“An Obama-Holder Conspiracy”: How The Conservative Media Are Eating Up The Zimmerman Trial
George Zimmerman’s trial in the shooting of Trayvon Martin is coming to a close. For what it’s worth, I think he’ll probably get acquitted, since 1) the lack of any eyewitnesses leaves room for doubt, and 2) my impression is that in Florida it’s perfectly legal to pursue somebody, confront them, and then when the confrontation turns physical and you begin to lose the fight, shoot them in the chest. You know—self defense.
In any case, conservative media are feasting on the Zimmerman trial (as are some other media). Their basic storyline goes like this: Trayvon Martin was a thug. George Zimmerman’s gated community was beset by roving gangs of vicious black teen criminals. Zimmerman was in the right. And most critically, this whole thing is being drummed up by racial provocateurs, most especially Barack Obama and Eric Holder, to continue their ongoing war on white people, who are the real victims of racism in America today.
Let’s take, for instance, this little story. After Martin’s killing, when protests were being organized, the Justice Department sent a team of mediators from its Community Relations Service down to Sanford, Florida to try to keep things peaceful. Here’s how the Miami Herald described the work of one of the mediators: “[Thomas] Battles, southeastern regional director of the CRS, acted as a trusted third party, gathering opposing factions to address the simmering tension by developing reconciliation strategies. He worked with city and civic leaders to allow the protests, but in peaceful manner. He also worked with the city to create its nine-point plan that aims to improve race and police relations, and tapped into the city’s faith community to help guide the healing.”
Sounds like a good thing, right? The (white) mayor of Sanford is effusive in his praise for Battles. But conservative media have a different take on the CRS’s efforts to diffuse the anger over the case, which came to their attention when the conservative group Judicial Watch obtained documents detailing the CRS’s expenses of a couple of thousand dollars for their time in Sanford. In their reading, it’s a Justice Department conspiracy, in which Obama and Holder are working with Al Sharpton to organize anti-Zimmerman protests. “Docs: Justice Department Facilitated Anti-Zimmerman Protests,” said the Daily Caller. Fox News, which has been treating its viewers to the commentary of thoughtful race analysts like Mark Fuhrman and Pat Buchanan about this case, was a tad more circumspect, posing it as a question: “Did Justice Department Support Anti-Zimmerman Protests After Martin Shooting?” Breitbart.com saw the entire prosecution as a result of the mediators: “Judicial Watch: Zimmerman Prosecution Might Have Been Forced By DOJ-Organized Pressure.” Powerline was even more dramatic: “Did the Department of Justice Stir Up Trayvon Martin Riots?” Interesting question, particularly since there were no riots. “The United States government has been converted by Obama and Holder into a community organizing agitator bunch!” thundered Rush Limbaugh in response to the report about the CRS. “This regime saw an opportunity to turn something into a profoundly racial case for the express purpose of ripping the country apart.”
This is just one little corner of the way this case has been covered in the conservative media. From the beginning, it has fit neatly into the race-baiting project they’ve been on since before Barack Obama got elected. They’ve told their audiences that Barack Obama has, in Glenn Beck’s immortal words, “a deep-seated hatred for white people,” and everything he does, from health care reform to economic stimulus, is about exacting cruel revenge on white people for long-ago sins of racism. As Limbaugh said yesterday, “Stoking the racial stuff is the way Obama was raised … He’s got a chip on his shoulder about it, and he’s here to square the deal. And Holder too. I think all of these guys have an anger about them …And so all of this is being done so the rest of us can get a taste of it.”
