January 16, 2005
All the President's Newsmen
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This was a half-hour of television so egregious that it makes Jon Stewart's
famous pre-election rant seem, if anything, too kind. This time
"Crossfire" wasn't just "hurting
I do not mean to minimize the CBS News debacle and other recent journalistic
outrages at The New York Times and elsewhere. But the Jan. 7 edition of CNN's
signature show can stand as an exceptionally ripe paradigm of what is happening
to the free flow of information in a country in which a timid news media, the
fierce (and often covert) Bush administration propaganda machine, lax and
sometimes corrupt journalistic practices, and a celebrity culture all combine
to keep the public at many more than six degrees of separation from anything
that might resemble the truth.
On this particular "Crossfire," the featured guest was Armstrong
Williams, a conservative commentator, talk-show host and newspaper columnist
(for papers like The Washington Times and The Detroit Free Press, among many
others, according to his Web site). Thanks to investigative reporting by USA
Today, he had just been unmasked as the frontman for
a scheme in which $240,000 of taxpayers' money was quietly siphoned to him
through the Department of Education and a private p.r.
firm so that he would "regularly comment" upon (translation: shill
for) the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind policy in various media
venues during an election year. Given that "Crossfire" was initially
conceived as a program for tough interrogation and debate, you'd think that the
co-hosts still on duty after Mr. Carlson's departure might try to get some
answers about this scandal, whose full contours, I suspect, we are only just
beginning to discern.
But there is nothing if not honor among bloviators.
"On the left," as they say at "Crossfire," Paul Begala, a Democratic political consultant, offered
condemnations of the Bush administration but had only soft questions and
plaudits for Mr. Williams. Three times in scarcely as many minutes Mr. Begala congratulated his guest for being "a stand-up
guy" simply for appearing in the show's purportedly hostile but entirely
friendly confines. When Mr. Williams apologized for having crossed "some
ethical lines," that was enough to earn Mr. Begala's
benediction: "God bless you for that."
"On the right" was the columnist Robert Novak, who "in the
interests of full disclosure" told the audience he is a "personal
friend" of Mr. Williams, whom he "greatly" admires as "one
of the foremost voices for conservatism in
Last year Mr. Novak had failed to fully disclose - until others in the press
called him on it - that his son is the director of marketing for Regnery, the company that published "Unfit for
Command," the Swift boat veterans' anti-Kerry screed that Mr. Novak
flogged relentlessly on CNN and elsewhere throughout the campaign. Nor had he
fully disclosed, as Mary Jacoby of Salon reported, that Regnery's
owner also publishes his subscription newsletter ($297 a year). Nor has Mr.
Novak fully disclosed why he has so far eluded any censure in the federal
investigation of his outing of a C.I.A. operative, Valerie Plame,
while two other reporters, Judith Miller of The Times and Matt Cooper of Time,
are facing possible prison terms in the same case. In this context, Mr. Novak's
"full disclosure" of his friendship with Mr. Williams is so anomalous
that it raised many more questions than it answers.
That he and Mr. Begala would be allowed to lob
softballs at a man who may have been a cog in illegal government wrongdoing, on
a show produced by television's self-proclaimed "most trusted" news
network, is bad enough. That almost no one would notice, let alone protest, is
a snapshot of our cultural moment, in which hidden agendas in the presentation
of "news" metastasize daily into a Kafkaesque hall of mirrors that
could drive even the most earnest American into abject cynicism. But the ugly
bigger picture reaches well beyond "Crossfire" and CNN.
Mr. Williams has repeatedly said in his damage-control press appearances
that he was being paid the $240,000 only to promote No Child Left Behind. He
also routinely says that he made the mistake of taking the payola because he
wasn't part of the "media elite" and therefore didn't know "the
rules and guidelines" of journalistic conflict-of-interest. His own public record tells us another story entirely. While
on the administration payroll he was not only a cheerleader for No Child Left
Behind but also for President Bush's
He took to CNN last October to give his own critique of the CBS News
scandal, pointing out that the producer of the Bush-National Guard story, Mary Mapes, was guilty of a conflict of interest because she
introduced her source, the anti-Bush partisan Bill Burkett, to a Kerry campaign
operative, Joe Lockhart. In this Mr. Williams's judgment was correct, but grave
as Ms. Mapes's infraction was, it isn't quite in the
same league as receiving $240,000 from the United States Treasury to
propagandize for the Bush campaign on camera. Mr. Williams also appeared with
Alan Murray on CNBC to trash Kitty Kelley's book on the Bush family, on CNN to
accuse the media of being Michael Moore's "p.r.
