Killing the Messenger Read online

  And out in the crowd were countless local Clinton supporters whose names I’d never heard but who had been loyal to the former president dating back to when he was a young governor. Later, many waited in line to tell me they came to see for themselves if I understood the hurt and damage I had caused them.

  Kicking off the program was Skip Rutherford, the dean of the school and an old Clinton hand from way back when who had valiantly attempted to defend the president from my attacks.

  “In the 1990s,” Skip told the room, “he certainly played a major role in this state, to the dismay of some.” Standing offstage, I heard several people laugh nervously at the understatement.

  Although Skip and I had known each other’s names (and probably cursed them, too) for many years, we’d never met until the night before the speech, when we got together at the Capital Bar.

  He was friendly and welcoming, but he made it clear to me how hard those days had been on Clinton supporters in Arkansas. Though the investigations my reporting had unleashed turned up nothing, they tormented innocent people, forcing them to ring up huge legal bills. It was important, he told me as we finished our drinks, not just for the sake of history, but for the future, that people hear my story.

  And so, before a packed crowd—a mix of reporters, politicos, and young students looking to learn from my own strange journey in American politics and journalism—I told that story. I talked about the reclusive billionaire whose wealth funded a shadow campaign against the American president, about the right-wing publications that ignored any pretense of journalistic standards and chose instead to launder false accusations into print, about the way the mainstream media were unwitting accomplices to the crime of character assassination, and about the role I played in all of it.

  It’s a story that, as yet, lacks an ending. I didn’t come back to Arkansas to settle some karmic debt, to find closure in a difficult, and at times ugly, chapter of my life, or to have one last Moscow Mule at the Capital Bar.

  The real reason I came back—and the reason I wrote this book—is that the Clinton wars still aren’t over.

  Bill and Hillary Clinton remain the most important, perhaps the defining political figures of this generation. Hillary is the most likely candidate—and, in my opinion, the right candidate—to win the Democratic nomination for president in 2016. And the same reactionary forces that tried to drag them down in the 1990s are still at work today.

  The Arkansas Project wasn’t a relic. It was a rough draft. There remains what Hillary, back in 1998, called a “vast right-wing conspiracy” in this country. It even features many of the same participants. But it’s become bigger, more focused, and better-funded than ever before. It’s more like a “vast right-wing conglomerate,” as the Atlantic magazine observed. And it’s about to bring its considerable power to bear against Hillary Clinton.

  Today, even more obviously than when I was involved, the conservative movement cannot compete in the marketplace of ideas. And when it comes to the 2016 election, the fact is that no Republican politician enjoys the widespread appeal, deep devotion, or impressive record of public service that Hillary does. The only way they can win is by using fear and sensationalism to undermine honest debate—and that’s exactly what they’ll do if we let them.

  When I finished my speech at the Clinton School, I was relieved by the warm round of applause. And I wasn’t surprised that, despite the radical personal transformation I’d detailed, a majority of the questions I got weren’t about my story at all.

  My questioners were concerned less with what I’d participated in back in the 1990s, and more about the ongoing right-wing campaign to distort the facts and destroy their opponents by any means necessary.

  Today, conservative mouthpieces like Rush Limbaugh and his imitators are continuing to spread lies and spew angry rhetoric that deserve no place in our public discourse. One right-wing shock jock has expressed his wish to see Hillary “shot in the vagina.”

  Today, Fox News reliably recycles these lies onto cable news, creating an alternate universe in which facts are turned upside down and invective stands in for argument. Fox has accused Hillary of murder, compared her to a murderer, and suggested she commit suicide.

  Today, Richard Mellon Scaife may be dead and gone, but he’s been replaced by a pair of billionaire brothers, Charles and David Koch, whose motives are no purer but whose treasure chest of funding for right-wing causes is far deeper than Scaife’s. They’ve pledged to spend close to a billion dollars to defeat Hillary.

  Today, the American Spectator may no longer be the journal of record for the conservative movement, giving its most extreme elements a platform, but that’s only because those extremists now have platforms of their own: a slew of new digital media properties from which conservatives slander their political opponents. They have Hillary squarely in their sights.

  Today, the conservative movement has been co-opted by its right-most fringe, blocking progress or even real debate on the issues that affect our country. The United States Senate is bullied and bossed by Tea Party types like Ted Cruz, who led a pointless government shutdown, and Rand Paul, a desperate presidential candidate who, as I pointed out in Little Rock, has already started recycling the same stale attack lines on the Clintons.

  And, of course, today, it is still a Clinton who stands in the way of these forces. Well before Hillary declared herself to be a candidate for president, no fewer than eight conservative PACs had set up shop to try to tarnish her record and reputation before she had a chance to make her own case.

  The market for such sludge is huge. Unprecedentedly, every major news outlet assigned a reporter to the Hillary beat three years before Election Day, while she was still a private citizen and unsure she’d even make the run.

