Killing the Messenger Read online

  But, yes, researchers also have to have a pretty high tolerance for listening to Rush Limbaugh. That said, it pays off. In time, Media Matters would succeed in marginalizing the once-invincible king of the dittoheads—not just by discrediting him, but by putting pressure on advertisers to withdraw their support of his show. Rush was always generous enough to give us a steady stream of material to work with. But in early 2012, he would finally cross the line once and for all.

  Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke had become the face of a legislative fight over birth control. Ostensibly, it was a fight about the Affordable Care Act’s mandate that employers cover prescription birth control for employees. But you didn’t have to scratch too far beneath the surface to understand what conservatives were really mad about.

  Rush made the mistake of saying what so many in the conservative movement were really thinking, calling Fluke a “slut” and a “prostitute.” We caught the smears in real time, of course, but decided to hold off on spotlighting them. While Rush’s vilification of a private citizen was disgusting, we weren’t sure there was much to be gained by picking a fight over a few nasty words. But Limbaugh wasn’t done; over the next three days, he continued his smear campaign against Fluke, launching, by our count, forty-six separate personal attacks against her, each of which we recorded and catalogued. It was exactly the sort of offensive material that had given us our first major victory over Limbaugh back in 2004; now, however, we had eight years of Rush’s vitriol archived and ready to display, allowing us to put his attacks on Sandra Fluke in their ugly context.

  When we struck back, we struck hard, publishing a background piece highlighting Limbaugh’s long history of extremism, misogyny, and personal attacks, and clearly demonstrating that his three-day smear campaign was no anomaly. It was a perfect example of our multifaceted approach (and talented staff) in action.

  Our media team created a series of narrative-building videos which quickly amassed tens of thousands of views online. Our messaging initiative armed allies in the progressive community such as Planned Parenthood with talking points, and graduates of our pundit training program hit the airwaves, making dozens of appearances on cable networks. Our spokespeople joined them, driving the conversation in major national media. Fluke herself referred people to our website when she made appearances. And our online engagement team launched a radio ad campaign in key markets to urge local stations to give Rush the boot. And our outreach folks organized allies to pressure advertisers to abandon the show, collecting nearly a million signatures overall.

  Today, Rush Limbaugh still has a radio show. But his program has lost hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue for the radio companies that carry it. Moreover, the show has become so toxic it is hurting all of talk radio. Indeed, a right-wing radio show ain’t worth what it used to be. Despite the fact that so-called “news talk” radio remains the industry’s second-most popular format (behind country music), advertising on those stations now costs about half what it does on stations that play music. In other words, while right-wing radio may still be popular, it’s no longer so lucrative—because, as the Wall Street Journal reported in February 2015, advertisers want to “avoid associating their brands with potentially controversial programming.” Rush may have been the father of right-wing talk radio, but, with a little help from Media Matters, his mouth turned out to be its undoing.

  To be sure, our targets hated any scrutiny. Bill O’Reilly called Media Matters a “guttersnipe organization,” “very fascist,” and “vicious,” and likened us to the Ku Klux Klan. Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky told a gathering at a conservative think tank: “Now on the outside there is a well-documented effort by a number of left-wing groups like Media Matters to harass and to intimidate conservatives with the goal of scaring them off the political playing field and off the airwaves as well.” And Fox host Eric Bolling exclaimed, “Hey, Media Matters… I’d love to waterboard you for the truth!”

  We took it all in stride. In fact, there was no better evidence that Media Matters really mattered.

  Chapter Two

  How Democrats Got in the Game

  We celebrated a lot of wins in our first decade at Media Matters, but we didn’t go undefeated. The conservative institutions we were racing to catch up with, and the falsehoods they were so prolific at infusing into the mainstream political debate, remained a serious threat to an honest debate. And even as we were beginning to build a truth-telling machine to counter that influence, we got an early reminder of how far we had to go.

  Media Matters launched on May 3, 2004. The next day—May 4—the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by a Vietnam War veteran named John O’Neill. That afternoon, a group of O’Neill’s associates, calling themselves the “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth,” held a news conference.

  The coordinated message of the day was simple, direct, and devastating: Sen. John Kerry, a decorated Vietnam vet whose heroic service was the key to his biography and a major reason he was about to become the Democratic presidential nominee, was, in fact, a liar, a fraud, and a coward.

  Claiming to have served with Kerry—and thus to have firsthand knowledge that he had not, in fact, performed the heroic feats that led to him being awarded three Purple Hearts, the Bronze Star medal, and the Silver Star—the Swift Boat Vets authored a book (published by a right-wing publishing house), appeared in television ads, and succeeded in sowing doubts not just about Kerry’s heroic acts, but about his very honor.

  They were lying the whole time.

  At Media Matters, we were still unpacking—but we immediately saw the Swift Boat attack as a serious problem for Kerry. John O’Neill was no impartial observer—he was a longtime Republican who had been deployed by President Richard Nixon to publicly counter Kerry back in the 1970s, when as a young veteran, Kerry had become an outspoken opponent of the conduct of the war. Since then, he had worked for a variety of Republican judges and politicians. We smelled a rat and quickly got a post up on our new website exposing O’Neill’s past. Some of the initial news reports mentioned O’Neill’s partisanship, but most did not.