machine" and on Tina Brown's CNBC talk show to lambaste Mr. Stewart for
doing a "puff interview" with John Kerry on "The Daily
Show" (which Mr. Williams, unsurprisingly, seems to think is a real, not a
fake, news program).
But perhaps the most fascinating Williams TV appearance took place in
December 2003, the same month that he was first contracted by the government to
receive his payoffs. At a time when no one in television news could get an
interview with Dick Cheney, Mr. Williams, of all "journalists," was
rewarded with an extended sit-down with the vice president for the Sinclair
Broadcast Group, a nationwide owner of local stations affiliated with all the
major networks. In that chat, Mr. Cheney criticized the press for its coverage
of Halliburton and denounced "cheap shot journalism" in which
"the press portray themselves as objective observers of the passing scene,
when they obviously are not objective."
This is a scenario out of "The Manchurian Candidate." Here we find
Mr. Cheney criticizing the press for a sin his own government was at that same
moment signing up Mr. Williams to commit. The interview is broadcast by the
same company that would later order its ABC affiliates to ban Ted Koppel's
"Nightline" recitation of American casualties in
Ever since Mr. Williams was exposed by USA Today, he has been stonewalling
all questions about what the Bush administration knew of his activities and
when it knew it. In his account, he was merely a lowly "subcontractor"
of the education department. "Never was the White House ever mentioned
anytime during this," he told NBC's Campbell Brown, as if that were enough
to deflect Ms. Brown's observation that "the Department of Education works
for the White House." For its part, the White House is saying that the
whole affair is, in the words of the press secretary, Scott McClellan, "a
contracting matter" and "a decision by the Department of
Education." In other words, the buck stops (or started) with Rod Paige,
the elusive outgoing education secretary who often appeared with Mr. Williams
in his pay-for-play propaganda.
But we now know that there have been at least three other cases in which
federal agencies have succeeded in placing fake news reports on television
during the Bush presidency. The Department of Health and Human Services, the
Census Bureau and the Office of National Drug Control Policy have all sent out
news "reports" in which, to take one example, fake newsmen purport to
be "reporting" why the administration's Medicare prescription-drug
policy is the best thing to come our way since the Salk vaccine. So far two
Government Accountability Office investigations have found that these Orwellian
stunts violated federal law that prohibits "covert propaganda"
purchased with taxpayers' money. But the Williams case is the first one in
which a well-known talking head has been recruited as the public face for the
fake news instead of bogus correspondents (recruited from p.r.
companies) with generic eyewitness-news team names like Karen Ryan and Mike
Morris.
Or is Mr. Williams merely the first one of his ilk to be exposed? Every time
this administration puts out fiction through the news media - the
"Rambo" exploits of Jessica Lynch, the initial cover-up of Pat
Tillman's death by friendly fire - it's assumed that a credulous and
excessively deferential press was duped. But might there be more paid agents at
loose in the media machine? In response to questions at the White House, Mr.
McClellan has said that he is "not aware" of any other such case and
that he hasn't "heard" whether the administration's senior staff knew
of the Williams contract - nondenial denials with
miles of wiggle room. Mr. Williams, meanwhile, has told both James Rainey of
The Los Angeles Times and David Corn of The Nation that he has "no
doubt" that there are "others" like him being paid for purveying
administration propaganda and that "this happens all the time." So
far he is refusing to name names - a vow of omertà
all too reminiscent of that taken by the low-level operatives first apprehended
in that "third-rate burglary" during the Nixon administration.
If CNN, just under new management, wants to make amends for the sins of
"Crossfire," it might dispatch some real reporters to find out just which
"others" Mr. Williams is talking about and to follow his money all
the way back to its source.