The Republican Noise Machine

[Guest guest]

http://www.motherjones.com/news/qa/2004/09/09_400.html

 

The Republican Noise Machine

 

David Brock, the reformed conservative noise-maker, on

how the Right has sabotaged journalism, democracy, and

truth.

 

David Brock

Interviewed By Bradford Plumer

 

September 1, 2004

 

As a young journalist in the 1990s, David Brock was a

key cog the Republican noise machine. Writing for the

American Spectator, a conservative magazine funded by

billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife, Brock gained fame

for his attack pieces on Anita Hill and President Bill

Clinton. Then, in 2002, Brock came clean. In his

memoir, Blinded by the Right, Brock admitted that his

work was based on lies and distortion, and part of a

coordinated smear campaign funded by wealthy right

wing groups to discredit Clinton and confuse the

public.

 

Since then, Brock has continued to expose the

conservative media onslaught. In his newest book, The

Republican Noise Machine, Brock documents how

right-wing groups pressure the media and spread

misinformation to the public. It's easy to see how

this is done. Fringe conspiracies and stories will be

kept alive by outlets like Rush Limbaugh, the

Washington Times, and the Drudge Report, until they

finally break into the mainstream media. Well-funded

think tanks like the Heritage Foundation overwhelm

news reporters with distorted statistics and

conservative spin. Mainstream cable news channels

employ staunchly rightwing pundits -- like Pat

Buchanan and Sean Hannity -- to twist facts and echo

Republican talking points, all under the rubric of

" balance. " Meanwhile, media groups like Brent Bozell's

Media Research Center have spent 30 years convincing

the public that the media is, in fact, liberal. As

Brock says, it's all a sham: " I have seen, and I know

firsthand, indeed from my own pen, how the organized

Right has sabotaged not only journalism but also

democracy and truth. "

 

Not content to merely complain, Brock launched Media

Matters for America in May, a media watchdog

organization devoted to exposing rightwing distortions

in the news, and to chart undue conservative influence

in the media.

 

Brock recently chatted with MotherJones.com about

Media Matters, Swift Boat Vets, convention coverage,

and the conservative stranglehold on the media.

 

MotherJones.com: What's your impression of the

campaign coverage so far?

 

David Brock: I've been interested in watching the

level of conservative misinformation that circulates

through the media. Now before Media Matters launched,

I talked for quite some time in my book about the last

election, where certain messages and themes would

start in the Republican Party and then get into the

media. The Republicans knew they couldn't win on the

issues in 2000, so they developed an explicit strategy

to attack Gore's character -- and that ultimately

seemed to have worked. If you looked at the exit polls

from 2000 you see that on all the issues -- even on

taxes -- voters preferred Gore and his policies, but

the election was lost on the issues of trust and

integrity. So it has always been my working theory

that the same thing would happen this year, no matter

who the candidate was.

 

MJ.com: So when did the " Republican noise machine "

start attacking John Kerry?

 

DB: Well, it seemed to me that, in the first few

months leading up to the Democratic National

Convention, the conservative attack machine was very

busy trying to shore up President Bush and hadn't

really turned its guns on John Kerry. Then during the

spring, after it was clear that Kerry would be the

nominee, I think they were still throwing various

things at him and kind of hoping that something would

stick and didn't really find anything.

 

MJ.com: And with the Swift Boat story, they've finally

found something.

 

DB: Right. I think the dynamic that has unfolded for

the last three weeks is one that is very familiar to

me, resembling the worst of the anti-Clinton

activities that I was involved in. Back then, we were

able to create a so-called story that had a lot of

political motivation behind it, had partisan money

behind it, and we were able to take that and get a lot

of attention for it in explicitly conservative media

-- on radio talk shows, on internet sites like the

Drudge Report. Eventually the story would spill over

into the regular media.

 

I think the exact same thing has happened in the last

three weeks, whereby a supposedly outside group, the

Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, had been working as

early as the spring, through a rather small ad buy and

book published by Regnery --a publisher, note, that

has the worst record in terms of putting out books

filled with falsehoods. Then the group was able to get

a lot of free media time for it -- first starting on

the internet and radio, then moving to cable shows

like Fox, and finally getting into the New York Times

and NBC News. And so you have something that has very

little basis in fact spreading like a virus, and it's

creating doubt about Kerry's character that didn't

seem to be there in the polls until very recently.

 

MJ.com: Now to me, it seems like some of the

newspapers -- the New York Times, the Washington Post

-- have actually been dissecting some of these claims.

Does it seem like the mainstream media is no longer

willing to follow conservative talking points quite so

blindly?

