” over shots of soldiers, tanks and Iraqi children. The Microsoft-NBC joint venture also ran promos using similar footage over the sound of patriotic speeches, such as John F. Kennedy’s “pay any price” inaugural address, and others by President Bush.
1. The Osama-Saddam connection
Ultimately, Fox wins the top prize not for its relentlessly pro-war anchors and news angles, but for the simple graphic that so often brought viewers back from commercials. “War on Terror” the intro began, before whooshing off the screen as a new phrase jumped on and took its place: “Target: Iraq.”
Enough said.
Conservative radio hosts have come to dominate the airwaves with ferocious rhetoric that’s often filled with ad hominem attacks and blatant untruths, but Michael Savage is easily the worst of the bunch. Savage, who makes Rush Limbaugh look reasonable, isn’t just a radio personality anymore. His book “The Savage Nation: Saving America From the Liberal Assault on Our Borders, Language and Culture” has reached the top of the New York Times bestseller list, and Savage has been rewarded with his own weekly MSNBC show as part of that struggling cable network’s efforts to improve its ratings.
Criticizing the rhetoric on Savage’s radio show, which has about 5 million listeners and airs on over 300 stations, is a relatively easy task, as evidenced last week when MSNBC announced Savage’s new show. The liberal media watchdog group FAIR, for instance, immediately responded with a press release pointing out that Savage often refers to Third World nations as “turd world nations.” In addition, Savage has said the U.S. “is being taken over by the freaks, the cripples, the perverts and the mental defectives,” and said of poor immigrants, “You open the door to them, and the next thing you know, they are defecating on your country and breeding out of control.”
But there’s more to Savage than the sum of his hateful quotes. Known before his radio career began as Michael A. Weiner, he’s also an ethnobotanist with a Ph.D. from the University of California who wrote a number of books about natural healing and nutritional supplements with titles like “Herbs That Heal.” Savage became an author after he failed to get an academic position, a result he blames in his book on affirmative action and his status as a white male: “For here I was, a ‘manchild in the promised land,’ denied my birthright for matters of race.”
In 1995, in the aftermath of the Republican takeover of Congress, which many credited to Limbaugh and other conservative talk radio hosts, Savage launched his show on San Francisco talk station KSFO, eventually landing a national syndication deal and becoming, according to Talkers magazine, the fifth most popular talk-radio host in the country.
It’s worth noting, however, that Savage attempted to return to academia in 1996, when he applied to be dean of U.C. Berkeley’s School of Journalism based on less than two years of experience in radio and his Ph.D. in epidemiology and nutrition science. When he wasn’t granted an interview, Savage filed a lawsuit that, unsurprisingly, didn’t go anywhere.
Unlike Limbaugh and the increasingly popular Sean Hannity, Savage spends little time in his book praising President Bush or the Republican Party, or spreading false tropes that circulate in the conservative media. Unlike Hannity’s “Let Freedom Ring,” for example, which often reads like a collection of Republican talking points, “The Savage Nation” is an almost unreadable amalgamation of virulent attacks on liberals, feminism, Islam and gays. It wouldn’t be much of a surprise if people like MSNBC president Erik Sorenson, who called Savage “brash, passionate and smart” in a press release, haven’t actually opened the book.
If Sorenson did read “The Savage Nation,” one has to wonder what he thought of Savage’s description of MSNBC correspondent Ashleigh Banfield, whom he calls “the mind slut with a big pair of glasses that they sent to Afghanistan,” adding, “She looks like she went from porno into reporting.” Those aren’t the only kind words Savage has for successful women, though. “Today in America,” he writes, “we have a ‘she-ocracy’ where a minority of feminist zealots rule the culture.” In Savage’s mind, this “she-ocracy” includes not only the usual conservative targets like Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barbara Boxer, but even right-leaning Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, a Reagan appointee.
