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Breitbart fiddles while the MSM refuses to burn him

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If you’re a writer or journalist and you quote someone selectively or out of context so egregiously that you can twist their words to mean the very opposite of what they actually convey when they’re quoted in full or in context, what you have done is not just mischievous or aggressive, it’s outright wrong. If you’re a professional, then you’ve committed an act of professional malfeasance.

And if you get away with this sort of stunt repeatedly, despite being exposed and shamed for it, then you are pulling off a grand heist — stealing the credibility of larger media and government institutions that continue to pay attention to you.

This, in a nutshell, describes the challenge Andrew Breitbart has presented to the world of journalism, first with his ACORN deception and now with his Sherrod stunt. So far, journalism is failing to meet it.

By this point, Breitbart ought to be an object of snorting derision in the journalism profession. He ought to be shunned by respectable news organizations and mocked in public. He deserves the sort of ostracism that until recently was reserved for serial plagiarists.

Yet look at how two post-mortems of the Sherrod affair framed their presentation of his role.

Listen to this lead All Things Considered story on NPR, as Ari Shapiro sums up the meaning of Breitbart’s behavior:

There has been a pattern of conservative activists blurring the line between journalism and advocacy, and doing it with striking success.

This is precisely not the problem with what happened to Shirley Sherrod. What’s wrong with Breitbart’s work has nothing to do with the fact that he is a partisan journalist rather than an “on the one hand, on the other hand” style journalist. The problem with Breitbart is not that he is an activist in journalist clothes, but rather that he is a serial purveyor of deceptions who is somehow still viewed as a legitimate source by some of his colleagues in the media.

Here is how Politico framed its take on Breitbart’s role in the Sherrod story (in a piece that also talked about Tucker Carlson’s stories on the Journolist emails). “The combative Breitbart” caused an “uproar,” but his “revelations proved decidedly less incendiary when the context of the comments was added. And both [Breitbart and Carlson] have been criticized for failing to provide, or even trying to provide, that context.”

No, Politico, Breitbart’s revelations didn’t prove “decidedly less incendiary.” They proved wrong — deliberately counter-factual and embarrassingly misleading. Breitbart is not merely combative and uproarious. He is malicious and dangerous. A handful of journalists have come close to acknowledging this: Later on the same All Things Considered, Jon Alter called him “a notorious smear artist.” And over at Fox News, Shepard Smith describes him as untrustworthy. But mostly, Breitbart gets off with being described as a rambunctious bad boy whose behavior is the result of overly ardent partisanry rather than simple unfairness and lack of decency.

If there is any remaining doubt about how fully Breitbart deserves a full-on shun from the entire media world, just take a look at the laughably inadequate correction notice he has appended to the original report on his site about Sherrod:

While Ms. Sherrod made the remarks captured in the first video featured in this post while she held a federally appointed position, the story she tells refers to actions she took before she held that federal position.

The implication is: “Our story holds up, Sherrod said what we said she said, but we goofed on this little detail of her employment at the time.” Whereas a real correction would read more like “Our original story was wrong. We quoted Sherrod to suggest that she drove an old white couple off their farm because she was a racist. In fact, she helped that couple hold onto their farm and used the tale to argue against racism.”

Really, though, if Breitbart had any self-respect he would withdraw the whole story and apologize to Sherrod. Since he’s never going to do that, why should he have a future as a participant in public discourse?

BONUS LINK: David Frum explains why the conservative media won’t hold Breitbart to account.

MORE LINKS: Not surprisingly, the toughest media voices on Breitbart come from the ranks of those who wear both pro-journalist and blogger hats. Josh Marshall makes a similar point to mine: “For anyone else practicing anything even vaguely resembling journalism, demonstrated recklessness and/or dishonesty on that scale would be a shattering if not necessarily fatal blow to reputation and credibility.”

