Right-wing propaganda revisited: A reply to readers

Jul 29, 2010 — Washington Post

E.J. Dionne

Well, I thought my Monday column on Shirley Sherrod, President Obama and the right-wing media might stir some interest, but I did not expect it to draw quite the response it did. Because it attracted many comments, I’d like to thank everyone who got involved in this discussion, to reply to some who took the time to argue with me, and to express appreciation to those who wrote in support of my view. This post is longer than usual because readers raised a lot of issues, only some of which I can deal with here.

The outpouring from progressives reflects the depth of their frustration over the long-term success of the right-wing in pushing not only its arguments but also its false claims into the mainstream media. There are two issues here. One has to do with the mainstream media’s willingness to accept conservative frames on ongoing controversies. The other has to do with the right’s ability to push entirely untrue allegations into the mainstream discussion, on the infinitely elastic theory that “if people are talking about it, we have to cover it.”

The second should, in principle, be the easier issue to deal with. It is astonishing how many completely fake and false allegations became part of the mainstream discussion: the popular understanding that Al Gore said he “invented the internet” when he actually never said it; the pack of lies thrown at John Kerry in 2004 about his Vietnam service; and astounding assertions that President Obama is (1.) a Muslim who (2.) was educated at a madrassa and (3.) was not born in the United States and who (4.) despite the fact that he is half white and despite a life of extraordinarily close friendships with white people, somehow favors blacks over whites. The distortions of Shirley Sherrod’s powerful speech against racism into evidence that she is a “racist” should, as I said in the column, create a much higher barrier in the future. But will it?

I do want to acknowledge, as several readers pointed out, that the Sherrod case is in some important ways good news: partly because of her own promptness in facing down her accusers and partly because of some old fashioned fact-checking and reporting by the mainstream media -- with, as far as I can tell, CNN honorably leading the pack -- the false story was discredited pretty quickly. I thus share the view of one commenter on The Post website who issued these marching orders to the MSM: “Report! Return to hard reporting. Research that story and don't turn it in until your editor has approved that its solid. This goes for print, blogs, and broadcast.” All I can say is: Amen.

The framing issue is a bit more complicated. Having been in the media for a long time, I am absolutely certain that editors and producers worry far more about being fair to the right than being fair to the left. That’s the case, I think, because many editors responded rather defensively to all the studies showing that reporters are, indeed, more likely to be Democrats or independents than Republicans. The automatic suspicion is that if there is going to be bias, it would probably be against the right. That might be the case on social issues such as abortion. But on economic issues, particularly those connected to trade and labor unions, the media’s automatic bias is often against the left. Editors also suspect, correctly, that they are in more danger of being attacked by the right, which has been in the media criticism business for four decades, than by the left, which has only gained traction for its media criticism with the rise of the blogosphere.

Obviously (or at least it should be obvious), I have no problem with the idea that journalism should be fair to the right. I think journalists should be fair to everybody. I have tried to do that over the years, and my book Why Americans Hate Politics paid extensive and respectful attention to conservative and libertarian ideas. Even though I now am free as a columnist to offer my opinions -- which are, indeed, often critical of conservative approaches -- I still feel bound by journalistic rules about accuracy. I may polemicize, but I don’t invent facts, and I try not to distort the views of those I argue against.

The objection I offered in the column was to members of the mainstream media bending over so far backward for fear of being attacked as “liberal” that they allowed conservative assumptions to become embedded in news stories and in conventional analysis. For example: No matter how often supposedly centrist commentators claim that the Obama Administration went way to the “left” on the stimulus or health care, it is just not true. Obama is a very moderate sort of progressive. The health bill is similar to old moderate Republican proposals. It is a long way from full-throated liberalism, let alone socialism.

For me, the signal tip-off to the mainstream media’s capitulation to a conservative framing of large questions was the coverage of the 2000 recount. For weeks, the assumption than ran through so much of the reporting and analysis was that George W. Bush had “won” the election and that Al Gore was being unpatriotic and selfish by prolonging matters just because he wanted to recount ballots in Florida -- a state he lost by a few hundred votes -- and even though he had won the popular vote. It was, as I wrote at the time, a situation of “Heads Bush Wins, Tails Gore Loses.”

Now, to a few of my critics. One wrote: “In a free world with a free press Fox news has every right to skew their reportage however they wish... you do not have to watch it... if you do, you do not have to believe it.”

