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R E C E N T L Y

Sid and Christopher's naked lunch
By James Poniewozik
The Blumenthal-Hitchens flap reveals the dirty secret of Washington's elite journalists
(02/09/99)

Rolling Stone gathers a $50 million lawsuit; Condé Nast's firing line, part 57
By Susan Lehman
(02/04/99)

Mammary dreams
By Steve Erickson
Behind men's moral outrage at Clinton's behavior seethes the fear that his compulsion is just one step beyond our own
(02/03/99)

The little N-word
By James Poniewozik
So we're all cool with "niggardly" now. Uh ... aren't we?
(02/02/99)

Wills to Sheehy: Your Clinton-incest psychobabble grows tiresome
By Susan Lehman
Plus: Gazoongas raise Maxim, Mother Jones searches in vain and other tales of media madness
(01/28/99)

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BROWSE THE
MEDIA CIRCUS
ARCHIVE

-----Et tu, Chris?

THE JUDAS KISS -- OR AN ACT OF PRINCIPLE? STEVEN BRILL, BARBARA EHRENREICH, GRAYDON CARTER, KATHA POLLITT AND OTHER MEDIA POOBAHS WEIGH IN ON THE HITCHENS-BLUMENTHAL DEBACLE.

BY SUSAN LEHMAN

Journalists, perhaps having associated with politicians for too long, have begun to eat their own. Among the pundits and scribes this week, one subject ruled supreme, displacing such minor affairs as the impeachment trial: the ugly little dust-up between Christopher Hitchens (a sometime Salon contributor) and Sidney Blumenthal. Haven't had enough? Media Circus sought comment from well-known media figures.

Barbara Ehrenreich (author of "Blood Rites"): My first response was a small cheer. I always thought the most despicable thing the White House did in all of this was to attempt to discredit Monica Lewinsky -- from Clinton's calling her "that women" to the effort to float the stalker theory. It just disgusted me. That's why my first response was a little cheer. I'm sort of glad Hitchens exposed Blumenthal.

Katha Pollitt (columnist, the Nation): I think someone who calls himself a socialist and a man of the left should not be helping the repressive powers of the state. He could have just left this whole thing alone. There was no need for him to help Trent Lott, Bob Barr and Henry Hyde. He could have said, "I don't have a dog in this fight." I think that would have been a defensible left-wing position.

Joe Conason (columnist, Salon and the New York Observer): In the long run, it is a sideshow created by the House managers and abetted by Christopher Hitchens in order to prolong their own failure. And they failed even in this.

Janet Malcolm (author, "The Crime of Sheila McGough"): Frank Rich [New York Times columnist] kind of had the last word in his column today about it. I have nothing to add. [Rich scoffed at Christopher Buckley's claim that the incident was a "Chambers-vs.-Hiss moment ... the kind of event in which one inevitably must take sides," writing, "Where are the huge principles to rally around? ...What is on the line is the guest list of certain Washington dinner parties, a lot of lawyers' fees, and Mr. Hitchens' continued ability to command a spotlight on All Monica talk shows. This cat fight isn't Chambers vs. Hiss but Beaver-vs.-Eddie Haskell."]

Marc Cooper (author, "Roll Over Che Guevara"): We just spent a year being told that it's none of our business what the president's sex life is; if that's true, it's even less of our business to know details about the friendship between Christopher Hitchens and Sidney Blumenthal. It's between them. I don't think Christopher Hitchens betrayed any journalistic confidence here; he did disrupt a friendship, but he didn't violate any journalistic standard. My interest is in what this whole thing has done to what we call the left, and in the degree to which the left has consistently folded itself into Bill Clinton's camp over the last year. When someone for once in this whole mess rises above crass self-interest and political expediency and acts on what appears to be principle, the whole world goes crazy, and we see such foolishness as was visible in the L.A. Times wherein Todd Gitlin argued that the survival of morally decent society depends on these two guys and their old boy's network keeping each other's secrets -- regardless of what Blumenthal did or didn't do.

For those who want to wring hands over the moral and ethical questions here, the larger question is about other so-called journalists, who are all aghast and shocked about what journalist Hitchens has done. What about journalist Blumenthal, who resigned his job in order to put his Rolodex and professional authority into the service of a lying and scheming president, and who used his contacts not to defend national security or social reform, but to be a hit man, in an effort to handle, not a political opponent, but a young woman who had become inconvenient for the president? Blumenthal has become Clinton's Tom Hagen, the consigliere to Godfather Clinton, and I'm supposed to feel badly because someone ratted out Blumenthal for cutting the horse's head off?

N E X T_ P A G E | Cockburn: Hitchens is a Judas