I’d also point you to the chorus of criticism from the Atlantic’s stellar blogging bench (hat tip to the Atlantic’s Bob Cohn). Josh Green highlights Breitbart’s role as “ringmaster”: “It’s hard for me to see how the media can justify continuing to treat Breitbart as simply a roguish provocateur. He’s something much darker.” And Jim Fallows makes the McCarthyism parallel explicit: “Silver lining: the possibility that for the Breitbart/Fox attack machine this could be the long-awaited ‘Have you no sense of decency?’ moment.”

ALSO: Rogers Cadenhead with some of Breitbart’s backstory: “What good is being a self-employed media mogul if you can’t admit you fucked up and try to make it right?”

And Greg Sargent asks: “Has any news org done a stand-alone story on the damage the Shirley Sherrod mess has done — or should do — to his credibility?”

Party context of that staggering debt chart

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The Journal published one of those jaw-dropping charts about the U.S. national debt last Thursday, and it looked pretty bad:

There are two things to argue about here: One is the economic debate about how dangerous this “debt mountain” really is, and whether deficit-cutting today amid high unemployment would just stall the economic recovery (the famous “mistake of 1936”).

The other is the political debate. We’re in the middle of an election cycle, so charts like this fuel voter anger and “throw the bums out” sentiment.

I’m a timeline-oriented sort of person, and so the first thing I did when I looked at this chart was ask, “OK, let’s plot the presidential administrations by party along the horizontal axis and see what we find.” Since what I found was pretty remarkable, I marked up the chart below. Blue bars are Democratic administrations.

US Debt Chart By Presidential Party

Pretty much speaks for itself, no? The main observation is that the huge runups in the debt that we’ve experienced since 1980 are almost entirely the results of the policies of two Republican presidents, Reagan and Bush Jr. (The elder Bush deserves some credit for a willingness to tackle the debt through a modest tax increase.) Yes, these presidents sometimes had the cooperation of some Democrats in Congress. But the disastrous supply-side-style tax cut policies were authored by these presidents’ administrations, and they are responsible for them.

The truth of the last three decades of American economic history is simple: The GOP has repeatedly pursued a policy of “cut taxes and let our kids pay for it.” Some supported it out of a mistaken belief that tax cuts would always pay for themselves in economic growth. Others supported it out of a Machiavellian belief (“drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub”) that if you cut taxes enough, you could force the government to scuttle popular government programs that Republicans detest like Medicare and Social Security. Others supported it out of plain old self-interest (tax cuts are always popular).

Whatever their motivations, every Republican politician who rails against the evils of the debt should be shown this chart and asked to explain it.

CORRECTION/UPDATE: As William Sullivan points out in comments, this chart, which I mistook for a graph of public debt only, actually aggregates public and private debt. I’ll poke around for a public-debt-only graph. In the meantime, it’s interesting to think, gee, what does it mean that both public and private debt together surge under our most recent Republican administrations? The positive spin, I suppose, would be: Business is humming and consumers are confident during these expansive GOP eras so people take on more debt.

Given what we experienced in 2008, however, I think a more accurate read would be: Our supposedly conservative Republican presidents actually presided over massively risky leveraging of our economy without thinking about how either the government or private citizens would actually pay it all off. Which, to me — speaking as a liberal who has paid off his credit card bill every month of my adult life — sounds like the opposite of “conservative.”

Iran and the ghost of history

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There’s a chorus on the right, including some GOP leaders, complaining that President Obama ought to be saying more or doing more to support the Iranian protesters. It is unclear what, exactly, they wish him to do about Iran. Now, perhaps, is not the time for bombing, although that was, until recently, considered a dandy option by many; to offer loose words about support for protests risks repeating past American leaders’ errors in such situations, who have sometimes made perceived promises of help to uprisings and then failed to follow through — or even betrayed the protesters.

I think Obama is playing a careful hand: he knows that if he embraces Moussavi too closely he is, perversely, helping Ahmadinejad, whose chief recruiting tool has always been the anti-American banner.

But I also think that few Americans, and sadly even too few in the American media, have a full understanding of the arc of history here and the twisted record of American involvement in Iranian “regime change.”

