Ho-hum. Another day, another threat by the White House press corps to stop being so "nice" to Obama. You know, "nice" like pretend he’s a Muslim citizen of Indonesia, or that he pals around with terrorists, or that pretty much any patently ridiculous charge flung at him, especially those flung by Republicans, is a legitimate news story worthy of being regurgitated repeatedly despite definitive debunkings?
Ahem.
As Eric Boehlert’s book Lapdogs demonstrates, "nice" is what that same press corps did and still does for George W. Bush and virtually any Republican out there — and seldom does for any Democrat, unless it’s a Democrat who’s attacking other Democrats. (Yes, gang, this is why the press loves those Blue Dogs.)
This has been how the press operates for decades. Bill and Hillary Clinton ran into the same problems as did Obama. Here’s what I mean by that:
Remember the very first "Clinton scandal"? The White House Travel Office Scandal? (Actually, I think it was the second or third — the "haircut on the tarmac scandal" was the first since his inauguration, if I recall correctly. And of course there was the Gennifer Flowers nonsense, which was neutralized by the news of George H. W. Bush’s own Jennifer Fitzgerald, but that was before the election.)
What happened was this: In the course of reviewing the workings of the White House administrative staff they inherited from the first Bush, the Clintons noticed something odd: Tens of thousands of dollars was missing from the White House Travel Office, which among other things oversaw the travel arrangements of the press corps that traveled with the president. Because of this, they saw fit to fire a bunch of the Travel Office staff.
Now, it’s true that Hillary Clinton had some travel-agency friends who she apparently thought deserved the Travel Office gig. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that over $50,000 of the Travel Office money was sitting, unauthorized, in Billy Dale’s own private and personal bank account.
However, Billy Dale was not without his friends in the press: In his years as the WHTO chief, under Reagan and then Bush I, he ruled with the classic iron fist in the velvet gloves: Juicy perks to those journalists who wrote the "right" things, the cold shoulder to those who didn’t. This is why guys like Sam Donaldson leapt to Billy Dale’s defense, praising their old friend and attacking the Clintons with far more vigor than they’d ever exercised against George H. W. Bush or Ronald Reagan for Iran-Contra. They attacked them so hard over this and other minor "scandals" and smears (such as accusing Hillary of boinking her spouse’s friend and White House aide Vince Foster, that Foster wound up killing himself — and leaving a note blaming the press for driving him to it.
They kept at the Clintons over this for years, and it ended only when the Clinton presidency did — not even an exoneration from a special prosecutor was enough to shut up the press about this.
Starts to sound familiar, doesn’t it? Now you know why I call it "The GOP/Media Complex".
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Hmmmm. I seem to have missed that part.
Per http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/…..rjury.html
Also per the Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewinsky_scandal
In my memory, the whole Whitewater round of accusations that were proved to be scraped up for the usual right wing purpose of inventing a reason to indict, so that the candidate can be described as ‘under indictment’ – was the first of the ongoing round of accusations against a president who actually did the country a lot of good. That doing a lot of good for the country is the main source of irritation to the wingers, who really, really like the country to be squeezed dry so they can run off with all the profits. (see http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/6622 )
Reading comprehension problems?
EXONERATED OVER THE “TRAVEL GATE SCANDAL.”
Which is what PW was talking about, which is what the main subject of those last five paragraphs was about, and for which he/she/they was/were exhonerated.
Sorry, didn’t mean to step on your attempt to take her quote out of context to make a totally different point.
The MSM was complicit across the board in helping to perpetuate this crap. Charles Pierce called out David Shuster a few nights ago on this very point and Shuster’s head just about exploded. For a few moments, I thought he was channeling Bill O’Reilly. Go here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9txF1Z2v2A
Sorry Shuster, but Pierce is way out of your league. Oh, and hey Davey? Blow Job.
Notice those first three words. That should tell you how trustworthy they are.
Also, I’m told by a usually-unreliable source that perjury has a very specific definition: something like, lying under oath about a material fact. Bill Clinton’s tomcatting wasn’t material to either the Travel Office or to Whitewater, which is why he didn’t commit perjury (not that he wasn’t lying, but it wasn’t perjury).
Wish more people when on air would challenge these pampered and priviledged celebrity “journalists”. The corporate media is truly abysmal in the States and does little to inform or enlighten the American public.
Shuster just about blew his wig, alright. Pierce sold a few books out of that appearance, if for no other reason than to spite the pampered little twit.