You might think George Zimmerman acted perfectly reasonably, and he would have followed and confronted Trayvon Martin if the teen was white. Or you might think there’s just no way to know. But one thing’s for sure: in the conservative media, they’re pleased as punch about this case, because it allows them to renew all their old claims about Barack Obama, and assure their audiences that white people are, as always, the real victims.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, July 11, 2013
“White Sale”: The “Missing White Voter”
I’ve been writing about this for the last week in the context of Sean Trende’s analysis of ethnic and racial voting data. But MSNBC’s Benjy Sarlin has an excellent summary of the gradual but steady conversion of conservative gabbers from the belief that securing a higher share of the Latino vote is an ontological necessity for the GOP to the very, very different conviction that the GOP’s salvation lies in an enhanced appeal to the same white voters that already compose nearly all of its “base.”
After November’s stunning loss, an array of influential Republicans argued that immigration reform was the party’s best chance to claim Latino voters before they become permanent Democrats. But in a mere eight months, a counter-narrative has taken hold in conservative circles, nurtured by a shrewd group of anti-immigration lobbyists and Tea Party enthusiasts. The new argument sees immigration reform at best as a divisive distraction from the GOP’s real problem of countering “white flight” from the polls. At worst, they view it as an electoral apocalypse, a seventh seal behind which lies an unbroken line of future Democratic presidents.
Sarlin sees this “counter-narrative” largely as a backlash against “Republican establishment” voices telling conservatives something they really, really didn’t want to hear (it’s no accident that Rush Limbaugh was among the first and most consistent in rejecting the Latino Imperative proposition). But he notes that some influential figures, particularly on Fox News, have switched from one theory to another as conservative opposition to immigration reform has intensified:
[T]he anti-immigration argument appears to be gaining converts fast. On election night, Fox News anchor Brit Hume called the “demographic” threat posed by Latino voters “absolutely real” and suggested Mitt Romney’s “hardline position on immigration” may be to blame for election losses. On Monday, Hume declared that argument “baloney.” The Hispanic vote, he said, “is not nearly as important, still, as the white vote.”
Sean Hannity, a reliable bellwether on the right, has been on a similar journey since the fall. He announced the day after President Obama’s re-election that he had “evolved” on immigration reform and now supported a “path to citizenship” in order to improve relations with Hispanic voters. Hannity has now flipped hard against the Senate’s bill. “Not only do I doubt the current legislation will solve the immigration problem,” he wrote in a June column, “but it also won’t help the GOP in future elections.”
Hannity and Hume didn’t arrive at their latest destination by accident. They’re just the latest figures on the right to embrace the compelling new message that’s whipping Republicans against immigration reform while still promising a better tomorrow for the GOP’s presidential candidates.
Sarlin notes the particular role played by the highly-reputed number-cruncher Sean Trende and the influential conservative journalist Byron York (who unlike Trende has been crusading against the Gang of Eight immigration bill) in making this inherently attractive-to-conservatives argument (I’ve called it a bottomless crack pipe for the Right) respectable. Their work is particularly popular, unfortunately, among those who deliberately ignore what Trende and York say about the kind of white voters who “went missing” in 2012 and the unconventional things Republicans need to do to appeal to them:
York and Trende have some nuanced ideas about how the GOP can accomplish what Romney failed to do, many of which involve tacking left on the economy. But to the talk radio right, the main takeaway is that there are several million angry white votes ripe for the taking if the party can swing even more to the right.
White voters stayed home, Limbaugh said in May, because “they didn’t think the Republican Party was conservative enough….”
“Their idea seems to be gaining currency,” Frank Sharry, executive director of immigration advocacy group America’s Voice, told MSNBC. “Right after the election most of the conservative commentariat said they had to do something to get right with Latino voters. Now there seems to be this bizarre conversation that could only happen in the conservative bubble about how Romney didn’t win because he didn’t mobilize enough white voters.”
Underlying these claims is a belief that Romney lost because he was a blue-blooded moderate who failed to connect to conservative white voters on a visceral level. Nominate an American bad-ass in 2016 and those missing whites will reappear in a hurry.
Bingo. It’s more or less the same rationalization conservatives offered for losing in 2008, as well: a nominee too moderate for the “conservative majority” who was laboring under the false premise that his past support for comprehensive immigration reform would win him Latino support.