The formative, primal event in the history of modern Iranian politics took place in 1953, when the U.S. government, working clandestinely through the CIA, helped overthrow an elected Iranian government and install the Shah as a friendly dictator. (Read more on this beginning here and following up here.) Everything that has happened since in Iran has happened under that shadow. Most Americans simply don’t remember this, but you can bet that Iranians do.

So a U.S. president has a particularly poor platform to stand on and lecture Iranians about violations of the electoral process. Obama — who in his Cairo speech publicly admitted the American role in the 1953 Iran coup for the first time — seems to understand this reality and to be working from that understanding, rather than denying it. It’s time for his critics to learn a little of that history, too.

Note to Peggy: your goose already croaked

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Oh dear: we’re losing contact with Peggy Noonan again! As we enter a movie season featuring a cartoon about an aged, out-of-touch curmudgeon floating off from reality in a private balloon, let us not forget that we already have a similar character in journalism.

Here’s Noonan today:

Mr. Obama’s government, in all its flurry of activism, may kill the goose that laid the golden egg. This is as dreadful and obvious a cliche as they come, but too bad, it’s what people fear. They see the spending plans and tax plans, the regulation and reform hunger, the energy proposals and health-care ambitions, and they–we–wonder if the men and women doing all this, working in their separate and discrete areas, are being overseen by anyone saying, “By the way, don’t kill the goose.”

The goose of course is the big, messy, spirited, inspiring, and sometimes in some respects damaging but on the whole brilliant and productive wealth-generator known as the free-market capitalist system. People do want things cleaned up and needed regulations instituted, and they don’t mind at all if the very wealthy are more heavily taxed, but they greatly fear a goose killing. Economic freedom in all its chaos and disorder has kept us rich for 200 years, and allowed us as a nation to be generous and strong at home and in the world. But the goose can be killed–by carelessness, hostility, incrementalism, paralysis, and by no one saying, “Don’t kill the goose.”

Note to Noonan: The goose passed away last year. It is an ex-goose. Its neck was slit, over and over, by a decade-long procession of greedheads and vandals. Michael Lewis even wrote the obituary! The liver was extracted to produce foie gras that is still being feasted on in certain corners of Manhattan, southwestern Connecticut and Los Angeles. But there will be no more eggs until we figure out how to re-stock the farmyard. Indeed, Tim Geithner and Ben Bernanke are up all night in the financial labs trying to reconstitute the beast’s DNA.

I guess this cluelessness should not surprise us, given that Noonan is the same columnist who, last December, looked around and wondered why the economic crisis was not visible to her.

Still, this bears repeating: “What people fear” is not that the fragile life of the free market will be extinguished. What we fear is the lingering presence, and indeed power, of the buccaneers and charlatans who slaughtered it — and who will jump at any opportunity to strangle its successor, if they are given a tenth of a chance. Yet they are, apparently, as invisible to Noonan today as that goose-corpse was to her last December, when everyone else was gagging from the smell of its rot.

The Times, John Dean and the elephant in the room

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New York Times ombudsman — excuse me, “public editor” — Clark Hoyt published a piece today about a sorry recent incident in which the Times ran a front-page piece granting some exposure and credibility to Watergate revisionists. The piece described the efforts of a writer named Peter Klingman to discredit the work of historian Stanley Kutler, suggesting that Kutler had doctored his transcripts of the Watergate tapes in an effort to protect John Dean and blacken President Nixon’s name.

Hoyt’s piece is fine as far as it goes: it basically points out how weak the Times story was, and how unfair to Kutler. Hoyt concludes that “the Times blew the dispute out of proportion with front-page play, allowed an attack on a respected historian’s integrity without evidence to support it, and left readers to wonder if there was anything here that would change our understanding of the scandal that ended Nixon’s presidency.”