Book Salon up at the Mothership with Eric Patashnik’s Reforms at Risk: What Happens After Major Policy Changes Are Enacted hosted by Steven Teles
Bill Clinton’s use of the English language was exquisitely precise. He’s one of the few people where I listened, and then had to go and think until blood ran out of my ears to understand what I thought he might have said.
When he said, pointing with his finger, “I did not have sex with that woman,” I’ve always wanted to know at whom Clinton was pointing. Did he point to some women in the audience with whom he had not had sex? I could believe that.
Did he say “I did not have Sex with Monica Lewinsky?” Not that I recall from watching it on TV.
I don’t believe Clinton ever lied. Misdirected the questioner? Frequently.
I remember him saying that his goal in the deposition was to be as unhelpful as possible without lying. “I was never alone in the Oval office when Ms. Lewinsky was with me.”
Exquisite phrasing.
It’s true, he was (is?) a language virtuoso. It’s a success trait in a lawyer. If you watch the deposition video, when he says “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is,” he is absolutely correct. I always viewed the out-of-context attack on that statement as emblematic of the utter vacuity of the entire Kill Bill movement.
Correct, too: when she was there, he wasn’t alone. They should have had better, more precise, questions.
Wigwam: Go look up “perjury trap” in Google sometime. That’s what the get-Clinton crowd tried to set up WRT the whole Paula Jones nuisance suit. The whole point of the suit was to get Clinton under oath to talk not about Paula Jones (whose story was and remains full of plot holes that would embarrass a grindhouse movie producer, despite her team’s attempts to revise it on the fly), but about Monica Lewinsky — even though his relationship with Lewinsky had no connection whatsoever with the ever-changing allegations of Paula Jones.
Guess what? One of the five criteria a statement must meet (and it must meet all five) to be considered perjury under Federal law is that it must be relevant to the case in question. Clinton’s statement about Monica was made in response to questions asked him in the course of a deposition on a totally different matter, and had nothing to do with that matter. Whether or not Clinton told the truth is irrelevant, because the question itself was irrelevant and should not have been asked.
The judge defined “sex” in a very specific way. As I remember it was “touching the breasts or genetalia of another for the purpose of arousal.” Something very close to that. I remember thinking “you old fox” about Clinton, because if he used a cigar, he could argue that he was touching the CIGAR, not Monica. And if Monica was giving him a bj, and he wasn’t touching her good bits, then she might have been touching HIM in a way that fell within the definition while HE was only touching her mouth.
Parsing, indeed, but not lying.
as i have contended since during the campaign, it is all too obvious the msm takes the gop’s, including those like rush limbaugh, talking points as true and expects president obama to defend the negative.
unlike walter cronkite who believed the media’s responsibility was to educate, the msm today looks to the polls, sees whose up and whose down, and gears their reporting to reflect those polls. today’s msm believes only in covering controversy, usually by the democrats.
since the run-up to the war, the msm has lost credibility.
Furthermore, during one of the conversations that Linda Tripp taped, Monica Lewinsky says herself that “we didn’t have sex, Linda!… We just fooled around.” Like most of the respondents in a JAMA study done around that time, Monica honesty didn’t consider hummers to be sex.
But setting all that aside, here’s the biggest reason that what Clinton said wasn’t perjury: It simply wasn’t relevant to the matter at hand. As I already mentioned, one of the five criteria a statement must meet to be considered perjury under Federal law is that it must be relevant to the matter at hand. Clinton’s deposition was for the Paula Jones suit, which was soon to be dismissed. The Lewinsky questions had nothing to do with the matter at hand. It would have been the same if they’d asked him about parking tickets from 1967: If it’s not germane, it doesn’t matter if he answered truthfully — any answer to a question that should never have been asked in the first place is not perjury. Period.
I call it the Conglomerate Media or BigMedia. There’s nothing “mainstream” about what they report. They actually do not follow polls, and instead try to sway poll results with their “reporting.” Issue after issue, year after year, they ignore the will of the people and promote their other BigMedia friends’ storylines instead, the “public option” debate being the most recent example.
I say this as someone who spent years working for the Conglomerate Media. Doesn’t matter what you think personally out “in the field,” since you do what your boss tells you (this is why I left). It’s quite easy for them to control the message from the very top of the Conglomerate since they specifically hire “yes men and women” all up and down the organization.