  This, then, is the dynamic in which events are unfolding, a dynamic I warned of in my speech: On the one hand, a voracious news media hungry for any Clinton crumb; and on the other, well-funded anti-Clinton mudslinging operations that feed the beast. This is the new reality of American media and politics, a sick and scary evolution from the world within which I operated back in the 1990s.

  Fortunately, things have changed on the other side, as well.

  Today, a network of progressive organizations exists to confront the right on the battlefield of public discourse, countering their lies and holding accountable those who spread them.

  Today, Democratic politicians and their supporters embrace the idea that these smears cannot be ignored—they must be refuted and their sources exposed.

  Today, Hillary knows that dedicated watchdogs have her back in the fight against conservative propaganda.

  And, today, I’m one of them.

  This book is, in part, the story of how Bill and Hillary Clinton, their enemies, and I have all evolved since the battles of the 1990s—how the Clinton Wars have become ingrained in the fabric of our politics, how the vast right-wing conspiracy has grown and changed, and how I came to take a leadership role in combating it.

  Counterarguments and spin have long been a part of the normal give-and-take of politics in our democracy. But concurrent with the rise of the Clintons—and with the trajectory of my own time in politics—there arose a professional political class on the right, bankrupt of ideas and issues, whose sole and relentless preoccupation is slinging mud at the liberal alternative.

  In my lifetime, the conservative message machine I was once an integral part of has grown into a formidable and treacherous leviathan. And my career has become a ceaseless (some might say Sisyphean) effort to counter the power of the organized right and restore some sense of truth and balance to the political arena.

  That’s what this book is all about. I wrote it not just to tell stories about the recent political past. I wrote this book to help shape the future.

  I make no secret of the fact that I hope for the sake of the country Hillary Clinton is the Democratic nominee for president in 2016—and wins the presidency. And I know from my long experience on both si
des of the Clinton Wars what it will take for that to happen—and what her opponents will do to try to stop her.

  This, then, is more than a history of the new, vast right-wing conglomerate and the progressive infrastructure that has grown up to counter its influence. It’s a handbook—a practical guide for Hillary supporters who want to help protect her from the dishonest conservative campaign already underway, for Democrats who are sick and tired of being bullied by the radical right and lied to by the press, and for plain old everyday Americans who want to see a real debate about their futures rather than a rerun of the stale scandal politics of the 1990s.

  Hillary’s candidacy means that 2016 will be the climax of a long struggle to determine America’s purpose in the twenty-first century. The right will come at her with everything it has.

  The good news is, I have their playbook. And I’m revealing it to you so that, together, we can be ready for what the right has coming and ensure our fellow Americans don’t get tricked by it.

  Chapter One

  Building the Machine

  My phone was ringing.

  It was a blustery Saturday afternoon in January 2003, and I was walking through the front door of my townhouse on N Street in the Georgetown section of Washington, arms laden with groceries from the nearby Safeway.

  Once upon a time, this townhouse—sometimes referred to as “the house Anita Hill built,” since I had purchased it with the proceeds from my best seller, The Real Anita Hill—had been a social hub for conservative movement activists determined to destroy the Clinton presidency and have a rollicking good time doing it.

  A typical cocktail party at my townhouse might feature appearances from bold-faced names like Grover Norquist, Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham, Matt Drudge, and Tucker Carlson. You might bump into the conservative lawyers who represented Clinton accuser Paula Jones. You might run across the Republican Capitol Hill operatives investigating Whitewater. And no matter who was in attendance, you’d find plenty of booze, plenty of cigars, and plenty of braggadocio, as the leading lights of our movement celebrated and plotted.

  On the night in 1994 when Republicans swept the midterm elections and Newt Gingrich rose to power, I’d hosted perhaps our most memorably raucous celebration, where we toasted again and again to the apparent demise of our enemies.

  But it had been years since the house Anita Hill built hosted any right-wing bacchanalia. In fact, it had been a while since I’d had much company at all.

  When I broke with the conservative movement in 1997, declaring in an Esquire article that “David Brock, the road warrior of the right, is dead,” I wasn’t just abandoning my professional network. I was turning my back on the only friends I had (or, at least, people who I thought were friends). In Washington, the personal and the political had always been intertwined, unusually so in my case. And in both respects, I was now adrift and alone.

  That’s how I spent much of the next four years—alone, in that townhouse, struggling to understand the journey I’d been on, let alone figure out a way to explain it.

  The resulting book, Blinded by the Right, was an anguished endeavor. It also ended up becoming a critical and commercial success. The first review, a long piece in the New Yorker by Hendrik Hertzberg, signaled the consensus line on the book in media circles—it was an incisive exposé on the inner workings of the conservative movement. Moreover, Hertzberg and other reviewers found the confessional aspects of my story authentic and sincere.

  As for my former friends on the right, they never laid a glove on what I wrote, factually or otherwise. Instead, they endeavored to smear me personally, which shouldn’t have surprised me; they were using the same playbook that had made my own career.