But Hoyt’s discussion conspicuously avoids the elephant in the room (and yes, it is an elephant). I don’t know Klingman’s exact motivations or political affiliations, but it doesn’t take much thought to realize why someone in 2009 might be interested in attacking John Dean and lightening Nixon’s burden of guilt. Dean’s testimony was central in the collapse of Nixon’s presidency. Dean served a prison sentence for his role in Watergate — time that Nixon should have served, too, but avoided by wangling a corrupt pardon for himself. But many conservatives are still itching to exact further punishment for Dean’s betrayal. In the past decade, Dean became an outspoken critic of the Bush administration. Discrediting him would be sweet revenge.

It is bizarre to watch Hoyt dig in at such length about so many of the scholarly and journalistic issues surrounding this story yet fail to discuss the politics.

Full disclosure: I worked closely with Dean back in 2002 on an ill-fated (but still, to me, worthwhile) e-book titled Unmasking Deep Throat. You can read Dean’s take on the Times controversy in this column from the Daily Beast.

California gridlock, courtesy GOP diehards

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Here in the state of California we are being treated to the spectacle of a small minority of Republican dead-enders in the legislature holding the entire state economy hostage to their tax-cutting religion.

The story, for those blissfully beyond Sacramento’s reach, is that our state rules require a 2/3 vote to pass a budget. So that even though Democrats control both houses of the legislature, they need a few Republicans to pass a budget. And our local GOP reps have apparently signed a pact in blood that they will never, ever, under any circumstances, support tax increases. The Democrats — along with our Republican governor — have found two GOP state senators to come to terms with reality, but they need a third, and can’t seem to find it. (It’s as if Obama’s stimulus package died in Congress because one of the three Republican moderate senators got cold feet.) In the latest development, the GOP diehards have spurned their own leader as an apostate because he was willing to negotiate with the evil tax-boosters.

Every time something like this happens we need to remind ourselves of the deep misreading of history that underlies the tax-cutting religion. The theory is that the only way to grow the economy is by cutting taxes. Reagan cut taxes in the early ’80s, and the ’80s were a good decade if you were a bond trader or an investor in the PC industry, but for the middle class they were, at best, so-so. Bush pere and Clinton raised taxes in the early ’90s and the ’90s were the best decade economically that most of us have experienced. Bush fils cut taxes in the early 2000s and we had a lousy decade again, except if you were a hedge-fund investor or a house-flipper, and even a lot of them got clobbered in the end, along with everyone else.

Given all this, anyone who preaches the universal efficacy of tax cuts is, in my book, not fit to sit at the grownup table.

If California is going to meet its obligations, California has to raise taxes. Would it be kinder to the people of California not to raise their taxes in the face of the bad economy? Of course. The state could use a lot more help from Washington (where, whoops, the GOP has stood in the way of greater aid to state and local governments). Someday, these tax increases probably ought to be rescinded. But right now? The state can’t print money, and it needs to pay its bills.

Which brings us to the real question: as this economic calamity courses through our system and our lives, how much of the machinery of government and the infrastructure of local communities are we going to allow it to destroy? And what kind of a society do we want to have left on the other side of the cataclysm?

What the Republicans who stand in the way of a California budget are saying to our community’s schools and fire departments and other services is: shut down. Go away. We don’t need you. It’s the logical endpoint of the strangle-government-in-the-bathtub philosophy of America’s hard right, which actively wants to wreck government’s ability to serve as a stabilizing and supportive force in our lives and our economy.

With any luck, this crisis will help voters see this philosophy for the dead end that it is. Obviously we here in California need to change the 2/3 rule that gives a small minority this kind of power over the public’s business. We can also hope that the communities who elect these ostrich legislators never have to face the full brutal consequences of their ideological idiocies.

Obama’s hard words

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“No drama Obama” found his drama this morning in the best possible way. Given the weight of expectations on his shoulders today, this wasn’t a foregone conclusion. I’m not sure exactly how one rises to such an occasion, how one finds the words to fit such times, but for me at least, our new president did.

One clue I realized as I listened to Obama’s words: this speech, stern in many ways and uningratiating by design, stuck to hard nouns and verbs. There was little flowery rhetoric. The sentences had weight not by being heavy but by being solid. In that solidity, I heard the cadences of Whitman and Melville, American voices full of rough power rooted in the experience of nature and the effort demanded by the settling of the land.

