Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right (14 page)

Only Republicans interrupting the left’s lock on the media are subjected to bitter reproach. Every incident of a Republican sneaking into the news apparatus becomes an instant scandal. It is criminal to be a conservative, and conservatives must be hunted! There were forty-two news items on Pete Williams and the “revolving door” and eight news items on Kathleen DeLaski and the “revolving door”—four of which also raised the troubling issue of Pete Williams.

The most famous alleged “Republican” in the mainstream media is Diane “Milhous” Sawyer. Sawyer’s youthful indiscretion of working for Richard Nixon is persistently cited to support the proposition that the “revolving door” includes both Republicans and Democrats. Let’s examine that.

In her early twenties, Sawyer got a low-level job in the Nixon White House through her father’s connections. Sawyer has explained that she was simply looking for any job in politics and said, “If someone like George McGovern had offered me a job, I’d almost certainly have taken it.”
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Her only involvement in politics prior to becoming an assistant in Nixon’s press office was to march in a campus protest against mandatory Bible class at Wellesley College.
⁶⁵

While working at the White House, Sawyer ran into Nixon precisely
⁶⁶
once.”
⁰
Indeed, Sawyer’s job in Nixon’s White House was so ministerial that when a dying rabbi and Nixon confidant claimed she was
Deep Throat,
Bob Woodward laughed out loud, noting Sawyer’s “subsidiary role in the Nixon White House.”
⁶⁷

As with Molinari and Williams, Sawyer’s hiring at CBS News in 1978 became an instant scandal. CBS big feet Dan Rather and Robert Pierpoint were beside themselves with righteous indignation. Pierpoint informed a CBS vice president: “I don’t like hiring people into news who have been involved in party politics.”
⁶⁸
Rather complained that Sawyer “had no credibility” and had “been discredited” by her work for Nixon.
⁶⁹
Sawyer herself recalls that “conversations would stop as I entered the room.”
⁷⁰

She later rectified things by giving Nixon a hostile interview, winning plaudits from the establishment press. In response to some unexceptional remarks Nixon made about female reporters treating first ladies unfairly because “women reporters think they have to be tougher” than men,
⁷¹
Sawyer reacted “like a wounded tigress” and snapped, “How do you know that women of the press are such carnivores?”
⁷²
Newsweek
called it Sawyer’s “finest hour.”
⁷³

Diane Sawyer’s connection to Richard Nixon, youthful indiscretion though it was, is the stuff of media legend. But there is a virtual blackout on the information that Sawyer’s CBS colleague Lesley Stahl was—in her thirties, as an emancipated adult—a speechwriter for left-wing John Lindsay.
⁷⁴
In broad LexisNexis searches for news items mentioning “John Lindsay and Lesley Stahl,” only eight items turn up. Searches for “Diane Sawyer and Richard Nixon” retrieved over seven hundred news items.
⁷⁵

Unlike Sawyer, Stahl was never required to distance herself from her left-wing political activism. Nor does she. When two thirds of Americans were telling pollsters they didn’t believe Anita Hill, Stahl found Hill completely credible, saying she “brings out what every woman has always known and doesn’t even talk about.... Like Anita Hill, most women don’t stop a guy.”
⁷⁶

Still and all, Diane “I would have worked for McGovern” Sawyer is a perennial fixture as the “Republican” in stories on the “revolving door” between politics and media. And she worked for a Republican only by accident, stumbling into a White House job in a Republican administration three decades ago. If we’re going to have to keep hearing about the “revolving door” on the basis of a single news personality, Republicans at least ought to have the option of choosing someone other than Sawyer.

Bitterly complaining about a George Bush cousin working behind the camera at
Fox News
on election night,
Salon’s
Eric Boehlert proclaimed that “hiring George Bush’s cousin to run a crucial part of its election coverage, the right-wing Fox Network hits a new low in conflict of interest. Why didn’t the Fox News Channel hire George Will to man its Election Night Decision Desk? Or Peggy Noonan or William Safire? Hell, why not just go right to the source and hire George W. Bush himself?”
⁷⁷

Mainstream publications like the
Los Angeles Times
were still waving the bloody shirt a month into the Bush presidency. New York University professor Todd Gitlin wrote on the op-ed page that if a Gore cousin had been employed at one of the networks, “Can anyone reasonably doubt that the pundits would be working themselves into a nonstop lather charging ‘the liberal media’ as accessories to grand larceny?”
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How about this: Suppose that half a dozen relatives of Republican politicians were scattered throughout network news as well as major national publications, along with another dozen veterans of Republican politics—not as opinion journalists, but as objective news and political analysts. Suppose the only slots available to Democrats were liberal commentary positions— “From the left, Lesley Stahl.” Pat Buchanan and Pat Robertson would be the dueling political commentators
on ABC News
(which would at least have the virtue of being a lively debate). George Will would be the host of
Meet the Press.
Peggy Noonan and Tony Blankley would provide objective political analysis.

That is the news media in America, except they’re all liberal Democrats. The occasional heretics from the liberal orthodoxy are regularly trotted out for the ritualistic Orwellian “two minutes of hate.” The one TV station that is not an ocean of liberal Democrats punctuated by the occasional “from the right!” opinion commentator is Fox News Channel. Liberals have responded to this one breach in the Wall of Sound by directing a vicious stream of invective toward
Fox News.

FIVE

advance as if under threat of attack:

Fox news channel and the election

Liberals explicitly view the dissemination of news in America as a vehicle for left-wing indoctrination. Within the ruling oligarchy’s control of television and national newspapers and magazines, there have long been only modest outlets for alternative political opinions, to wit: the
Washington Times
and the editorial page of the
Wall Street Journal.
But after years of abuse, the left has gotten used to
the Journal
and tries to ignore the
Times.