  The next day, we highlighted some discrepancies in the Swift Boat Vets’ accounts—including reports written by members of the group during Kerry’s service that praised his conduct, and indications that other members had not, as they claimed, actually served with Kerry. And we continued to go after the Swift Boat Vets as they became mainstays on Fox News and game changers in the presidential election. In the end, their claims largely fell apart—they were wrong about so many details of the incidents they claimed to witness that, today, the very term swift-boat means “to destroy someone’s reputation with lies.”

  But it didn’t matter back then. Without an explicitly progressive media echo chamber to pick up on our work and debunk the Swift Boat Vets’ claims for a larger audience (that would come years later), we couldn’t be of much help. Nor did we have the delivery system yet in place to push responsible media outlets to do their own investigation before uncritically reporting on the book’s contents.

  Worst, and perhaps most telling, of all, the Kerry campaign itself remained silent as those accusations spilled from right-wing media onto the front pages of the nation’s newspapers and across all TV news channels. After the election, Bob Shrum, the campaign’s top political advisor, told me the campaign had missed the charges as they bubbled up from right-wing media and onto cable TV. The Kerry campaign only considered responding when the allegations were reported on the broadcast evening news—and by then the damage had already been done.

  Today, this sounds like political malpractice. But the Kerry campaign was simply following standard operating procedure for the Democratic Party in 2004. They thought of cable news as an alternate dimension in which nothing that happened really mattered, because well-informed citizens got their news from Peter Jennings, Dan Rather, or Tom Brokaw. And they didn’t understand that the distortions on cable news, if not confronted, could easily bleed onto the nig
htly news and directly into the consciousness of millions of voters, which is exactly what happened.

  The story raged for weeks before, to our lack of surprise, it began to dominate the mainstream media. Only then was the Kerry campaign finally ready to push back. At that point, Kerry’s stepson called my cell phone. He had noticed our early efforts online and wanted my advice. Should they dignify these false accusations with a response?

  I offered the view that, in the era of 24-7 cable news, every charge needed an answer. But I also said that I thought it was too late. The lie had already traveled halfway around the world—and here we were, debating whether the truth should start to put its boots on.

  Over time, we’d prove that a Swift Boater could be sunk with an aggressive defense. By the time Barack Obama emerged in 2008, we were ready for a command performance by Jerome Corsi, one of the right-wing operatives who had smeared Kerry and was preparing to do the same to Obama in a book called The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality. Instead of waiting for Corsi’s wild accusations to make news, Media Matters scored a copy before it even went on sale, and we published a list of dozens of falsehoods, which we got into the hands of every TV host interviewing the author. Right out of the gate, MSNBC’s Contessa Brewer confronted Corsi with our research and he never recovered. The book soon sank with barely a trace. What a difference four years made.

  There’s an old saying in the legal profession: When the law’s against you, pound the facts. When the facts are against you, pound the law. And when they’re both against you, pound the table.

  When it comes to the court of public opinion, both Republicans and Democrats are confident advocates, believing that they are right on the law and right on the facts. They walk into every political skirmish fully expecting that their ideas will win the day. And both sides do their share of table pounding when they lose cases (be they elections or policy debates) they feel they should have won.

  The difference is that when it happens to Republicans, they smear the judge, the bailiff, the stenographer, and the guy who delivered lunch to the jury. They’ve built an entire cottage industry on (often imagined) grievances against actors whose impartiality they call into question—everyone from the news media to the scientific community.

  But when it happens to Democrats, they turn their ire on the other attorneys sitting at their table. You hear it all the time from frustrated progressives who just don’t understand how the likes of Karl Rove always seem to win: What’s wrong with us?

  Ironically, it was Democrats who, in the eyes of many analysts, set the standard for effective political communication in the modern era. In 1992, the Clinton campaign famously adopted a take-no-prisoners approach to rapid response, answering Republican charges aggressively and in real time, a winning effort chronicled in the documentary The War Room.

  Perhaps lulled into complacency by the fact that they had won the White House, in the years that followed Democrats began to feel that they were being outgunned in the political trenches. The right had its well-funded infrastructure of talk radio hosts, gray-market pseudo-journalists, and scorched-earth operatives, not to mention an increasingly strong foothold in the mainstream press. And time and time again, Democrats found themselves sputtering in protest as Republicans shaded the truth, bent the rules, and got away with it.

  When I was starting Media Matters back in 2003, this sentiment was at a fever pitch.

  Democrats had worked hard to win two presidential elections in 1992 and 1996, only to see the man they elected hounded by a wave of scandals that turned out to be either grossly inflated or outright invented. Then they’d watched a presidential campaign in 2000 in which Al Gore was covered in mud by a mainstream media that misportrayed him as a diffident elitist and a serial liar, neither of which reflected his actual record. And while Gore was being savaged, George W. Bush’s right-wing policies and deeply sketchy personal history somehow largely escaped press scrutiny. To this day, we know much more about what Gore said about being the inspiration for the movie Love Story than we do about Bush’s actual service in the Texas Air National Guard.