In speaking of “the risktakers, the doers, the makers of things,” Obama found words that could encompass both the laborers who have represented the old school of the Democratic Party and the entrepreneurs and digital innovators who represent its newer supporters. In telling us to it was time to “put away childish things,” he may have been referring to the bitter divisions of the past decade, the political squabbling that has diverted so much precious energy and time. “Childish” might well describe the stupidity of the Clinton impeachment drama; but — painful though it may be for many of us to accept — it might also refer to the passion for a settling of accounts with the malefactors of the Bush administration that so many of the new president’s supporters share. We’ll have to see, over time, exactly how Obama defines this “new era of responsibility.”

There was a roll-up-our-sleeves quality to the whole address that was sober without being grim. I’ll want more time to digest the whole thing. Right now, I’m left with the picture of Malia, the president’s older daughter, pulling out her own digital camera to take a picture right as the TV camera was trained on her. It was a little pointer to the future, a gesture for a new generation that will be taking charge of its media in ways we can’t yet imagine.

“Write it yourself” is Jay Rosen’s sharp advice to the new president. He means, “Write that new White House blog yourself” — but also, in that moving-finger-writes way, write the whole story, the big drama of the next four years, yourself. Really, it’s what each of us needs to do.

Can conservatives report?

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Interesting exchange this weekend which we might title, “Why can’t conservative bloggers report?”
It starts with Matthew Yglesias responding to a Michael Goldfarb item about Greg Sargent leaving Talking Points Memo for a new Washington Post website. Goldfarb says the GOP has no equivalent to TPM — no website with a cadre of muckrakers. Yglesias responds:

What the right lacks are people with the skill to do the job. The one time I can recall the conservosphere leading the charge on a legitimate story, the thing with Dan Rather and the national guard memos, they got tons of traffic and attention. And lord knows the conservative media has lots of money and plenty of staff. But almost none of that stuff is going to people who report competently. Instead, you get a lot of wild conspiracy theories and a lot of commentary. The progressive blogosphere involves plenty of commentary, of course, and relies a decent amount on reporting done by the non-ideological media. But the right, for all its loathing of the allegedly liberal MSM, is actually entirely dependent on it and the cable-Drudge nexus to advance stories.

I think there’s more reporting happening in the conservative blogosphere than Yglesias allows. (Michelle Malkin goes nuts here with a long list that includes some legitimate links mixed in with lots of ringers — but she has a point.)

But I’d argue that the real reason you find deeper and more effective muckraking on the left is that it’s in the ideological genes. There’s more of a tradition of independent investigative journalism — it goes back to I.F. Stone and beyond, to the original muckrakers of the Progressive era. This is because the progressive ideal is rooted in a belief that government has a key role to play in the modern state and its economy. You dig for stories about corruption and bad behavior in government because you believe it has a job to do and needs to do it right. If you believe, as most on the right do, that the best government is the weakest and smallest government — if you dream of “drowning it in the bathtub,” as the ideologues who ran the country for the last eight years did — then why waste your time trying to expose its malfunctions? Why develop a tradition of trying to shame government into living up to its ideals when you don’t share them?

Goldfarb, and doubtless many others on the right, think that TPM and other Democratic-friendly investigative journalism outlets will wither away during an Obama administration because they won’t want to criticize their pals. That assumes the only motivation for investigative reporting is partisanship. My experience at Salon, which has always done its share of exposes on right and left and which thrived under the Clinton administration, tells me he’s wrong.

UPDATE: Simon Owens picks apart Malkin’s roster of conservative scoopery.

Times trips over COBRA

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This morning I read the New York Times’ front-page piece about Obama’s stimulus plan, and nearly spat out my coffee as I read this passage near the top of the piece:

Other policy changes would subsidize employers’ expenses for temporarily continuing health insurance coverage to laid-off and retired workers and their dependents, as mandated under a 22-year-old federal law known as Cobra.