The bottom line here is that selling conservatives on a particularly self-serving version of the “missing white voter” theory is the easiest sale imaginable, and they are accordingly buying it like hot cakes. That’s bad news for those who favor immigration reform, and even worse news for those who dream of a political environment in which racial and ethnic conflict is not constantly lurking in the background.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, July 2, 2013
“With Awe And Romance”: Howard Kurtz And Fox News, A True Love Story
Fox News and Howard Kurtz may be a good match not only because the conservative news network has become a stable for journalists who have fallen on hard times, but because the former Daily Beast Washington bureau chief has long been more generous to the network than many of his fellow media critics.
Not surprisingly, Fox has often come in for a drubbing from media watchdogs for its often conservative, narrative-driven news coverage. But Kurtz, while occasionally willing to call foul on Fox, is generally pretty credulous of the cable news channel, defending it during controversies, favorably profiling its personalities, and seemingly overlooking its lapses.
John Cook at Gawker pointed this out, suggesting that Kurtz may have scooped him in 2004 at the behest of a News Corp. PR agent, and pointing to some other examples:
Kurtz wrote a negative review of Robert Greenwald’s anti-Roger Ailes film Outfoxed. He also wrote a related item, quoting Briganti, accusing the New York Times Magazine of “ambushing” Fox News in a feature about the movie. More recently, Ailes turned to Kurtz for an exclusive interview in June 2011 after two damaging stories in Rolling Stone and New York magazine portrayed him as a paranoid lunatic. A few months after that, Kurtz wrote an influential story claiming that Fox News had become more “moderate” under Ailes’ strategic guidance. Several months after that, a “senior Fox News executive” turned to Kurtz to express “regret” after (the now moderate!) Ailes called the New York Times “lying scum.” Kurtz transmitted the apology, as well as Ailes’ “respect” for Times editor Jill Abramson, but did not note that Ailes had called her “lying scum” in the course of telling a bald-faced lie himself.
But there’s more.
Kurtz took Sean Hannity’s side in his battle with Democratic Rep. Keith Ellison after the Fox host called the congressman an Islamic “radical” comparable to the Ku Klux Klan; he defended the network after the Shirley Sherrod scandal; downplayed News Corp.’s $1 million donation to the Republican Governors Association; favorably profiled anchors Bill Hemmer, Shepard Smith, and Megyn Kelly, along with chieftain Roger Ailes; seemed to take the network’s side in its dispute with former host Glenn Beck; and declared that Karl Rove is “generally fair-minded in his commentary.”
In the early days of the Tea Party rallies in 2009, Kurtz equated “whatever role Fox played in pumping them up” with mainstream reporters who were “late in recognizing the significance of the protests.” Journalists at CNN and MSNBC who “also performed badly on April 15th,” he wrote in a Washington Post Q&A with readers by being a few days on their importance. When another reader questioned the bleeding of opinion programming into Fox’s straight news block, Kurtz pointed to the quality work of Major Garrett, a good reporter who later left his job as Fox’s White House correspondent because he said he wanted to “think more.” Garrett’s work is solid, but he’s a single anchor and reading the Q&A, it feels like Kurtz is going a bit out of his way to defend the network. He played the same Major Garrett card in an interview with former White House Communications Director Anita Dunn during the height of the White House’ war on Fox News.
This isn’t to say Kurtz hasn’t criticized Fox News. He’s had a number of scrapes with the network, especially his made-for-TV feud with Bill O’Reilly that led to an on-air debate in February. But that fight was about O’Reilly making an isolated error and being too stubborn to correct it, and Kurtz never even came close to addressing Fox’s fundamental flaws as a news organization.
But considering how much there is to criticize about the network, one might expect more from one of the country’s most prominent media critics — who had a media watchdog TV show on a rival network for years. Perhaps, as some smart liberals like Alyssa Rosenberg and Simon Maloy have written, the move could actually be good for Kurtz and Fox. It could hardly get worse.
