Houck’s Complaint About Soundbites Bites

MRC Watch Dept. -  In recounting tonight’s network evening news coverage of the gay marriage case presently before the Supreme Court, Curtis Houck identified and complained about a disparity in soundbites.

In the report that ran on the NBC Nightly News, justice correspondent Pete Williams, recounts Houck, “played two soundbites from Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Antonin Scalia in support of traditional marriage but three from other justices expressing doubt for that argument.” Meanwhile, over on the CBS Evening News, justice correspondent Jan Crawford “aired three soundbites from justice[s] for gay marriage compared to just two in favor of traditional marriage.”

Given Williams’ tally of where the court’s justices seem to stand — he says there seems to be “a bare 5-to-4 majority in favor over same-sex marriage” — this split would seem appropriate. When it comes to the general population, support for gay marriage is overwhelming. In a portion of tonight’s ABC News report on the case, anchor David Muir points out that support is, by the ABC News/Washington Post poll, currently at 61%. Houck goes through Muir’s set-up but, unsurprisingly, leaves out that part (though the video clip that accompanies his article leaves it in). More broadly, most Americans have supported some form of official recognition of homosexual unions for over a decade.[*] This is the mainstream view, regardless of whether Houck edits it out of his story, and it and William’s take on the mood of the court renders rather absurd Houck’s complaint about an imbalance in soundbites.

--j.

---

[*] ABC’s Muir gets this wrong, as so many press outlets have. The 2004 poll he cites for comparison purposes shows 62% opposed to gay marriage. The word “marriage” was, for many years, a stumbling-block in polling on this issue. If respondents at the time of that older poll were only offered the option of “marriage,” a majority were opposed, but if respondents were offered the option of “civil unions” alongside “marriage”–as they were in the CBS News/New York Times polling–support for official recognition was overwhelming. An overwhelming majority going back at least to 2004. Over time, people just became more comfortable with using the word “marriage” to describe it.

[Note: This article was written for MRC Watch, a blog dedicated to a critique of the Media Research Center]

An Interview & A Kyle Drennen Tale of an Interview

MRC Watch Dept. - Monday, NBC offered the national platform of its “Today” show to Peter Schweizer, the conservative activist and author of the forthcoming anti-Hillary Clinton book “Clinton Cash.” Though this proved to be, by any serious estimation, a laughably softball interview that allowed Schweizer to repeat his anti-Clinton allegations without any serious challenge, even the mild questioning offered the author by host Savannah Guthrie proved to be too much for the MRC’s Kyle Drennen, who portrayed the host as a Clinton parrot worried about the harm Schweizer’s book may cause to Clinton’s candidacy.

Guthrie opened:

“Before we get into some of the details, let’s put it bluntly. Are you hoping that this book and the issues you raise in it torpedo her candidacy?”

Given that Schweizer has spent his entire adult life as a conservative activist and Republican operative,[1] it’s a fairly obvious question; Drennen characterized it thusly: “Guthrie worried about the political fallout for Hillary Clinton.” Schweizer replied that his book “is not really motivated to her candidacy, we’re just interested in transparency.” In the face of this extremely dubious claim, Guthrie failed to bring up Schweizer’s past; Drennen merely parrots Schweizer’s reply. As revealed at the end of the interview, Guthrie was aware that Schweizer’s next target was Jeb Bush. Bush has been largely absent from public life for nearly a decade but when he emerged as the frontrunner in the upcoming race for the Republican presidential nomination, his resistance to using immigration to race-bait made him a hate-figure among the right’s ideological jihadists.  The fact that Schweizer is critically writing about him would seem rather relevant to Schweizer’s answer about the Clinton book. If Guthrie connected those dots in her head, she failed to do so on the air.

