Busting big fat liars

You write in the book about the Nixon administration and Spiro Agnew's famous 1969 speech attacking the elitist press corps. You say: "It would take years of work by the Republican right to undermine and subvert journalism by painting it, essentially, as an un-American force." How long did it actually take, in your opinion? When did the right effectively accomplish that?

Well, let me use personal landmarks. In 1986 I was working at a sister publication of the Washington Times, Insight magazine, and I then became an editorial writer at the Washington Times. And I don't think it had happened during that period because the paper had the same circulation it has today, about 100,000 readers, and it was considered to be a suspect, unreliable right-wing publication. It had, from the inside, very little impact in getting its message off the page; its stories didn't really go anywhere. But then a few things happened: Limbaugh went to national syndication in '88, and then you had the proliferation of cable, and then you had the Internet. So today, 16 years later, someone writes something in the Washington Times that may be unreliable, but it resonates because Limbaugh could read it on the air, or [Matt] Drudge could post it, or the author could go on Bill O'Reilly's show. So it's a completely different climate. During the '90s the flow of misinformation was established.

What's your take on how the press has covered President Bush?

There's no question in my mind that a similar record with a different president would have resulted in different media treatment.

How do you think the press has treated John Kerry over the past few months?

Clearly there's already some evidence of a phenomenon I describe in the book of the ability of the right-wing media to project a caricature. For instance, [Media Matters noted] that Drudge wrote an item about a hairstylist being flown in for Kerry before his appearance on "Meet the Press." There was no sourcing, so one didn't know what to make of it. Then I believe the [next step in the] chain was that Jay Leno mentioned it in a joke, which is fine. Then the AP and Reuters reported the Leno joke. Then Linda Vester on Fox the next day claimed that Fox News had independently confirmed the story, but her story didn't provide any sourcing, so we didn't know what to make of that. And then [Fox anchor] Brit Hume asserted the same thing later in the day.

So this is the kind of problem we are already seeing for Kerry -- that's the climate a candidate has to live in. The right can distort anything it wants. The playing field is so unlevel; there's a systematic disadvantage.

Meanwhile, the Wall street Journal last Thursday had a Page 1 piece on its latest polling, and not until the 14th paragraph on the jump page did it report that Bush's approval rating had "slipped to 47%, the lowest of his presidency ... By a 50%-to-33% margin, voters say the nation is headed in the wrong direction." The press seems to be almost embarrassed -- or thinks it's impolite -- to report that Bush may be in serious trouble or that he often tells lies. How does the Republican noise machine fit into that dynamic?

The Republican noise machine has an echo effect. It sets a climate and helps set parameters and helps form impressions -- and because there is so much noise coming out, there's no way that doesn't seep in. The absence of a liberal noise machine pushing back in an accurate way has to have some effect in there somewhere.

Here's another important point. Every day, there actually are important stories that appear in places like the New York Times and the Washington Post, but they don't leave the page. Someone living in Dallas who reads the Dallas Morning News and is stuck in their car with very little choice on the radio, and then goes home and watches cable, never learns about some of the really good reporting that exists. So when [there is] something accurate that would be quite damaging to the administration, how do you get people to hear that? How does it enter their consciousness when there's no echo and now way to actually deliver [the information]? That's a huge problem.

Next Page: "Liberals don't think these people matter; they think they're crackpots"

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