By: Alex Seitz-Wald, Salon, June 22, 2013
“Bob Woodward’s Credibility Is In Tatters”: From Impartial Reporter To Conservative Pundit
On Fox News Monday night, famed Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward and host Bill O’Reilly zeroed in on the latest twist in Washington scandalmania — why the White House is refusing to answer questions about the 157 times former IRS commission Doug Schulman allegedly visited the White House, a closeness that raises questions about presidential involvement in the agency’s controversial targeting of Tea Party tax-exempt groups.
“This fiction that somehow [the IRS is] totally an independent agency is absurd,” Woodward, who broke the Watergate scandal, said. “You say they aren’t answering this question about the 157 visits by the IRS commissioner. They should.”
“President Obama could easily come out through his spokesperson and say this is where Mr. Schulman was. And here are the dates. Here is who he met with,” O’Reilly said. “The fact that the President doesn’t do it, should raise the curiosity of every reporter, Mr. Woodward, every reporter. Yet, as I said, the major network news on television ignored the story last week in its totality. It’s amazing.”
This forces us to ask the uncomfortable question of whether O’Reilly and Woodward have access to Google. Because if they did, they would have the answers to all of these questions, and they may even find a statement from the president’s spokesperson that he is supposedly refusing to give.
“The IRS commissioner, in carrying out his duties, would of course have many reasons to have an appointment to visit the White House,” White House spokesperson Eric Schultz said.
That’s a bit vaguer than what O’Reilly and Woodward are looking for, but the White House doesn’t really have to say any more, considering that all the specifics are already online, available to anyone who looks for them.
The story of the 157 visits originated with the Daily Caller, based on a (sloppy) inspection of White House visitor logs. But as the Atlantic’s Garance Franke-Ruta reported, parsing those very same visitor logs a bit more closely, it turns out that while Schulman — a Bush appointee — was cleared to visit the White House 157 times, he appears to have actually visited only 11 times.
The vast majority of the cleared visits were related to the implementation of Obamacare, in which the IRS plays a key role, and include regularly scheduled weekly meetings with administration officials on the ongoing work. Meanwhile, many people seem to be conflating the presidential mansion itself with other executive office buildings that are organizationally under the “Executive Office of the President ” — all colloquially referred to as “The White House.” They’re all included in the Secret Services’ visitors logs, but it turns out Schulman was rarely cleared to visit the actual White House, more often having permission to go to the Executive Office Building.
Some Googling might also reveal a Politico story, which also cast doubt on the Daily Caller’s scoop, or plenty of others.
You can see where Schulman went, whom he met with and when — all of these mysterious questions the White House refuses to answer — here.
We expect it from O’Reilly, but it’s a bit disappointing from Woodward, who should know better. Still, he’s seemingly been making a subtle drift from impartial reporter to conservative pundit in recent years.
By: Alex Seitz-Wald, Salon, June 4, 2013
“Circling The Media Wagons”: Journalists Are No Different Than Other Citizens In The Eyes Of The Law
When will journalists take responsibility for what they do without circling the wagons and shouting that the First Amendment is under attack?
I’m talking about the case of Fox News correspondent James Rosen.
The case should be described as a State Department contract worker who signed a non-disclosure agreement, yet is alleged to have leaked Top Secret/Special Compartmented Information (TS/SCI) in violation of criminal law. He also is alleged to have lied to the FBI.
Search for a story analyzing damage to intelligence collection caused by the leak and what will emerge are stories about the threat to the First Amendment and journalists.
Some background: On June 11, 2009, Rosen published a scoop on Fox News’s Web site that disclosed how North Korean officials planned to hold another nuclear test in response to an expected U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Pyongyang for recent tests of nuclear and ballistic missiles.
