Right-wing media stars hurl grenades at CBS from glass houses
By Edward Olshaker
OpEdNews.com
Predictably, the most passionate expressions of outrage over CBS’s forged-document error have come from some of the media’s most brazen fabricators—yet no one seems to have noticed the breathtaking hypocrisy and double standard.
A derisive radio commentary by Rush Limbaugh—posted on his website under the title “Crackin’ Dan Has History of Shoddy Reporting—compares the CBS mistake to the crimes of Watergate, asking, “Is there a cancer growing at CBS? Is the problem limited to Dan Rather? … Is this how CBS operates? Is it the top-down philosophy of Dan Rather, this cancer on CBS? Has it affected everybody?” (Last year, Limbaugh displayed the same kind of outrage over reporter Jayson Blair’s falsehoods, righteously declaring that the New York Times “has suffered blow after blow when it comes to its integrity and competence,” and indignantly complaining, “Look at how long they were able to tolerate this behavior in the name of diversity.”)
Remarkably, this outspoken critic of “shoddy reporting” is the same man who, on March 10, 1994, urgently warned his audience, “Brace yourselves,” and then shared a report “that claims that Vince Foster was murdered in an apartment owned by Hillary Clinton…”
As recounted at fair.org (Extra!, July/August 1994), “Limbaugh took this baseless rumor from a small insiders’ newsletter and broadcast it to his radio audience of millions, adding his own new inaccuracies: The newsletter did not report—as Limbaugh claimed—that Foster was murdered, or that the apartment was owned by Hillary Rodham Clinton. Limbaugh’s repetition of an unfounded rumor has been credited (Chicago Tribune, 3/11/94; Newsweek, 3/21/94) with contributing to a plunge in the stock market on the day it was aired.”
Questioned about his falsehood on a Ted Koppel ABC Viewpoint special on media coverage of the Whitewater scandal, Limbaugh responded with yet another lie, claiming, “Never have I suggested that this was murder.” Unlike other figures in the media who have been caught spreading false stories, Limbaugh did not lose his job; instead, later that same year he would be honored as keynote speaker at the “freshman orientation” for incoming Republican U.S. Representatives, who, exceedingly starstruck in the presence of the media’s number-one fabricator, lined up to have their picture taken with him.
A less-known but more outrageous falsehood was Limbaugh’s claim that the motion-triggered car bomb that wounded environmentalists Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney in Oakland on May 24, 1990, shortly after they received a flurry of death threats, was a weapon that they were transporting with the intention of committing a terrorist act In reality, the investigation of the blast by the district attorney had found that it was an assassination attempt on the two nonviolent activists (something that was obvious early on to anyone with common sense—how likely is it that any real terrorist would plant a motion-triggered bomb under his or her car seat and then drive the car?). Unable to find any real evidence of criminality commensurate with his emotion-based hatred of the two left-wing activists, but determined nevertheless to declare them guilty no matter what, Limbaugh resorted to the only remaining alternative—outright fiction.
The timing of this defamatory lie—March 3, 1997, one day after Bari died of breast cancer, leaving behind two young daughters—was convenient for Limbaugh, who no longer had to be concerned that she might defend herself. For good measure, Limbaugh crossed the line of decency and humanity by making joke after joke about Bari ’s painful, untimely death in the same broadcast. If CBS’s mistake justifies a massive letter-writing campaign calling for Rather to be pulled off the air, then surely there is ample reason to protest the slanderous falsehoods spread by Limbaugh on this and other occasions. His bosses at the Clear Channel Communications Corporate Board are: Lowry Mays, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, LLowryMays@clearchannel.com; and Mark Mays, President and Chief Operating Officer, MarkPMays@clearchannel.com.
Entire books have been written detailing Limbaugh’s falsehoods, with one in particular, The Bum’s Rush: The Selling of Environmental Backlash, by Don Trent Jacobs, focusing strictly on his long trail of inaccuracies regarding the environment. Yet Limbaugh has been featured on Nightline as an environmental expert, debating Al Gore on the subject. He has appeared as a news commentator on Meet the Press, This Week, and other programs, and has written columns for publications such as Newsweek and the New York Times. He is treated as a respected journalist—but one who enjoys immunity from the profession’s standards, for reasons that have never been explained.
In a similar vein, syndicated columnist Patrick Buchanan demanded, “Where is the outrage?…Where is the righteous rage of Dan Rather at the forgers of faked military records of George W. Bush, who played him for a fool?…While CBS probably did not know the documents it used were blatant forgeries, it is guilty of having aired a bigoted, misleading attack ad on George Bush masquerading as an investigative report.”
But whatever merit there might be to Buchanan’s criticism of CBS, he is hardly in good standing to point a finger, in light of his own long and ugly history of politically motivated journalistic deception and outright lies, going back to his days as a St. Louis Globe Democrat editorial writer. As Norman Solomon and Jeff Cohen of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) note in Wizards of Media Oz, “The FBI used ‘media assets’ to plant smear stories in the press—some insinuating that King was a Soviet agent. One FBI media asset against King in the early 1960s was Patrick Buchanan…”
The defamation campaign that used “assets” such as Buchanan was one of a variety of weapons employed by Hoover ’s FBI to achieve its declared goal of “neutralizing King as an effective Negro leader.” Other tactics included extensive surveillance, disruption of King’s efforts through dirty tricks, planting of informants, and even a blackmail attempt in which the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize recipient was urged to commit suicide “before your filthy, abnormal, fraudulent self is bared to the nation”—tragic proof that the FBI literally wanted King dead.