 

DB: Well more so in this case than in the case of

Gore, when there were either quotes made up and put in

his mouth that he never said or quotes taken out of

context like his Internet remarks. And it's nothing

like the coverage in the mainstream media of

Whitewater. So it does seem in this case that the

regular media has been trying to play the role of

adjudicator of fact. Unfortunately, that didn't really

come about until the Swift Boat Vets had the

conservative media echo chamber to themselves for

about 10 days.

 

So when the newspapers finally got around to it, they

found that by and large the charges don't check out.

But it seems like a losing battle in the sense that

there's so much noise about all this. You get to a

point where the factual adjudication doesn't matter

because there are all these other outlets that are far

less responsible, all talking about the ad, some of

which have a political reason for promoting it.

 

MJ.com: So it's no longer about who's right, but who

can scream the loudest?

 

DB: Sure. You can't fault some of the reporting in the

major papers. But there are so many sources and

information, particularly with the internet, that

stories like the Swift Boat ads take on a life of

their own. The New York Times has much less authority

nowadays when they say we don't find the charges

valid. So that's the effect of what the conservatives

have built up in terms of their ability to communicate

a message that they want out there.

 

Part of it comes from this phony notion of balance --

that we need to hear all sides of a story, and that

everyone's entitled to express their opinion.

Conservatives have tried to write all this off by

saying who can be against their right to say what they

want to say? Of course, nobody's against their right

to say they don't think John Kerry would be fit to

command. But to make specific allegations and then

have no records to back them up is a significant

problem. And the viewer and casual radio listener may

not be reading the 7000-word dissection in the

Washington Post. So you've got two medias going on.

And I know from my involvement in the anti-Clinton

stuff that often the goal is just to confuse people,

and to take the political opponent off his or her

game, and to not let them talk about what they want to

talk about. All those things seemed to have been

achieved here. Even if at the end of the day the whole

thing is viewed as a hoax, by the time we get there,

the election may be over.

 

MJ.com: Turning to the Republican convention, what

will Media Matters be paying attention to?

 

DB: We're tracking TV coverage, for one. We did a

study of cable coverage of the Democratic Convention

and found that CNN and MSNBC made close to the same

decisions about how much time they would devote to the

speeches, while Fox decided to hold less live

coverage. We're eager to see whether Fox will allot

the same time for Republicans, or whether they decide

to devote more time because of the ideological

composition of their audience.

 

MJ.com: I noticed Media Matters was wondering whether

CNN would have a Democratic operative to speak on TV

after each Republican speaker.

 

DB: Right, during the Democratic Convention, after

Senator Edwards spoke, they switched to Ralph Reed of

the Christian Coalition. And right after John Kerry

spoke, they went to Ed Gillespie, [chairman of the

Republican National Committee]. So we're looking to

see whether CNN will give time to Terry McAuliffe or

another Democratic operative to come on and rebut Bush

after he speaks.

 

MJ.com: Do you think that the Kerry campaign might not

be as adept at using the media to its advantage?

 

DB: I do think you have to hand it to the Republicans

in terms of their ability to work the media and to get

the media to do what they want it to do. That ranges

from having a more disciplined delivery system to

actually voicing complaints about the media. As you

may have noticed, former president Bush was bashing

the New York Times in an interview on Monday, and Rudy

Giuliani disparaged the media in his speech.

 

The Democrats seem to shy away from taking on the

media in that way. If the Republicans were in Kerry's

position, facing a smear ad being given free airtime

and uncritical coverage, they would be kicking and

screaming about holding the media accountable. That

doesn't go on with the Democrats, I think partly

because they have subconsciously accepted this

critique that the media's liberal. So maybe they feel

that they're going to get a fair shake. But in

reality, there are a lot of biases in the media that

trump whatever ideology reporters may hold. In the

Swift Boat Case, the media is biased towards airing a

dramatic story -- and in this case, you've got a bunch

of angry veterans, some dramatic accusations. It makes

for good TV.

 

MJ.com: In addition to the Republican party, you've

talked about a lot of well-financed conservative

groups -- think-tanks, media advocacy firms -- that

can influence media coverage. What role are they going

to play in this election?