One can only hope Sorenson didn’t refer to Savage as “smart” based on his insights into the fight against terrorism or, as he calls those who took down the World Trade Center, “pirates in filthy nightshirts.” Savage states flat out in his book what several mainstream conservative commentators, like Hannity, have only dared to hint — that American liberals are a threat equal to terrorists. “To fight only the al-Qaida scum is to miss the terrorist network operating within our own borders,” he states. “Who are these traitors? Every rotten radical left-winger in this country, that’s who.”
Lest one think Savage is only talking about the truly radical left, he makes clear that he includes most Democratic leaders and center-left foreign leaders on that list. Former President Bill Clinton, Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and British Prime Minister Tony Blair are all “New World Order Socialists” to Savage, with Blair earning the extra moniker of “Third Way Führer Blair.”
Savage’s rants against liberals also occasionally include the obsession of radical right-wingers with a one-world government. “[The liberal agenda] is all about one oppressive central government ruling the whole world,” he says. “This is the utopia the left has in mind for us.” Savage is fiercely bipartisan when it comes to one-world government, though, adding later on, “I’ve said for a long time that we have a ‘Republicrat’ or ‘Demican’ oligarchy in America and that most of our politicians are pawns controlled by their one-world puppet masters behind the scenes.”
Most of the book consists of fact-free rants such as these; “The Savage Nation” doesn’t bother with notes, and doesn’t even have an index. Like Ann Coulter, Michael Moore and Hannity, when Savage does bother with facts, he often gets them wrong. He says that “the divorce rate has doubled since 1970,” but according to federal statistics, while the divorce rate was 3.5 per 1,000 people in 1970, it never came close to doubling, and was 4.7 in 2000.
Using a study by Tokyo University scientists as data, Savage mocks former Vice President Al Gore’s efforts “to combat the evils of global warming and the ozone depletion [sic]” and asks “Why won’t Al, the global warming bogeyman, back down?” That study, however, found only that the ozone hole in the Southern Hemisphere would heal itself by 2040 thanks in part to regulatory controls of CFCs and other chemicals. Savage, whose biography calls him an “ardent conservationist,” seems unaware that ozone depletion and global warming are in fact separate phenomena.
As part of an attack on the use of Ritalin by children, Savage quotes then-first lady Hillary Clinton at a White House conference calling the drug “a godsend for emotional and behavioral problems for both children and their parents.” He fails to mention, however, Clinton’s next comment: “We do have to ask some serious questions about the use of prescription drugs in all children … What about the effects on our very youngest children who haven’t been tested for these prescription drugs and whose brains are in their most critical stages of development?” Hardly the words of someone who, as Savage alleges, is “calling Ritalin a miracle drug.”
Just how does a book like this get published? The answer can be found on a network of conservative Web sites. “The Savage Nation” is one of the first books published by WND Books, a partnership between the conservative site WorldNetDaily and Thomas Nelson, a publisher of Christian books. All WND books are not only heavily publicized on WorldNetDaily but also made available for sale there first, giving direct access to a loyal audience most authors would kill for.
Much of Savage’s content, meanwhile, can be traced directly to columns he published on the conservative site NewsMax.com. The book itself is divided into two- to four-page sections, many of which are near-exact replicas of Savage’s NewsMax columns with the same name. Most of the content in the book, in fact, can be found in the columns archived on this page. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with collecting a series of columns into a book. It’s noteworthy, however, that Savage doesn’t tell his readers they’re primarily reading recycled material, and it’s revealing that a book containing so many errors is primarily a cut-and-paste job.
The easiest response to all of this, of course, is one that Savage himself partially makes early in his book: “Comedy is what I sometimes do.” Does taking Michael Savage seriously play right into his hands? It’s certainly important to point out the hypocrisy of a bestselling author who says of himself, “I want to elevate the dialogue, if I can, to some level that’s civil.”
