Fighting the Right Wing Smear Machines

By Paul Waldman, TomPaine.com. Posted February 15, 2007.

In June of 2004, I wrote a column for The Gadflyer asking why the right wing seemed so slow in getting its machinery of anger and innuendo aimed at presumptive Democratic nominee John Kerry.

"Where are the anti-Kerry books?" I asked. "The conspiracy theories? The intimations of murder and drug-running? The maniacal ravings of the unhinged Right we've come to know and love?" Before long, of course, they got their act together, and Kerry never recovered from the blizzard of lies told by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and other assorted conservative dirty tricksters.

We all know how early the 2008 presidential campaign has begun. It is nearly a year before the first primary vote will be cast, and the smear machine is already taking aim at the Democratic contenders, hoping to replicate the successes it had in torpedoing the last two Democratic nominees and hamstringing Bill Clinton's presidency.

But it isn't just the candidates that are readying themselves for a campaign that will be longer and more arduous than ever before. And what about the reporters who have so often been the right's gleeful partners? There are reasons for both hope and concern.

In their repugnant book The Way to Win, ABC News political director Mark Halperin and John Harris of The Politico (and formerly of The Washington Post ) explain that, as journalists, "Matt Drudge rules our world."

In other words, when Drudge -- a right-wing operative who closely coordinates his activities with the Republican National Committee -- puts up a sensational story on his website, Halperin, Harris and the rest of their cohorts simply have no choice but to run off and cover it, whether it is true or not.

What's that, you say? Barack Obama once killed a man in a barfight? John Edwards is a pedophile? Hillary Clinton knows where Bin Laden is, but won't say because they're lovers? Run that baby! After all, "questions are being raised."

But amazing though it may seem to observers of the gurgling sewer of deception and distraction that is our modern news media, we may need to update Mark Twain's oft-quoted quip that a lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on. Today a lie can get all the way around the world in the time it takes a liar to click "post." The good news is that the truth will be hot on its tail.

Consider the first of what will no doubt be many false stories spread about the Democratic candidates: the lie that Barack Obama attended a fundamentalist madrassa when he lived in Indonesia as a boy. When insightmag.com, a website owned by the right-wing Washington Times, put out a breathless report trumpeting the fantasy, Fox News immediately jumped on board, as did Limbaugh, Hannity and the rest of the talk radio bile spewers. "Why didn't anybody ever mention," asked "Fox & Friends" co-host Steve Doocy, a man who makes Larry King look like Oscar Wilde, "that that man right there was raised -- spent the first decade of his life, raised by his Muslim father -- as a Muslim and was educated in a madrassa?"

This sentence contained no fewer than five falsehoods: Obama wasn't raised by his father, his father left the family when Obama was two years old, his father wasn't a practicing Muslim, Obama wasn't raised as a Muslim and he didn't go to a madrassa . "Well, he didn't admit it," chimed in co-host Brian Kilmeade. "I mean, that's the issue."

But then, perhaps spurred by their more or less constant feud with Fox, CNN sent a reporter out to -- get this -- check to see if the story was true. ABC and the AP followed suit, and all reported to their audiences that what Obama had attended was nothing more than an ordinary public school. In other words, they did what journalists are supposed to do when confronted with a potentially scandalous story about a candidate: investigate before reporting it, then tell the public the facts. That those news organizations doing the right thing seems so remarkable is a testament to how debased American journalism has become.

Of course, by the end of the day there were probably many people who heard something about Obama and a madrassa , and now not only have the impression that he is a Muslim, but a Manchurian terrorist, as well. (You can read a timeline of the smear's spread.)

But among the politically aware, including journalists themselves, the story now stands as a cautionary tale. When the next Drudge-fueled myth is introduced into the media bloodstream, Democrats can say, "This is the Obama madrassa story all over again," and, if the stars align, perhaps journalists will decide to do their jobs.

After the madrassa story, it was rumored that Obama was now refusing to give interviews to Fox News in response to their appallingly irresponsible behavior.

See more stories tagged with: election08, barack obama, john edwards

Paul Waldman is a Senior Fellow at Media Matters for America. His next book, Being Right is Not Enough: What Progressives Must Learn From Conservative Success, will be released in the spring.

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