It wasn’t the substance of the leaked info that most deeply concerned the intelligence community. Rather it was that Rosen’s story alerted the North Koreans that the United States had penetrated their leadership circle. A second concern was how quickly someone with access to TS/SCI information — a limited, top-level security classification applied primarily to electronically intercepted messages — had leaked it.
As Rosen noted in his article, the CIA had “only learned of North Korea’s plans this week” and from “sources inside North Korea.” In short, the story warned Pyongyang’s counterintelligence specialists that the United States had probably obtained conversations or messages of top-level North Korean officials by electronic intercepts or through agents.
The U.S. leak probe quickly focused on 96 individuals who, before Rosen’s story or on publication day, had access to the relevant intelligence report. Five of those with access to the North Korean report had had contact with Rosen in the weeks or days leading up to his story’s publication.
As of May 28, 2010, 11 months after the probe began, only Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, a senior intelligence adviser in the State Department’s Bureau of Verification, Compliance and Implementation, had “accessed the intelligence report and . . . had contact with the reporter [Rosen] on the date of publication of the June 2009 article,” according to an affidavit by FBI Special Agent Reginald B. Reyes.
The probe showed that the report had been called up on Kim’s computer three times earlier on the day Rosen’s story appeared. Investigators also found records showing that about the same time the classified report was on Kim’s computer screen, “two telephone calls were placed from his desk phone to the reporter,” meaning Rosen, according to the Reyes affidavit.
Using State Department security-badge records that show comings and goings at State’s main building, investigators realized that an hour after those phone calls Kim and Rosen left the building within a minute of each other. Thirty minutes later they returned within four minutes of each other. Several hours later, Rosen’s story appeared on Fox’s Web site.
Recent articles have implied that the government was physically following Rosen, but investigators had simply used federal records to track him.
Further investigation of Kim showed seven calls between his desk phone and Rosen’s phones on the day of the article, and about 29 others between May and July 2009. In a Sept. 24, 2009, FBI interview, Kim denied being Rosen’s source and having any contact with Rosen after meeting him in March 2009.
On Nov. 9, 2009, investigators got a warrant and searched Kim’s e-mail accounts. They found that he and Rosen had set up aliases and that Rosen sought intelligence about North Korea.
All reporters covering national security, including myself, recognize we regularly seek classified information. We also know that sources can be accused of breaking the law if caught passing highly classified information to those not cleared to receive it, such as journalists.
While getting my degree at Georgetown Law School and later when I was subpoenaed in the probe of the leak of the identity of CIA covert officer Valerie Plame Wilson, it became clear that reporters could be labeled co-conspirators, aiders and abettors or accessories in criminal leak cases.
To be so named in an application for a search warrant when the government wants to get a journalist’s or any citizen’s e-mails or phone records does not mean prosecution. A journalist, however, is not very different from other citizens in the eyes of the law when it comes to the government seeking records from a third-party provider such as Google or a phone company.
Applying labels such as co-conspirator provides a probable cause for the judge to grant the warrant, as in the Rosen case. If Rosen offered money or some other reward, it might be a different case. I believe the First Amendment covers the right to publish information, but it does not grant blanket immunity for how that information is gathered.
When First Amendment advocates say Rosen was “falsely” characterized as a co-conspirator, they do not understand the law. When others claim this investigation is “intimidating a growing number of government sources,” they don’t understand history.
The person or persons who told the Associated Press about the CIA operation that infiltrated al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and Kim — or someone else — who informed Rosen about North Korea, were not whistleblowers exposing government misdeeds. They harmed national security and broke the law.
The White House Correspondents’ Association board issued a statement May 21 saying, “Reporters should never be threatened with prosecution for the simple act of doing their jobs.” But it admitted, “We do not know all of the facts in these cases.” The board added: “Our country was founded on the principle of freedom of the press and nothing is more sacred to our profession.”
I worry that many other journalists think that last phrase should be “nothing is more sacred than our profession.”
By: Walter Pincus, The Washington Post, May 27, 2013
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