More fundamentally, in a world where people like Savage are rewarded with their own shows on a major cable news channel, close scrutiny is absolutely necessary. Either MSNBC executives have listened to Savage’s show and read his book and believe his brand of vitriol and distortions make him, as Sorenson said, “brash, passionate and smart,” or they don’t care about anything other than his ratings and his book sales. Either way, they have a lot to explain. Michael Savage may be one small step up in the ratings for MSNBC, but he’s one giant leap down for our political discourse.
In the debate over how to deal with Iraq, historical comparisons abound. Those who question the Bush administration’s threats of a unilateral invasion (like Al Gore on Monday) point to the success of nation-building in Germany and Japan after World War II — but how Afghanistan withered without international support after the Soviets withdrew. Supporters of Bush’s approach point in response to the increased dangers posed by dictators, such as Hitler, allowed to go unchecked for too long.
But some Bush supporters also have been hurling a loaded term at their critics: appeasement. Although the word can sometimes mean to calm or to bring peace, many war supporters have clearly been using it in a specific, and historical, sense: “to buy off (an aggressor) by concessions usually at the sacrifice of principles” (as defined by Merriam-Webster Online). This, of course, brings up memories of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who is generally considered to have made a disastrous decision in allowing Hitler to take possession of the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia, in the hope that it would somehow appease the Führer. Instead, it was the first in a chain of events that led to World War II.
Given the power of this analogy, it’s easy to see why the Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol denounced “an axis of appeasement” that stretches “from Riyadh to Brussels to Foggy Bottom, from Howell Raines to Chuck Hagel to Brent Scowcroft” and syndicated columnist Paul Greenberg called United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan the “appeaser-in-chief.”
But the label doesn’t fit. No one of any consequence wants to cut a deal with Saddam Hussein, or to try and make him happy by offering him anything, much less territory, money or weapons. Opposition to a unilateral invasion simply does not constitute a negative version of appeasement — the burden is on those who would use the term to explain how it applies.
Unfortunately, that hasn’t stopped pundits from repeatedly using the term as an ad hominem attack. An editorial in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette called war opponents “Appease-Firsters.” Michael Ledeen commented in National Review Online that “Germany had accepted the leadership of the forces of global appeasement.” The Dallas Morning News headlined an editorial (registration required), “Congress and Iraq: This is no time for appeasement.” In the New York Daily News, Michael Kramer said of France, Germany, Russia and other nations that support renewed U.N. weapons inspections in Iraq: “It’s appeasement, pure and simple.” William Safire stated in his New York Times column that “[o]ld World-weary apostles of appeasement don’t get it.” And Andrew Sullivan has used the word (or variations, such as “appeasenik”) eight times on his Web site in September alone. Misuse of the word hasn’t been limited to those in the media. At a hearing of the House Armed Services Committee on Sept. 10, Rep. Ellen Tauscher, D-Calif., said, “[Bush] has got to put specifically the Security Council members — Russia, China and France — their feet to the fire and ask them how they can honestly expect us one year after this terrible tragedy as they continue to appease and continue to allow Saddam Hussein to do clearly what everyone recognizes that he does.”
Remarkably, the clearest view on the subject came from pundit George Will in his syndicated column. Commenting on those who have criticized former President George Bush’s National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft for questioning the wisdom of an Iraq invasion, Will, a supporter of Bush’s approach, observed quite forcefully why appeasement is an unwarranted term:
“It is semantic vandalism to say that Scowcroft and others who share his apprehensions are ‘appeasers.’ Appeasement is the policy of resolving a conflict by making concessions to the most truculent side. Scowcroft believes, probably mistakenly, that containment and deterrence — which, when applied to the Soviet Union, resulted in regime change — can suffice to make Saddam Hussein’s regime something America can live with. Or at least Scowcroft believes that the risks of reliance on containment and deterrence are less than those of regime change by war and its aftermath. This may be wishful thinking; it is not appeasement.”
For several years now, conservatives have targeted African-Americans as potential supporters of private investment accounts in Social Security, often making the misleading claim that the system discriminates against them. A recent ad along these lines, calling Social Security “reverse reparations,” was mistakenly aired under the name of GOPAC, the high-powered Republican political action committee, putting one of the party’s most influential groups behind a message it says was never intended to run.