 

DB: Well, the conservative Media Research Center is

planning to spend $2.8 million in an advertising

campaign before the election, basically to attack the

so-called liberal media. Their goal is to bully and

intimidate the media, and it's been very effective,

because in a lot of newsrooms there's concern shading

into fear of being seen as liberal, and these

reporters end up accommodating conservatism. It was

particularly noticeable after 9/11 when the Media

Research Center had a direct mail campaign promising

to target network anchors and producers who were

deemed insufficiently supportive of Bush's aims in the

war on terror. Those kinds of activities do end up

coloring the coverage, and partly explains why

questions about the war in Iraq weren't asked at the

time. There was a symposium of network anchors at

Harvard back in July, and a panel was discussing

rightwing pressure on the media, and how it causes

people to think twice or not be as aggressive as their

journalistic integrity would otherwise lead them to

be.

 

So part of the idea behind Media Matters was to try to

balance that criticism and pressure from the

progressive side. You simply can't have 90 percent of

email and phone and fax traffic coming into a

newspaper ombudsman from just one ideological

perspective. That will inevitably change the culture

of the institutions over time. So if we could empower

progressives to voice their own concerns about what

they're seeing, over time you might get a 50-50

balance in terms of pressure, and that would give us a

better product.

 

MJ.com: What sort of impact do you expect Media

Matters will have on the media?

 

DB: I'll tell you about one short-term effect we've

had. One of the central ideas behind the organization

was to capture the content of the top talk radio show

hosts in the country. Radio content is never captured

and catalogued in a systematic way, so there's no way

to hold radio show hosts accountable for their words.

But on the week we launched, the Abu Ghraib prison

photos were released, and we had our system in place

to record and professionally transcribe Rush

Limbaugh's reaction. So we were able to catch a whole

string of comments in which he said that torture was a

brilliant maneuver and compared the abuse to a college

fraternity prank. It was offensive across the board,

and showed how out of the mainstream Limbaugh is. That

got a lot of attention, Limbaugh spent time defending

himself, and in the end, there was legislation

introduced in the Senate because of it. Basically,

Limbaugh broadcasts on Armed Forces Radio and

Television Services -- which is a taxpayer funded

service -- and he's the only partisan host to get a

full hour of time. So we started a position to get him

pulled off the air and stop propagandizing our troops,

and the new legislation that passed in the Senate will

at least force the broadcasts to offer opposing points

of view.

 

We have other goals that might be harder to measure.

One of the things that conservatives have successfully

done over the years is to anesthetize people to the

fact that they are extreme. Limbaugh has engaged in a

process of mainstreaming himself, to the point where

during the November 2002 election, NBC News had

Limbaugh on as an election night analyst. But when we

monitor his show, we find that he's the same old

Limbaugh, making racist and sexist comments on his

program every day. It's possible that NBC doesn't even

know what goes on in his show, so by hiring him,

everybody just accepts the fact that he's a leading

conservative and he should be on mainstream

television. We want to reverse that mainstreaming

process and let people understand exactly who these

conservative pundits really are.

 

Also, when we correct misinformation that's out there,

we make an effort to deliver these corrections to

people debating on TV. For example, we did some

original research on the co-author of the Swift Boat

book, Jerome Corsi, and we found that he had made all

these bigoted postings to a rightwing website. So we

try to deliver that to people, let people know that's

out there, and in this case we saw a lot of pundits

who were debating the book and saying maybe that's

something we should consider when we're weighing the

credibility of the book. So that has an impact.

 

In the longer term, we want to ask whether its

possible for those people we're monitoring to be more

responsible. Take the case of Bill O'Reilly, who

probably has the highest rate of false statements of

anybody that we monitor in the media. O'Reilly was on

Tim Russert's show with Paul Krugman a few weeks ago.

Krugman was able to go to our website, get transcripts

of O'Reilly's radio show, and hold O'Reilly

accountable for things he had previously said.

O'Reilly knew exactly where those transcripts came

from, because we're the only ones who are doing that,

and he blew his top. Now the question is, if O'Reilly

knows he's being monitored, will that induce him to be

more careful? Right now, we're too young to really

know. Our role is to let his listeners know that

they're getting information that is incorrect. Over

time we're trying to reduce the impact of the false

information on people who are making decisions about

what policies and candidates they support.

 

MJ.com: What do you think viewers of the convention

should be watching out for?

 

DB: The main thing is to look for the susceptibility

of the mainstream media to adapt storylines that are

advancing the agenda of the conservatives. For

example, one of the emerging themes from the

Republican camp seems to be that, because Kerry talked

about his Vietnam record at his convention, somehow he

induced or invited people to make up lies about him.

Over time this is how conventional wisdom gels in the

media, and before you know it, it will have been

Kerry's fault that he was the subject of a vicious and

false attack. Those are the kinds of things people

should be looking for and be very careful and

concerned about.

.. What do you think?

 

Bradford Plumer is an editorial intern at MotherJones.com