The big NEA-Sept. 11 lie

Soon, an even more misleading version of the original Washington Times spin began to circulate. This time, pundits and editorial boards harped on Sorokin's implication that the NEA does not believe al-Qaida is responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks. Phyllis Schlafly, president of the conservative Eagle Forum, condemned "the idea that nobody is to blame for Sept. 11" to Canada's National Post. On Aug. 21, Investor's Business Daily wrote that one of "a new batch of Sept. 11 lesson plans put together" by the NEA "advises: 'Do not suggest any group is responsible,' and later seems to propose it's best not to blame anyone. The NEA's teaching plans, it seems, are a new variation of the left's old 'blame America first' theme. Sept. 11 was, of course, the work of a group." And the Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle claimed that the NEA "calls for teachers to blame the attacks more on the United States and Western culture than on the actual perpetrators" and "doesn't even hold the perpetrators responsible."

On Aug. 22, feeding off its own spin, the Washington Times published a brazen Life section piece by Tom Knott that belittled the NEA along the same lines. According to Knott, the group is "still not sure who perpetrated the horror." "In the sanitized world of the NEA," he writes, "Osama Bin Laden probably merits a smiley face next to his mug." But, he generously concedes, "[a]t least the NEA left the one-armed man out of its Sept. 11 lesson plan."

Regional newspapers rushed to condemn the outrage du jour. The Cleveland Plain Dealer (8/21), Richmond Times-Dispatch (8/22), Denver Post (8/22), Columbus Dispatch (8/23) and Tallahassee Democrat columnist Bill Cotterell (8/22) all condemned the NEA, attributing Lippincott's quotations to the group. The Times-Dispatch was one of several to follow Sorokin's lead in pluralizing the smear from one lesson plan to many, claiming that the NEA "has put together lesson plans for the occasion that caution teachers not to 'suggest any group is responsible' for the terrorist attacks."

On Aug. 25, George Will correctly attributed the essay to Lippincott in his syndicated Washington Post column, but attacked the NEA as a "national menace" and "as frightening, in its way, as any foreign threat."

Even though there had been ample time to research the story and Kuttner had knocked it down on "O'Reilly" on Aug. 19, most pundits displayed little or no awareness that it was bogus. On CNN's "Late Edition" on the 25th, panel host Kate Snow repeated Sorokin's spin, saying that the NEA was "suggesting that teachers ... should avoid suggesting that any group is responsible, avoid placing blame for the terrorist assault." The panel went along with the premise -- New Republic editor Peter Beinart even bashed the NEA as embarrassing to liberals like him.

After repeated attempts to contain the controversy, the NEA issued an indirectly worded statement on Aug. 27. Rather than directly refuting the charges, it vaguely asserts that critics "have taken the material out of context" and are "using this national tragedy to attempt to score political points," giving little indication that the entire controversy has essentially been fabricated. It also at some point apparently removed links to Lippincott's lesson.

By last week, the controversy began to receive significant attention from the mainstream news media, with dutifully "objective" reports that fail to make clear that the controversy was manufactured appearing in the Chicago Tribune, New York Times and Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. (Newberry was ultimately reduced to issuing the nasty accusation that the NEA's critics are frightened of diversity in the Times.) Finally, Op-Eds by Abraham Cooper and Harold Brackman in the Los Angeles Times and Mona Charen in the Baltimore Sun repeated the falsehood yet again.

Outside of the NEA, only a handful of mainstream critics have taken on this spin campaign. For a while, the lonely group consisted solely of Kuttner, Bob Somerby of the Daily Howler (see the Aug. 23, 26, 27 and 28 editions) and the Charleston Gazette. Most commentators and reporters have apparently been too lazy or cowardly to stand in the way of the steamroller of lies and distortions.

Luckily, however, this week Boston Globe contributor Cathy Young and New York Times education columnist Richard Rothstein have joined the ranks of the debunkers (though Rothstein mistakenly attributed Lippincott's words to the NEA Web site).

Even National Review, a leading conservative magazine, has conceded that Sorokin's case against the NEA is overstated. In an editorial published last week, N.R. argues that "the critics both overstate and understate their indictment," with the lesson plans revealing "modern liberal culture's shallowness" rather than "the NEA's lack of patriotism." The editors point out that the lessons come from a variety of outside sources, including the American Red Cross and PBS, that "there is not a lot of blame-America stuff" in them and the site includes "links to America's founding documents," though "the mood is mildly adversarial toward Americans, who are assumed to be constantly on the verge of committing ethnic pogroms."

Sorokin's article was not the first Washington Times piece to use a misleading, out-of-context quotation to generate a media myth. Joseph Curl did the same thing last November in a story suggesting that President Clinton blamed slavery and U.S. treatment of Native Americans for the Sept. 11 attacks. As my Spinsanity co-editor Bryan Keefer showed, Curl's story stripped a few fragmentary quotes out of context from a long speech to construct this fiction, when in context Clinton's statements were unremarkable -- so much so that the Associated Press account of the speech did not even mention them. However, Curl's story ran under the explosive headline "Clinton calls terror a U.S. debt to past," and from there it spread like wildfire, spawning vague and even more inaccurate second-order paraphrases that in turn generated ever more vitriolic denunciations. The myth continues to reverberate, recently turning up in Hannity's new book "Let Freedom Ring."

Unfortunately, there are few brakes on the spread of these myths, which play so effectively on the preconceptions of the public. Partisans have strong incentives to create and refine them in order to generate media attention and damage their political enemies. And the vast ranks of pundits and talk shows desperately need compelling material to fill airtime and column inches. In their rush to churn out content, many uncritically spread reports that later turn out to be distortions and lies. And when sober-minded people point out the truth, the myth mongers are rarely held accountable or forced to issue corrections. As a result, debunked stories are dredged back up and repeated all the time. Until we can correctly remember the past, it seems, we will be plagued with further distortions of it.

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