(MP3 download: To listen to the ad, click here.)
The radio ad, which ran several times over the past few weeks on a Kansas City radio station with primarily black listeners, not only distorts how Social Security benefits work and the program’s impact on African-Americans, but also incorrectly says it was paid for by GOPAC, chaired by former Oklahoma governor Frank Keating.
The ad was produced by Access Communications, a media agency that creates and airs political ads for conservative groups. GOPAC selected Access to produce and run ads targeting African-Americans, and the agency presented GOPAC with dozens to choose from. GOPAC selected seven ads, none of which dealt with Social Security. In what both organizations are calling a snafu, Access mistakenly believed GOPAC had selected the “reparations” ad and aired it under GOPAC’s name.
“We totally disavow this ad,” GOPAC communications director Mike Tuffin stated. “When we discovered it had run, we called them and had them pull it.”
Access’ mistake sheds light on how ads from interest groups come into being. This particular ad was most likely intended to hurt the local reelection campaigns of Sen. Jean Carnahan, D-Mo., and Rep. Dennis Moore, D-Kan. Access offered GOPAC a stock of dozens of issue-specific ads it could run, the same library it offers to its other interest-group clients. Such ads have become much more common in recent years as campaign finance reforms have limited the amount of money that candidates themselves can spend on campaigns; interest groups have stepped in, running ads intended to help certain candidates without mentioning them by name.
The ad in question uses racially charged language to link the controversy over whether blacks should receive reparations for the harm of slavery to a distorted claim that blacks receive substantially lower Social Security benefits than whites do. Hence, “reverse reparations.” “Under Social Security today, blacks receive $21,000 less in retirement benefits than whites of similar income and marital status,” the ad declares. “One-third of brothers die before retirement and receive nothing.”
As the liberal group Campaign for America’s Future has accurately pointed out, both these claims are misleading. The $21,000 figure, drawn directly from the Interim Report of the President’s Commission to Save Social Security, compares blacks and whites who have identical incomes, noting that Africano?=Americans receive less in benefits because their lifespan is seven years shorter.
But this is not a fair basis for concluding that Social Security subsidizes whites at the expense of blacks. The ad ignores the fact that in addition to having a shorter life expectancy, the typical African-American earns a lower income than an average white person — which a fair comparison would take into account. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, when average income and life expectancy are taken into account, “the average rate of return on Social Security is modestly higher for African-Americans than for whites.”
The statement that “one-third of brothers die before retirement and receive nothing” is even more misleading, because it ignores survivor benefits. While no dead person can receive benefits (for an obvious reason), surviving family members are guaranteed benefits.
Although GOPAC now rejects the Social Security ad, Access still stands proudly behind it. “This ad is perfectly good,” said John Uhlmann, the agency’s chairman. “Democrats want to distract people from the issue raised in the ad, that the current system discriminates against blacks and black families.”
Access’ president is Richard Nadler, a prominent conservative activist who has often advocated Republican outreach to minority audiences. In 2000, he came under fire for a controversial ad that ran in Kansas City advocating education savings accounts. The ad, sponsored by Nadler’s Republican Ideas Political Action Committee, shows a group of children — one of whom has a gun — and dramatizes the decision of a fictitious mother who pulls her son from a public school.
“We didn’t want him where drugs and violence were fashionable,” the actress said in the ad. “That was a bit more diversity than he could handle.”
The ad drew national attention and was disavowed by President Bush, Republican National Committee chairman Jim Nicholson, former representative Jim Talent (then running for governor) and then-senator John Ashcroft, among others. Nadler denied that “diversity” was a reference to race, saying it referred to “drugs and violence.”
While the misleading ad about “reverse reparations” had a short lifespan this time, Uhlmann says voters may be able to look forward to its reappearance soon. “We fully expect some other client will want to run it,” he said.