I first learned about COBRA as an editor/manager over the last decade, and learned all about it from the other side more recently, as one of the large number of Americans who have resorted to it over the past year. I guess the article’s authors, Jackie Calmes and Carl Hulse, have never had to deal with COBRA up close themselves. If they did, they’d know that employers don’t have many expenses associated with COBRA. COBRA simply allows employees who have lost their health insurance coverage (because they were laid off or they no longer qualify because, say, their hours were cut back) to keep their existing insurance for up to 18 months. All they have to do is pay the entire cost of the health insurance themselves — whatever portion they used to pay themselves, and the (typically) larger portion that their employers used to pay.

So what kind of assistance do employers need to cover COBRA costs? Maybe they have some minor administrative overhead. But surely they’re not the parties who need help in this situation.

There are two possible explanations here: Either the Obama team has suddenly lost all of its marbles, or the Times reporters mangled their description of the Obama plan — which, perhaps, might involve covering the employees’ costs for the COBRA insurance (possibly by paying into the employers’ plan, which might explain the confusion).

I checked the Times site at the end of the day, expecting to find a correction on the article, but there’s none there as I write this.

Holman Jenkins: “lost decade” or lost mind?

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I continue to read the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page and columnists in a “know thy enemy” mode. As the recent economic crises have pretty much razed the paper’s entire stable of totems, it has been fun to watch the rhetorical writhings. Mostly, they speak for themselves. But I think I cannot let this Christmas-eve gem from Holman Jenkins pass without comment. I think it will prove representative of the sort of hilarity we can expect to read from unrepentant free-marketeers over the coming year.

Here’s a shorter Jenkins:

(1) Since we only had one Great Depression, we can’t really draw any lessons from it, because we never got to run the experiment twice. We have no evidence that government spending helped end the Depression, or that more spending would have ended it faster.

(2) Despite said inability to draw lessons from the Great Depression, we do know — thanks to “plenty of evidence from history” — that “actions hostile to business tend to be related to an absence of prosperity.” Therefore people who argue that in the 1930s the “government did not do enough to restore business confidence, or did too much to damage it, piling on taxes, regulation and labor unions” are on “firmer ground” than advocates of government spending.

(3) But never mind these lessons from the Great Depression, because we live in a democracy, and democracies in general can’t be trusted with something as important as an economy. Give the people power and they will inevitably make bad policy.

(4) Sometimes democracies somehow stumble into periods of prosperity anyway, and when they do, this prosperity is “self-reinforcing” because “powerful interests” become powerful enough to resist all that bad policy that a democracy might wish to promulgate.

(5) These periods of prosperity do not last forever, and “once prosperity blows up” the same “self-reinforcing cycle” becomes “an unvirtuous one,” and instead of “powerful [business] interests” promoting prosperity, we get democratic governments promoting “costly or vindictive wish lists.”

(6) Government bailouts and the Federal Reserve’s extreme measures “may in retrospect be seen as just the right medicine. At the moment, no rational investor or business manager looks upon such doings with confidence in our economic future.”

(7) “Bottom line: Politics is in charge — in a way that makes a lost decade of subpar prosperity more likely than not.”

Jenkins’ account of recent events displays the sort of hermetic reality avoidance once only observable in unreconstructed Stalinists. Government must keep its hands off business! We can only trust the unfettered corporation to maintain a virtuous cycle of prosperity! When prosperity “blows up,” we can only trust the same “powerful” business interests to restore it! Don’t ever sully your analysis by asking how it was that your business-driven prosperity “blew up” in the first place. And once the blow-up happens, and people start asking why government didn’t restrain business from wrecking the economy in the first place, turn around and hold government responsible for the coming “lost decade.”

It is entirely possible that we are headed for a “lost decade of subpar prosperity.” But if that is the case, it is hardly excessive government meddling that is at fault, but rather the very philosophy that Jenkins espouses — of leaving our prosperity in the hands of powerful business interests unchecked by effective public oversight.

The good news is that people like Jenkins have next to no influence in the new administration. The bad news is they still have a platform in one of the nation’s two most influential newspapers.