I don’t know when (or if) it’ll be a available to non-subscribers, but Franklin Foer had a terrific item in the current issue of The New Republic about how lobbyist Jack Abramoff not only corrupted Tom DeLay, but ruined the entire conservative movement. There’s a lot of substance in the piece, but there’s one element I’d like to emphasize: the conservative press.
In August 1997, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay traveled to Russia in the company of his frequent companion, the now-infamous lobbyist Jack Abramoff. For six days, he huddled with government ministers and oil executives and golfed at the Moscow Country Club. Any pleasant memories of this tour of post-communist prosperity, however, have surely vanished. The trip now threatens the Texan’s political career and has placed Abramoff at the center of congressional inquiries. DeLay, though, was not the only prominent conservative to see Russia the Abramoff way. Two months before DeLay touched down there, Abramoff’s firm shepherded a contingent of Washington journalists and thinkers around Moscow — an itinerary of meetings and meals designed to please the trip’s funder, a Russian energy concern called NaftaSib. This journey included Tod Lindberg, then-editor of The Washington Times editorial page; Insight magazine’s James Lucier; and Erica Tuttle, The National Interest’s assistant managing editor at the time.
Such trips were essential prongs of Abramoff’s lobbying campaigns. The conservative movement’s think tanks, newspapers, and little magazines are filled with junketeers who have traveled the world on his dime. “It was like, you weren’t cool if you didn’t go,” remembers Marshall Wittmann, former legislative director of the Christian Coalition. And that’s precisely as Abramoff planned it. In a draft of a 2000 proposal to represent the Malaysian government, he and his colleagues boasted, “Our firm is one of the most expert in organizing effective trips to distant destinations, having already brought literally hundreds of such notables [as think-tank scholars and journalists] to destinations ranging from Pakistan to Russia to Saipan and within the U.S. mainland.” They told the Malaysians that these trips produce a “certain outcome”: “timely and powerful editorials and articles” conveying his clients’ messages. “Our firm has facilitated hundreds of such articles and editorials.”
Remarkably, this worked exactly as planned. As Foer explains extremely well, conservative writers and “journalists” would be whisked away to places like Malaysia in the hopes that they’d return home and write glowing words of praise. Right-wing reporters, who apparently have no self-respect, gladly accommodated Abramoff’s less-than-subtle requests.
Clint Bolick, a school vouchers proponent, touted the Islands in columns for The Wall Street Journal and Human Events…. Seemingly every time Abramoff acquired a client, Norquist or ATR’s chief counsel, Peter Ferrara, would write a Washington Times column making that client’s case. […]
As every aspiring editorialist knows, it is one thing to submit a piece to a newspaper. It is another to see that piece end up in print. Opinion pages are deluged with solicitations, and they typically make an ethical point of rejecting pieces that shill for an author’s client. So, to set Abramoff’s accomplishment in relief, here are some raw data: Over six years, The Washington Times ran seven op-eds and four editorials making the case for preserving the [Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands’] unique status; during that same period, four opinion pieces in the paper venerated the Choctaw Indians. (By contrast, The Washington Post ran a single column tangentially touching on the Marianas and nothing on the Choctaws.)
These totals may have less to do with the merit of the pieces than with Abramoff’s courtship of the conservative press, especially The Washington Times.
I find this more confusing than bizarre. I know what you’re thinking — if I believe conservative “reporters” at outlets like Rev. Moon’s Washington Times actually care about crazy little things like professional standards and quality journalism, I’m hopelessly naïve. But that’s not it.
These so-called journalists who would do Abramoff’s bidding (or, as it were, the bidding of his clients) have very little to gain by becoming hacks to this degree. Editorial board members at the Washington Times or the Boston Herald, unlike Tom DeLay or Bob Ney, don’t need campaign contributions. These guys would accept the trips and write the favorable newspaper pieces to a) be one of the “cool kids” on the right; and b) enjoy luxurious trips at exotic locales.
It didn’t even matter that these op-eds and columns would have no discernable effect on the policy at hand; Abramoff needed them to keep getting paid and the conservatives wrote them to keep getting the trips.
Amazingly, no one seems terribly surprised by any of this and there’s been no talk about firing the journalists highlighted in Foer’s article. If a writer for a mainstream news publication traded trips for columns, he or she would be a laughing stock and would probably never work again. But when it comes to outlets like the Washington Times, the reaction is, “Yep, sounds about right.”
It’s not just that these right-wing writers are hacks — though they obviously are — but that the conservative system is so corrupt, it’s no longer stunning to read reports like this one.