Years after King was no longer a “threat,” Buchanan candidly described how he had misrepresented FBI-supplied propaganda as his own original journalism. In his autobiography, Right From the Beginning, he proudly recalled how he misled readers, bragging that “We were among Hoover ’s conduits to the American people” in the effort to preserve white supremacy and destroy Dr. King.
But this was far from BuchananÂ’s worst journalistic offense. In his March 17, 1990, syndicated column, he denied that diesel gas could have possibly killed 850,000 Jews at Treblinka.
“The problem is: Diesel engines do not emit enough carbon monoxide to kill anybody,” Buchanan wrote. “In 1988, ninety-seven kids, trapped 400 feet underground in a Washington , D.C. , tunnel while two locomotives spewed diesel exhaust into the car, emerged unharmed after forty-five minutes.” Insanely equating a well-ventilated subway with an airtight room designed as a death chamber, Buchanan concluded, “Demjanjuk's weapon of mass murder cannot kill,” and, for good measure, mocked Holocaust survivors as liars with “group fantasies of martyrdom and heroics.”
When The New Republic asked for the source of his information, Buchanan replied, “Somebody sent it to me.” The magazine's investigation of his sources found that “much of the material on which Buchanan bases his column is sent to him by pro-Nazi, anti-semitic cranks.”
Dan Rather unwittingly used a phony document in a report and got pilloried for it. Buchanan lied about the Holocaust and ran for President of the United States two years later, a campaign during which the “character issue” would be raised by the media—but only about Bill Clinton. Buchanan ran again in 1996, a campaign memorable for his victory in the New Hampshire primary as well as the astounding “information” posted on his website—that the Israeli Mossad, whose agents included First Lady Hillary Clinton and White House Deputy Counsel Vincent Foster, had murdered Foster. Even in his weakest presidential run, representing the Reform Party in 2000, Buchanan was significant enough to take in 17 million of our tax dollars in federal matching funds. Despite his record of malicious smears and crackpot falsehoods, Buchanan never lost his status as a powerful insider, serving three presidents and maintaining high visibility as a respected journalist on television and in print.
Columnist and television personality Ann Counter eagerly chimed in with her own outrage over what she labeled “forgery-gate.” Yet her characterization of the network’s transgressions is also a fitting description of her own error-packed best-seller Slander. She wrote, for example, “Conservatives do not stoop to name-calling. Liberals do it all the time;” yet elsewhere in the book she calls Jim Jeffords a “half-wit,” Katie Couric “Eva Braun,” and Christie Todd Whitman a “birdbrain” and a “dimwit.” Nor does she mention that name-calling was official conservative policy when House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s organization, GOPAC, distributed a list of negative words that he urged GOP candidates to use to label their Democratic opponents. “The words and phrases are powerful,” the memo said. “Read them. Memorize as many as possible. And remember that, like any tool, these words will not help if they are not used.” The recommended terms included “sick,” “bizarre,” “pathetic,” “lie,” “betray,” “traitors,” “disgrace,” and “criminal rights,” among others.
Coulter also wrote, “Jim Jeffords always votes for higher taxes,” although in fact he voted against Clinton ’s tax hike and for George W. Bush’s tax cut. She alleged that The New York Times, motivated by liberal elitist bias, was virtually alone in failing to carry the news of racecar driver Dale Earnhardt’s death on the front page; in reality, the Times carried the news on page 1 the day after Earnhardt died. Many more of Coulter’s emotion-driven fibs have been compiled by dailyhowler.com, mediawhoresonline.com, Scoobie Davis Online, spinsanity.com, Joe Conason in Salon.com, and Tapped, the weblog of The American Prospect.
Weekly columns by both Buchanan and Coulter are featured at worldnetdaily.com, the influential website run by Joseph Farah, so there was striking irony in Farah’s recent complaint that “Rather not only practices bad journalism, but he does it with a purpose, with an agenda, with a mission…Now nobody believes Dan Rather. Nobody believes CBS News. That's great because there is no reason to believe them. They have squandered any credibility they had.” If accuracy is really a crucial concern for Farah, then he might appreciate a reminder that Buchanan’s history of Holocaust denial and journalistic fraud, and Coulter’s hate-driven inaccuracies, render them unworthy of being carried on his website. He welcomes reader feedback at Jfarah@worldnetdaily.com.
Unlike CBS’s careless error, the fictions disseminated by prominent right-wing serial liars are malicious, designed to incite hatred against fellow Americans disparaged repeatedly by Limbaugh as “human debris”—minorities, the poor, environmentalists, women’s rights advocates, homosexuals, and anyone who questions George W. Bush.
Unlike Dan Rather, they are rewarded and celebrated instead of condemned. According to an Associated Press article last year, “The success of Ann Coulter, Michael Savage, and other conservative authors has led many publishers to turn more to the right.” The story describes how the Book-of-the-Month Club, Penguin Putnam, and the Crown Publishing Group all announced the formation of new divisions devoted to “conservative” books similar to Slander and The Savage Nation.
And they needn’t worry about being taken to task by influential media analysts such as Howard Kurtz, who has supported Limbaugh in his column—maintaining that the hate-radio icon is by definition a “mainstream” journalist because he did election-night coverage on NBC with Tom Brokaw and Tim Russert —while showing no interest in exploring his long history of falsehoods, even as he devotes column after column to CBS’s negligence. This truly bewildering double standard will only encourage some of the media’s most flagrant fabricators to continue their pattern of journalistic fraud.
Edward Olshaker is a longtime freelance journalist whose work has appeared in History News Network, TomPaine.com, CrisisPapers.org, and the New York Times.
