Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi, a terrific writer with a biting sense of humor, wrote a piece this week that probably hasn’t generated the attention it deserves.
Taibbi watched with some horror this month when right-wing news outlets launched their “madrassa” smear against Barack Obama. It caused him to realize that “even the most outrageous media fictions about candidates are apparently going to go unpunished,” in large part because current media standards and expectations are self-reinforcing. Taibbi realized he could never get away with making a mistake this bad, but the right-wing media machine does it all the time, with impunity.
I get the feeling that as a society we have decided to give a collective pass to serial media swindlers like Sean Hannity simply because we never expect them to actually document the “facts” that come spewing in mass volumes out of their zoster-covered mouths every day. We actually expect them to pull most of their material out of their asses, and are mostly content to address the problem by pompously correcting their errata post-factum in whiny media-crit outlets like…well, like this one. Actual real punishment never seems to be forthcoming.
Taibbi uses the Obama incident as a helpful example. Insight made up the story, and Fox News trumpeted it. Even after the story was destroyed, Insight stood by the nonsense, while Fox News’ “retraction” didn’t actually retract anything, and simply told viewers that Obama claims the story isn’t true. The network refused to acknowledge its error.
I’m not sure if people realize exactly how serious a situation this is. The way our national media is currently constructed, a lie of this magnitude broadcast on a major network becomes an irreversible blow within, I would guess, about 24 hours after it appears. There are rare cases of an unsourced hoax blowing up quickly enough that it won’t stick to a politician — the John Kerry mistress story is a good example — but for the most part, once the lie is out there, it’s there to stay. This is especially true given the nature of the audience for outlets like Fox and Hannity. Unless you force a Hannity or a John Gibson to apologize by ripping his own still-beating heart out on national television, their audiences will assume that any “retraction” comes with a grain of salt, that the original report was true.
Indeed, people filter out facts to believe deceptive reporting all the time. People believe Saddam was linked to 9/11, and assume reports to the contrary are part of some ideological agenda. The same goes for WMD in Iraq, global warming, etc.
Taibbi, however, suggests a remedy.
The lesson of all this — and of the Iraq war, the Swift Boat controversy, and indeed the whole careers of swine like Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Michael Savage and the like — is that unless you prevent the lie from coming out to begin with, it doesn’t really matter what happens afterward. In the Internet age, and with no kind of regulation of the “facts” that are circulated on afternoon radio, once that genie is out of the bottle, he’s staying out. […]
Now we’re seeing the same thing with the Obama story; it is lingering, even after it has been totally discredited. Emboldened by a generation that has refused to punish their libelous behavior, these guys now just take whatever “facts” they like and run with them. Hannity is one culprit. Michael Savage, a spineless little f**khead who should be torn apart by hyenas, responded to the debunking of the Obama story by telling his listeners that Obama “will not reply” to the original Insight report, a blatant lie. He added, for good measure, that “assuming the world is still here” after a Clinton-Obama administration, Obama would then run for president with “Saddam Hussein’s younger grandson” as his running mate.
The very fact that the liars are allowed to continue their trade unpunished is a sort of endorsement of their original versions of the “truth.” I have absolutely no doubt that many Americans believe deep down in their gullible hearts that if people like Hannity and Limbaugh were really liars, they would be pulled off the air, or punished for some reason. They see that a Michael Savage can be yanked from a lucrative job for gay-bashing, but there appears to be no punishment at all for unchecked, intentional lying, which is at least as serious an offense for a journalist. […]
The direction all of this is traveling in is a future of pure informational mayhem, in which people will have absolutely no reliable means to make political decisions, leaving the political landscape ripe to be seized by demagogues and swindlers of all stripes, the public with no defense against political and environmental corruption, etc.
If the press is serious about saving itself as a social institution, it has to start policing its own business. We all have to encourage the likes of Barack Obama to hire the meanest lawyers on the planet and to file the hairiest lawsuits imaginable against the Hannitys, Gibsons, and Savages of the world. We have to impress upon the victims of these broadsides that choosing to ignore that style of libel is a betrayal of the public trust and an act of political cowardice that the rest of us end up paying for in spades.
I’m afraid I know very little about libel law. As I understand it, the threshold as it applies to public figures is quite high.
Nevertheless, I couldn’t agree with Taibbi more about the problem, the consequences of that problem, and the need to “prevent the lie from coming out to begin with.”
Any libel lawyers in the audience who can comment on whether these suits are feasible and/or likely to succeed?