  I was gratified by the positive reception to Blinded by the Right, but I was no less alone. While I had declared myself a refugee from a movement with which I no longer identified, I was still a man without a country. And, really, without a plan.

  After Blinded, I began work on another book, one that would open a wider lens on conservative organizing in both politics and media since the late 1960s, tracing the architecture of the modern conservative movement as it had developed over more than thirty years. I wanted to explain how, through their dedicated efforts, conservative Republicans had moved the country’s political discourse so far to the right that they had become a dominant force in American politics as a whole.

  The Republican Noise Machine, I called it. I knew from the inside how conservatives had built that machine, enabling them to shape public opinion and thus shift the political landscape. But as I began to research and write the book, I began to see, as well, how someone could build a machine to counter that influence, and even reverse it.

  To be clear, I didn’t yet see myself as that someone, though as part of the conservative movement, I was never purely an observer—my writing was a form of activism, and I still felt the pull to make a political difference with my work. But becoming an activist on the other side, a serious partisan working in liberal Democratic circles, I couldn’t yet fathom.

  And it might never have happened had I not walked in the door that cold January day, set my groceries down on the kitchen table, picked up the phone that was ringing on the wall, and—for the first time in my life—spoken with President Bill Clinton.

  I’d be lying if I said I remembered every word of the conversation. It was unexpected, almost unbelievable.

  I do remember him thanking me for writing Blinded. And he clearly wasn’t doing so to be polite. He was well versed in its contents, generous in his praise, and intrigued by the details I’d laid out about how the campaign against him had worked, who had been involved, and why I thought they’d done it.

  (Later, I discovered that he had purchased dozens of copies of the book, sending them across the country and urging friends to read it. I once visited his Harlem office, where an aide opened a big cabinet to reveal that it was filled with copies. I probably owe him some royalties.)

  At times, the former president seemed almost bemused by the antics of his detractors, especially some of the more colorful nemeses from back in his Arkansas days. At times, he was intensely curious—the reclusive and powerful Richard Mellon Scaife, in particular, was an object of fascination.

  And when we talked about the sections of the book where I had laid out the way the right-wing media had manipulated more mainstream outlets, using them to spread its anti-Clinton propaganda, the former president became especially animated.

  Then he asked me what I was currently doing—and what I planned to do in the future. We talked a bit about the paperback edition of Blinded I was tinkering with in between work on my new book, and he suggested that I consider going out and speaking, particularly on college campuses, as a way of spreading the message.

  Actually, suggested isn’t the right word. President Clinton insisted that I go see his speaker’s agent as soon as possible.

  Eventually, I found myself describing my new book project in some detail. And then I mentioned my nascent idea of an organization that could counter the “Republican Noise Machine.”

  Here, the conversation shifted. The former president had been doing most of the talking, but as I described this idea (more or less making it up as I went along), he got quiet, listening as I riffed. If a group like that had existed when his presidency was under siege, he finally said, things might have played out a lot differently.

  At the end of the call, he told me to write a business plan for an organization along the lines of what I was talking about, and send it to him.

  That’s how the story of Media Matters for America, and everything that came after, began: The right guy called at the right time.

  Had my phone not rung that day, and had President Clinton not responded so enthusiastically to the bits and pieces of an idea that were then floating around in my head, the organization almost certainly wouldn’t exist today. And I really don’t know where I would have ended up in life.

  But by the time I hung up the ph
one, I could see a path, a way to take my singular perspective, apply the skills that had built my previous career, and reengage in the political process—only this time, instead of fighting for the far right, I’d be fighting on the side of what is right.

  It was an unanticipated turn in my life. But in retrospect, it seems like fate.

  It was easy to make the argument for why Media Matters needed to exist (and hard to understand why Democrats hadn’t already created it).

  For decades, conservatives had complained about liberal bias in the mainstream media. And to help them complain effectively, they set up watchdog groups like Accuracy in Media (launched to protect the Nixon administration from being criticized on Vietnam and Watergate) and the Media Research Center (founded in 1987 by Brent Bozell, the nephew of conservative paterfamilias William F. Buckley).

  By the time I found myself drafting the original Media Matters prospectus, these groups had become enormously powerful, thanks to generous funding from right-wing activists like my old benefactor, Richard Mellon Scaife. The Media Research Center alone had a $6 million budget and dozens of employees. By comparison, the only media advocacy organization on the left, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) had a cash reserve of less than $25,000.

  Moreover, the right-wing watchdogs had been enormously successful in cowing traditional outlets into catering to right-wing spin and promoting right-wing commentary. Nine of the top fourteen newspaper columnists were now conservatives, reaching more than two thousand newspapers. At a July 2004 symposium at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, network anchors agreed that the right was in their ear. “There is a guy by the name of Brent Bozell,” NBC’s Tom Brokaw told the crowd, “who makes a living at taking us on every night. He’s well organized, he’s got a constituency, he’s got a newsletter, he can hit a button and we’ll hear from him.”