This week, the DC political media has ignored a fairly transparent lie from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ken.) about his office’s role in spreading the Frost family smear. On Wednesday, Digby explained why.
[A]fter watching them for the past two decades very closely, I think it’s obvious that what interests the media more than anything is access and gossip and vicious little smears piled one atop the other. And why not? They are easy to report, require no mind numbing shuffling of financial reports or struggling through arcane policy papers. In fact, the press has made a virtue of the simple-mindedness by calling what used to be known as gossip, “character issues”, which are used to stand in for judgment about policy.
The press, therefore, will go to great lengths to protect the people who give them what they crave, most of whom happen to be Republicans since character smears are their very special talent. There was a reason why Rove and Libby used “the wife sent him on a boondoggle” line. Stories about Edwards and his hair and Hillary and her cold, calculating cleavage are the coin of the realm.
The WaPo’s Howard Kurtz responded:
I agree that leakers often get to set the story line, but I also know that Democrats are not unfamiliar with the practice. (Remember the Bush DUI leak just before the 2000 election?) And those who leaked information about domestic surveillance, Abu Ghraib and secret CIA prisons also had an impact.
I’ve read Kurtz’s take repeatedly, trying to make sense of it. I’m afraid I’m at a bit of a loss.
To be fair, Kurtz’s analysis seems almost off-hand. He didn’t devote a lot of commentary to this — the three sentences I quoted are the full extent of his thoughts on the subject — and his column yesterday didn’t return to the subject.
That said, even as an off-hand comparison, Kurtz’s choice of examples to contrast reflects a troubling approach. As he sees it, critical instances of whistleblowers coming forward with evidence of criminal conduct are just political leaks driven by Democrats.
Kurtz’s comparison is, for lack of a better word, ridiculous. In Digby’s example, Republicans were dishing dirt, which turned out to be false, about an innocent family. In Kurtz’s examples of Bush administration wrongdoing, unknown insiders came forward with evidence, which turned out to be true, about a White House that was pushing the legal boundaries of executive power to the breaking point.
These are analogous, how?
As for Kurtz’s one example of a Democratic leak — criminal DUI charges on Bush’s record — even that’s dubious, and there’s no evidence at all that any Democratic officials were involved in dishing this dirt (which, by the way, was true) to anyone.
I realize that nearly everything that passes through the Village grapevine is Republican spin and lies, so it’s difficult to know what is and isn’t real. The Bush campaign did shriek like howler monkeys that that DUI thing was a dirty trick (although why it would be when it was true and Bush admitted it, I’ve never understood.) But knowing the truth about that story before saying it was a Democratic hit is a media reporter’s job, I would think.
I am sure that Democrats send out all kinds of tips to the media about their rivals. Nobody disputes that. My point was that the Republicans were the ones who knew how to hit the press corps’ sweet spot — their lazy, gossipy side. Kurtz’s reply only backs up that claim.
If Kurtz can explain otherwise, I look forward to reading it.