Fox News drives them nuts.

A cable news station unbeholden to the left-wing orthodoxy presents a new marginalization challenge for liberals. Americans love TV. It’s like the voice of God. The left’s singular hatred for Fox News proves even they never believed their own fundamentally sophistical equation of the network news anchors with Rush Limbaugh. Still, even in pursuit of the liberal technique of always advancing as if under threat of attack, complaining of “conservative bias” on Fox News is amazingly brazen.

“Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting” (FAIR), comically dedicated to exposing conservative media bias from its headquarters in the Manhattan heartland, has been especially rigorous in ferreting out Fox News’s slant.

In a shocking report released in July 2001, FAIR revealed that during the first few months of the George W. Bush administration—when the White House was Republican, the Senate was Republican, the House was Republican, and the new administration’s appointees were all Republican—Brit Hume’s news report interviewed almost entirely... Republicans! FAIR termed this discovery “breathtaking” and accused Fox News of “mislabeling a conservative news product as fair and balanced.”
¹

Joan Konner, professor and dean emerita at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, casually describes Fox News as “a blatantly biased, conservative news service that is challenging the longtime supremacy of the more balanced news networks.”
²
Fox News may modulate slightly to the right, but the idea that its anchors betray their political predilections more than Peter Jennings or Dan Rather do is absurd.

As part of its insidious attempt at mind control, Fox News invited a protester against “conservative bias” on Fox News, Cheryl Guttman, to make her case on Fox’s polluted airwaves. Her argument is quoted at length only in the interest of comedy.

Hannity & Colmes’s
liberal co-host,

alan colmes: I’d like to understand from you what your beef is.

cheryl guttman, democracymarch.org: Well, what our beef is, is that we feel that the media is really biased in a conservative fashion, even though people have been told it’s biased in a liberal fashion. There were twice as many stories criticizing Gore in the election, for instance. Since ...

colmes: All right. Go ahead. But why are you—but why are you protesting—that’s all right. You’re allowed to speak. But why are you protesting us? Why are you picking on Fox?

guttman: Well, we feel Fox is the most egregious because they say they’re fair and balanced, but studies have shown that they’re more conservative.

colmes: Well, that’s very interesting. Now you were saying before we got on the air here that you’ve never seen this show.

guttman: Yes, but studies have shown....

(Laughter)

colmes: Well, wait a minute. Wait a minute—you are putting yourself on the line. You’re going out there in that street. That’s today out there in front of
Fox News,
and you’re protesting something that you’ve never even seen!

guttman: There’s something else, too.

colmes: You’ve never even seen the show!

guttman: No, but there’s something else, too. Fox hired John Ellis, and John Ellis, who is obviously biased, called the election for Bush.

colmes: Yeah. You know what you’re doing, Cheryl? Look, I’m a liberal, and I’ve been attacked by liberals for being on the Fox News Channel, and liberals have been meaner to me than conservatives have because of what I do here every night. I may have to join the vast right-wing conspiracy.

Look, John Ellis—do you know that—now maybe you’re dealing from talking points or things you’ve read since you apparently don’t watch the Fox News Channel. Are you aware of the fact that John Ellis worked for NBC for about ten years prior to coming to Fox? Did you complain that NBC was conservative because John Ellis worked there?

guttman: Well, as I understand it, he quit because of a conflict of interest. So why did Fox hire him? And he was instrumental in calling the election for Bush, even though it was too close to call.

colmes: He quit the
Boston Globe.
He didn’t quit NBC.

guttman: Okay. I’m sorry.

colmes: You ought to get your facts straight. If you’re going to protest, you really ought to, first of all, watch the programming you’re protesting, know what’s on the channel you’re protesting, and understand the facts.

guttman: I’m not—I’m not an expert. I’m an organizer, okay?

colmes: But if you’re organizing a protest and you’ve agreed to appear on this show to give your point of view, the fact of the matter is that John Ellis worked for the
Boston Globe.
He quit that. Prior to that, he spent ten years with NBC, and nobody complained. Why is it only when he worked for Fox News is there an uproar about it?

guttman: Because he called the election for Bush and, psychologically, people felt that means Bush won.
³

The Fox News protesters were not isolated nuts. They were nuts, just not isolated. The John Ellis myth quickly developed into a typical phony media scandal.

It is true that Ellis is George Bush’s cousin, was employed at Fox News on election night 2000, and had talked to the candidate that night. After that, everything—everything, from the small facts to the larger implications—is demonstrably false.

Reveling in their childlike fascination with the law, journalists began tossing off phrases such as “conflict of interest” and “proprietary information” in the same breath with Ellis’s name. No one ever stops to
analyze
liberals’ legal babble to see that it is a series of incoherent factual gibes adding up to a totally contradictory account. They just keep moving fast and shouting out catchphrases to win the battle of the narrative.

In fact, the networks’ open partisanship on behalf of Al Gore on election night was far more egregious than anything they impute to John Ellis in their neurotic legalistic fantasies. By prematurely and incorrectly calling Florida for Gore, the networks actually cost Bush votes. Whatever John Ellis did, he didn’t do that.

If one Republican at Fox News can trump the propagandistic effect of ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, and CNBC combined and swing a presidential election, the Democrats may as well give up right now.

Yet Ellis’s position on the Fox News decision team became part of an all-out media witch hunt. Noticeably, the nation’s editorial pulpits expressed absolutely no interest in the networks’ incorrect projections for Gore. It was only the correct call for Bush that led to blinding outrage.

As the
Boston Globe
put it: “In the wake of the networks’ election-night exit-poll fiasco, no one has generated more scrutiny than John Ellis, the man who heads the Fox News team responsible for figuring out the election night predictions.”
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