Lying about Kerry

“A lie travels around the world before the truth gets its boots on.”

Having enclosed this pithy truth in quotation marks I have perhaps convinced you that I am quoting someone. It’s a nice turn of phrase, all right – so nice that, if you Google it along with several variants, you can attribute it, variously, to Mark Twain, James Watt, James Callaghan, a French proverb, and an English fundamentalist Baptist preacher named Charles Haddon Spurgeon, who himself attributed it to an “old proverb”.

So much for the reliability of lazy research.

Which brings me to the smoking-hot campaign story of the past week. The serial internet smear-monger Matt Drudge and the tabloid smear-monger Rupert Murdoch, among others, were wildly promoting the claim that John Kerry, while married, had had an affair with (original idea!) an intern in her ‘20s; that her parents opined that Kerry was “sleazy”; and that Kerry had sequestered the young woman in question in darkest Africa to keep her out of circulation.

If I knew how to game Google, and if the editors of openDemocracy were complicit, I might with a bit of work be able to pass around the world the claim that Howard Dean is George H. W. Bush’s long-lost love child.

Returning home after less than 24 hours without email, I had a message from an Israeli friend wanting to know if the story of Kerry’s affair could destroy the Democrats’ president-in-waiting. Turned out that the internet gossip-and-slander site known as the Drudge Report, as well as London’s Sun and Times, which share a Democrat-hating proprietor named Rupert Murdoch, as well as various papers in Glasgow and Melbourne (many though not all of the latter sharing the aforementioned proprietor), had printed the claim that Kerry had an affair with an intern. The Wall Street Journal website joined in the fun. So did various bloggers. Kerry went on a widely noted talk-radio-and-TV show to deny it. Listeners parsed his words carefully, listening for a telltale non-denial denial.

Major US newspapers stayed away from this story but CNN Friday night, 13 February, featured one of those sleazy, faux-high-minded discussions about what the media should do about the Kerry accusation. The house intellectual Jeff Greenfield, who ought to know better, took the position that “in this brave new world of instant communications, literally tens of millions of people will know about the story no matter what the networks and top tier newspapers do,” and added:

“The press loves to talk about its gatekeeper function, separating fact from rumor from falsehood but the truth is this role of the media has been effectively wiped out. As this and countless other stories demonstrate … there is no more gate.” Perhaps genuinely perplexed about how to scotch unsubstantiated rumors, Greenfield neglected to say there was no evidence that anything in “the story” was true. And so it went, the story that there was a “story”, that it was “out there”. Literally, it went around the world – where “literally” means literally, for a change. Fortunately, there are still grown-up media – let’s not smear them as “mainstream” – who didn’t bite. Congratulations to all those who kept the allegations to themselves.

Three days later, the woman in question issued this statement: “I have never had a relationship with Senator Kerry, and the rumors in the press are completely false.”

As journalists like to ask in other connections, what’s the story here?

The real story, absent evidence, is that a smear machine is at work. The guttersnipe Matt Drudge is one of its regular pit stops. Here’s how it goes: To lend himself the shadow of credibility, Drudge alleges that various grown-up news organizations were tracking “the story” – and since he was once right that Newsweek was working the Lewinsky beat, that’s enough to get political reporters slavering. Millions of clicks later, with the help of the less inhibited tabloids, the story about a “story” rolls from Drudge and the garbage press to the non-stop echo chamber of talk radio. It nibbles at the edges of respectable yack TV and the higher tabloids.

The purveyors gamble that the smears will win attention as media stories – those excited, pseudo-grave my-my how-the-press-is-handling-and-should-handle-the-rumor-fests. Given the bottom-fishing competition, the smear machine often enough succeeds in making its “story” the elephant grazing through every media room in the universe.

Question: Is this the very same smear machine that first made Matt Drudge a household slime artist when, in 1998, he retailed the false and vicious (and later withdrawn) claim that former Clinton assistant Sidney Blumenthal had beaten his wife? The same network of right-wing “elves” who (with Drudge’s help) escorted the Bill Clinton “troopergate” canard, the Hillary-Rodham-Clinton-lesbian canard, and a whole flock of other canards, along with the Paula Jones saga, through the right-wing press and, lawyers permitting, the courts until they hit the paydirt named Monica Lewinsky? (For details, see David Brock’s important book, Blinded by the Right, reviewed by this writer in the Los Angeles Times Book Review 17 March 2002.) Or is it a different smear machine this time?

Just asking.

The smear machines, also known as “oppo research”, are by now standard features of political staffs. I will eat a non-chocolate shoe if this is the last we hear from them during the next nine months. The doctored photograph of Jane Fonda and John Kerry that appeared this week is an ominous sign of what’s to come. How the machine works is surely a subject for journalists during the campaign’s dog days, when more immediate news from the candidates is likely to be sparse, and hundreds of reporters need to find something useful to do with their spare time. Reporting this sort of thing would be a risky business. (See my aspersion on Greenfield, above.) But if they do this work well, that is, scrupulously, reporters could shine some needed light on the dirt industry.

So, reporters, please don’t stop where the New York Daily News stopped its 17 February rectification piece, (headlined “Affair’s a lie, she says”), with this sentence: “It remains unclear how the rumor got started.” (A decent place to start is with this piece by the Philadelphia Inquirer’s political columnist, Dick Polman, who makes more informational stops along the food chain, but doesn’t know where the rumor started, either.)

And by the way, as some Republicans riposte with their readymade tu quoque – the Democratic and now, finally, amply reported charges that George W. Bush skipped out on his Air National Guard obligations (the subject of last week’s column) – please note that the charges against Bush involve factual claims with considerable substantiation. There are records. There are witnesses. There are surprisingly missing records. There are surprisingly missing witnesses. The White House took the question of records seriously enough to release what they said was all the records they had.

By contrast, on the strength of what’s been published anywhere so far, there are no facts supporting the Kerry rumor. Not one. There never was one.

[A footnote, 23 February 2004: For an interesting sidelight on the veracity of the Matt Drudge method, see Ryan Lizza's campaign journal in the New Republic]