Monday, May 12, 2008
From "Run, Warren, Run!" to why Kerry will beat Bush to celebrating Martha Stewart not going to jail, a few of our most notable clunkers.
Nov 15, 2005 | Amid all the hoopla and self-congratulation over Salon's first 10 years, the staff decided it wanted to get its humility card punched too. So we figured we'd collect Salon's worst calls, the biggest missteps and worst judgments, and have a good laugh over them.
Suggestions were called for and made, and we quickly ran into a problem: No one could agree about what constituted a bad call. One person's worst judgment in Salon history was another's greatest story ever posted. "Run, Warren, Run," Salon founder and then-editor David Talbot's quixotic plea for Warren Beatty to run for president, for example, got votes for this story and for the "Best of Salon" package.
It's not that it's hard to be humble when you're this good. It's just that it's hard to be humble when you can't decide which things to be humble about. And we're not even talking here about Salon Shop.
A conversation about bad calls at Salon has to start with the most controversial story we've ever published, the 1998 revelation that Sen. Henry Hyde, the Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, who was sitting in judgment of President Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, had carried on an extramarital affair in the 1960s with a woman who was also married.
Dozens of other news outlets had passed on the story before the source came to Salon with it, on the grounds that a 30-year-old affair wasn't relevant. There were fierce arguments among Salon's staff about whether to run the Hyde story, and Washington bureau chief Jonathan Broder eventually resigned after criticizing the piece publicly.
In the end Salon's editors decided to publish, arguing that Hyde's hypocrisy in condemning Clinton was a part of the story of the Clinton scandals. Also, Talbot said at the time, Salon wanted to take the Republican strategy of attacking Democrats' personal lives to its logical conclusion, to show how counterproductive it was and perhaps bring an end to the practice.
An American Journalism Review article on the controversy noted, "Finding journalists who see Salon's side isn't easy," but did find a few.
But the accompanying editorial explaining the decision to publish was widely attacked as smug, self-serving or simply absurd. And one line from it stuck to Salon like a bad nickname: "Aren't we fighting fire with fire," the editorial read, "descending to the gutter tactics of those we deplore? Frankly, yes. But ugly times call for ugly tactics."
For a while, you couldn't read or hear about Salon without seeing the phrase "Ugly times call for ugly tactics."
"I still consider Salon's outing of Rep. Henry Hyde -- the moral hypocrite who was sitting in judgment on President Clinton's morality -- to be one of our finest hours," says Talbot, who stepped down as editor earlier this year but is still Salon's chairman of the board.
"And even though the Beltway pundits were outraged by our editorial's line -- ugly times demand ugly tactics -- this was a bluntly honest statement about the hideous situation the country found itself in, hijacked by a right-wing lynch mob and the witless media pack that took up its insane cry," he says. "I'll be forever proud of Salon for breaking away from the pack."
The storm passed. The bomb threats called in to Salon's office turned out to be false alarms, and we moved on.
Salon's most infamous moment may have been when advice columnist and author Dan Savage went to work for the Gary Bauer campaign in 2000.
Savage's plan had been to go to Iowa on the eve of the caucuses, follow around one of the conservative Christian Republican candidates, Bauer or Alan Keyes, then write "something insightful and humanizing about the candidate, his campaign and his supporters."
But by the time he got to Des Moines, Savage had come down with a nasty flu. Watching Bauer on TV from his hotel sickbed, Savage, who is gay, got angry about anti-gay comments the candidate had been making, including one in which Bauer said the Vermont Supreme Court's approving of gay marriage "was in some ways worse than terrorism."
"In my Sudafed-induced delirium," Savage wrote in the resulting piece, "Stalking Gary Bauer," "I decided that if it's terrorism Bauer wants, then it's terrorism Bauer is going get -- and I'm just the man to terrorize him." Remember that this was pre-9/11, so the word "terrorism" was still fair game to be used as political hyperbole.
Savage decided to go undercover as a volunteer at Bauer campaign headquarters, with the goal of getting close enough to the candidate to give him the flu, which would have laid him out just in time for the New Hampshire primary. To achieve this goal, Savage licked the doorknobs at the campaign office. He also licked staplers, phones, computer keyboards and clean coffee cups, according to the piece, not to mention asking Bauer for an autograph and handing him his much-slobbered-upon pen for the job, but it's the doorknobs everyone remembers.
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