That is absolutely true. Fox News has every right to exist in a free society. But I have the freedom to call them out. My specific beef is with the idea that the mainstream media have to cover something just because Fox News makes a big deal of it. And Fox has that word “News” in its title, but does not live up to the standards the word demands. In the Sherrod case, Fox was ready to jump on the distorted excerpt of her speech -- without asking any questions about it -- because doing so served the political purposes of the right.

Here is an excerpt from Sean Hannity’s conversation with Newt Gingrich as posted by Fox – and to make clear I’m not taking this out of context, here is a link to the entire transcript.

HANNITY All right. A lot — a lot obviously going on here. The — this woman on tape saying these racially charged things that she didn't want to help farmers, in particular white farmer. That she said she wanted him to go out and deal with one of his own and she put him in touch with a white lawyer. Just the latest in a series of racial incidents. What do you think of this?

GINGRICH: Well, let me say, first of all, Secretary Vilsack did exactly the right thing. I mean I often disagree with this administration. But firing her after that kind of viciously racist attitude was exactly the right thing to do. And the fact that we have to be genuinely colorblind.

You know you can't be a black racist any more than you can be a white racist. And I just think it'd be good for those of us who are often critical of the administration to recognize that here's a case where Secretary Vilsack did exactly the right thing, moved very promptly, and fired somebody who frankly shouldn't be serving the American people because they clearly had a set of attitudes inappropriate for a federal official.

HANNITY: All right, my only thing is they weren't the ones that caught it. It was on Breitbart.com and it happened some time ago. So it's interesting that it took the new media to expose this.

Read that, and you decide. It took the new media to “expose” this? No, it took right-wing media to distort this.

There were a number of comments that suggested I have a double standard for left-wing and right-wing propaganda. My favorite on this score was from a reader who adopted a friendly, long-suffering tone: “E.J., EJ., E.J. --- Your column is not left-wing propaganda, because, uh... because... because... it's only propaganda if it comes from a conservative source. Did I get that right?”

There was also this: “Oh, I get it. The sludge the far left is pumping into the political waters is okay but the right's sludge is not. Now that's the kind of balance that a liberal can get behind.”

No, I think “sludge” is wrong wherever it comes from. But there is a fair point embedded in the criticism: that the word “propaganda” covers a lot of ground, so let’s make a distinction. It’s perfectly legitimate for conservatives to argue that the Obama health plan will cost the government too much money. This is an idea they might well want to propagate, which is where the word “propaganda” comes from. I disagree with that view, but it’s something we can argue about by mustering facts and speaking openly about the values we bring to those facts.

But it was not legitimate to say the health plan should be killed because it included “death panels,” since there was nothing even remotely resembling “death panels” in the bill. My core point was that the mainstream media should not be subtly or unsubtly pushed into accepting untrue or misleading right-wing propaganda to frame news stories. (It should not accept left-wing propaganda to do that, either.)

It took mainstream journalism far too long to make clear that the death panels were a pure invention. Some news stories treated a factual matter as a matter of opinion, thereby legitimating a falsehood. Consider this sentence -- not atypical of how the matter was treated in other outlets -- from the ABC News website in August, 2009: “The House bill, H.R. 3200, also includes controversial ‘end of life care’ consultations, which would reimburse doctors for discussing end-of-life arrangements with patients, but which some critics have characterized as ‘death panels’.” That’s simply wrong. There were no death panels, period, no matter how anyone “characterized” anything. As Trudy Lieberman wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review:

Traditional journalism tends to be reactive, and the ill-effects of this were never more evident than with the “death-panel” debacle. Instead of bringing audiences around to a serious discussion of end-of-life care, the press let right-wing ideologues set the agenda with misinformation before eventually doing the stories that refuted the outrageous claims of Sarah Palin and others. But it was too little, too late.

A few commenters raised the issue of whether the right-wing was responsible for the pain Shirley Sherrod was put though, or whether it was really the Obama administration’s fault for accepting the video at face value and asking her to quit. One reader wrote: “I believe the Democrats did this to themselves and now are trying to blame the Republicans. Typical of the left -- won't take responsibility for their own actions.”

As it happens, the third, fourth and fifth paragraphs of my column were devoted to criticizing what I called the “shameful” response of the administration. But the simple fact is that Obama’s lieutenants were not responsible for publicizing a distorted video. Conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart was.

There is much more to be said on this subject, and I hope we can keep the conversation going. I expressed hope that this episode would be a turning point, and it’s nice to know that a lot of other people hope so, too.