Also, this kind of stuff has been going on in various forms since probably the printing press was invented, or before. Although, the BigMoney stringpullers have been figuring out ways to take message control to new levels over the past few decades with TV. Check out this video on YouTube of the Mondale-Raygun debate in 1984 and note the warning by Barbara Walters near the beginning explaining the shenanigans in forming the questioners that night (Fred Barnes…are you kidding me?!?!):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ka38mzSuOtI
Little did Barbara know how bad it was going to get. All this crap is about keeping John Q. Nascar voting against his own self-interests, and instead voting for politicians who will enact policies that BigMoney wants, like NAFTA and unlimited conglomeration and so on. In other words, keep them voting for Repubs.
Busting up BigMedia is perhaps the number 1 issue we should focus on next in my opinion, since if more of the public had the facts instead of propaganda, we’d have better politicians who would be passing more beneficial laws for America as a whole. Every other issue follows from this.
Ya know, Shuster covered Whitewater as a reporter for a local affiliate in Little Rock. He then was one of the original Fox Newz reporters:
Seemed like he was taking Fierce Pierce’s critique personally, didn’t it? Defensive much?
While Shuster does seem at least somewhat honest, as someone who has been in those circles, I can attest that it really does start to cloud how you perceive what is “reality” after awhile. I suspect this has happened to Shuster over the years.
Ugh. He wouldn’t have been picked by Fox to be their lead guy on McCain if they weren’t absolutely sure of his loyalties. I’m not sure who’s worse, him or Ron Fournier — who is another McCain buddy, with extra added Karl Rove connections.
Studying Fournier’s work over the last year or so, I think Ron is one of the worst because he knows exactly what he’s doing. He’s happy to be deceiving the voters since no doubt feels what’s good for BigMoney is good for America. Classic trickle-downer.
I do think though you can see a difference between the ones that are really clever with it, like Fournier or a David Broder who are intentionally misleading, and those who may be well-intentioned but are too influenced by their surroundings, which I’m guessing is the case with Shuster. Those cocktail-weenies sure are tempting!
Of course, then there’s another class of just vacuous morons who just love getting so much attention.
— Henry A. Wallace, Vice President to FDR, 1944
The Danger of American Fascism
Taking over the media was a GOP reaction to the Washington Post’s role in Richard Nixon’s demise. Robert Parry wrote an excellent piece in 2005 @ Consortium News which is a must-read, must-bookmark article.
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2005/042805.html
Having gained control over the media by the simple expedient of buying it, the next step was to create a legal case establishing that the media could lie to the public and still call it news. FOX accomplished that in 2003.
http://www.projectcensored.org…..gally-lie/
More links and some of my commentary HERE.
It’s about corporate money and power. The corporate, consolidated media companies need to use politics as a tool to deceive the public into believing they are working in the public interest.
They’re not. They’re working in the interest of their stockholders, their sponsors, and themselves.
As long as the GOP is controlled by unprincipled billionaires and Wall Street CEO-types, the media (and Congress (and the White House)) will be too.
theyve been around for ages
http://coat.ncf.ca/our_magazin…..index.html
Huh! All these years and I never heard those details about the Travel Office firings. Of course, I long ago concluded that the people working there “served at the pleasure of the President” and so there was never the slightest case for the story to have ever gotten more than a few paragraphs on page A17.
Thanks for those links. Most of my opinions were based on personal experiences and observations, but nice to see others have studied it with such depth. Now I’ve got more data to back up my claims when trying to explain this to others.
What was that movie about Al Jazeera and the invasion of Iraq? I must say Shuster came off very well in that. But moving up often means selling out, no matter what your line of work.
You are more than welcome. I was pretty sure from your comment @ 17 that you would appreciate that. Busting up BigMedia is indeed the number 1 issue.
“Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.“
— A.J. Liebling
Oh, yes. They’d wanted to do it for ages but they hadn’t perfected how to manufacture consent. It took the P/R skills of Edward Bernays, the organizational talent of William Simon, and the money of their industrialist friends, to pull it off.
Re the failed coup in 1930: Thanks for the link. I knew about it, but looks like I can pick up a lot more details there.
It’s really insidious too, today, because people are so complicit in our own brainwashing.
Was that “Weapons of Mass Deception?”
I distinctly remember Rumsfeld saying publicly that he wanted to bomb Al Jazeera.
In reply to OldFatGuy at #3
Pretty much. I had missed that fact that the text I highlighted was an active link (a bit of colorblindness) and thus missed the fact that PW was talking about Kenneth Starr’s successor, rather than Starr himself. And, I’ve never heard of Starr doing anything decent wrt the Clintons.
My oops!