  As frustrating as the 2000 campaign was for progressives, the outcome was doubly so, coming down to an undemocratic recount in Florida that featured plenty of right-wing dirty tricks. At a pivotal moment, for example, Republican operatives staged phony demonstrations to give partisan election officials cover to stop counting votes. These “Brooks Brothers riots” were ridiculous on their face, featuring as they did a horde of well-scrubbed (and compensated) lobbyists and political staffers in nice suits posing as outraged local citizens.

  In the end, of course, George W. Bush benefited from Republican control over Florida’s electoral system, rigged through his brother, Jeb, the governor, and the conservative majority of the Supreme Court. As he was ushered into office by a 5–4 Supreme Court vote, Democrats roundly criticized Republicans for their willingness to win at all costs. But hidden in their outrage was frustration. Even as the recount and its aftermath deteriorated into farce, it seemed that at every turn, Republicans were willing to do whatever it took to come out on top, while Democratic leaders seemed more concerned with maintaining decorum than winning the damn election.

  Of course, when Democrats had found themselves a real, live war hero to puncture the phony flight-suit macho patriotism of a president who had lied us into Iraq, Karl Rove and his allies found a way to turn John Kerry’s biggest strength into his biggest weakness—thanks to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth propaganda campaign.

  So it was no wonder that Democrats began to feel as if there was something that prevented them from fighting as hard—or, more accurate, as effectively—as Republicans. And they were right.

  For a long time, both in the political arena as well as in the media, the Democratic Party behaved like a victim, handing over its lunch money day after day and going home despondent and hungry instead of standing up to the bully—which, of course, is the only response that a bully will ever understand.

  Having spent much of my life on the outside of the left looking in, I feel I can say with the appropriate level of dispassionate detachment that the fundamental decency of Democrats, their altruistic desire to “win clean,” can often be a liability. You don’t always win just because you have the best ideas—and, more important, you don’t get extra points by relying solely on the strength of your ideas to compete. Campaigns may be battles of ideas, but they’re also battles of strategy and tactics—battles in which there may be rules, but there are rarely serious penalties for bending them, and there is never a reason to count on your opponent following them.

  By that, I don’t mean that Democrats suffer because they don’t cheat. I mean that Democrats suffer because they tend to be surprised when the other side does. Time and again in the 1990s and early 2000s, the Republican Party proved that it was brazen and unscrupulous—and Democrats were shocked into disorientation and even paralysis. By the time they shook off their astonishment, it was too late to fight back.

  That’s a generous explanation: that Democrats were simply too nice to do battle with the right. A less generous take might be that Democrats were naïve, and perhaps even a little bit smug. Most Democrats didn’t consume right-wing media, they didn’t know anyone who did, and they assumed that Rush and his ilk were self-discrediting. How could anyone ever believe these guys? And then a right-wing talking point would cross over to CNN, and Democrats would have no idea where it had originated or how it had come to be accepted as fact, and thus no idea of how to knock it down.

  Even when some Democrats began to realize what they were up against, many still resisted the idea of fighting back against the right-wing media. Widespread among Democratic communications experts was the belief that led the Kerry campaign to slow-play its response to the Swift Boat attacks—that to answer a charge was to elevate it, an axiom that may have been true in a previous media age. But their reluctance to dignify the attacks with a response didn’t earn Democrats a
ny credit for declining to lower themselves to their opponents’ level. What they saw as a principled refusal to play in the mud simply left more mud available for the right to hurl.

  Then there’s an explanation that takes us out of the psychology department and into the poli-sci lounge. The “war room” approach that worked so well for the Clinton campaign didn’t work for the Clinton White House, simply because a campaign is by design a different, more nimble operation. And there were no independent watchdog groups on the left like Media Matters to pick up the slack.

  During the presidencies of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and especially Ronald Reagan, conservatives focused their energy on developing independent but party-aligned outside groups to supplement, bolster, and sometimes even perform many of the functions of a political party: developing policy ideas and circulating them in sympathetic publications, training young people to run for office and manage campaigns, maintaining message discipline among surrogates, and more.

  When Barry Goldwater went down in flames in 1964, the Republican establishment decided that his famous maxim—“Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice”—made for a better bumper sticker than it did a political strategy. The resulting conflict between party elders who wanted to win elections and conservatives who treasured their ideological purity would end up a defining feature of the GOP, one that’s still playing out today.

  With the Republican Party itself inhospitable to movement conservatism, conservative leaders believed, correctly, that they could set up institutions like the American Legislative Exchange Council (which helped coordinate the activities of state-level conservatives in all fifty states) and the Heritage Foundation (my old home and a leading right-wing think tank) that would act as a sort of shadow party, pulling the actual GOP to the right and allowing them to eventually take it over.