As documented by the pro-Clinton press watchdog Media Matters,[2] a lot of Schweizer journalism has proven rather shoddy over the years. Among other things, he has a long history making sensational yet dubious, misleading and false allegations against Democratic political figures. Press outlets that report them often end up writing retractions. Various media outlets have already poked holes in “Clinton Cash.” At least one of his more explosive claims — about Clinton facilitating the sale of an uranium mine to Russian interests — has already been largely discredited, and Schweizer has repeatedly conceded — just as he tacitly does in the Today interview — that he can’t prove his allegations. This raises the question of why a national news network would bother hosting him at all, but as this is a question that bears rather too closely on the MRC’s overarching project of portraying the press as irredeemably liberal, Drennen doesn’t touch it. And in spite of this history, Schweizer was allowed, during the interview, to make claims about Clinton without any serious challenge. Guthrie at one point asks him point blank, “Do you have any specific instance in which Hillary Clinton directly intervenes on behalf of donors to the Clinton foundation?” Schweizer replied:

“Well, it’s a great question, Savannah. What we have is a pattern of behavior. I was not in any of these meetings. I can’t look into Hillary Clinton’s mind. I certainly can’t look at her e-mails. So the question becomes what is this pattern? And this pattern consistently shows that donors give large sums of money to the foundation or they pay Bill Clinton a lot for a speech, there’s a policy action that’s taken to the benefit of that donor. In some of those instances Hillary Clinton is actually reversing course on previous policy positions.”

That, if you’re keeping score, is a complete failure to answer the question. Schweizer not only declined to offer up a single specific instance, he significantly inflated the initial allegation he’d just declined to substantiate. This is just a smear and Guthrie didn’t follow up on either point. Elsewhere in the interview, Guthrie says,

“You start off by mentioning that you’ve done bipartisan investigations. But a lot of your critics say, ‘Look, you are a conservative and that this is a right-wing hit job.’ Are you really claiming to be neutral here?”

While the question elicited a substantive response (“I’m not claiming to be neutral.”), Drennen takes offense at it, demagogically describing it as “Guthrie parroted Clinton campaign talking points smearing Schweizer.” He apparently took no offense, however, at Schweizer’s refusal to answer the question about specifics or Schweizer’s “reply” amounting to nothing more than tossing out even larger unsubstantiated allegations. For Drennen, those apparently aren’t smears. Guthrie’s failure to follow up on those points goes unmentioned in Drennen’s evaluation of her performance. This is how Drennen characterizes Guthrie’s questions about whether Schweizer believes Clinton could be criminally prosecuted for any of the allegations he’s made: “Guthrie downplayed the scandal by casting doubt on whether a criminal corruption case could be made against the Clintons.”

It’s unfortunate that some allegations that are probably legitimate and important public issues will end up in the stew of someone like Schweizer, where the association will probably discourage both any significant inquiry and taking them at all seriously. The corporate press is usually quite enthusiastic about any chance to loudly broadcast any anti-Clinton story, no matter how baseless or thinly sourced–this Today segment is a great example. This contributes to the same problem.

As for Drennen, his article is standard MRC reality control, just another not-particularly-outstanding example of why the MRC is properly regarded as a Ministry of Truth operation rather than a serious media critic.

–j.

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[1] Schweizer was a speechwriter for George Bush Jr. and a foreign policy consultant for Sarah Palin. He’s the “senior editor-at-large” for Breitbart.com, one of the worst, most partisan (and least credible) right-wing sites on the internet. And so on.

[2] Media Matters has done some important work on “Clinton Cash,” but it has also, in this author’s view, injured its credibility, veering at times into active misrepresentation in an effort to defend Hillary Clinton (of whom MM’s founder David Brock is a confessed fan). ThinkProgress, for example, obtained an advance copy of the book and reported that

“Though Schweizer is unable to provide direct evidence that State Department actions were influenced by Clinton Foundation donations, he does raise questions about unsavory donors and possible conflicts of interest, regardless of whether or not they dictated Clinton’s policy.”

TP’s Aviva Shen notes that Schweizer can’t prove his allegations and discovered that the author

“fingers Bill Clinton’s speaking fees, a favorite target in conservative circles, as a potential avenue to influence Hillary. He links the timing of the State Department’s generally positive report on the Keystone XL Pipeline with a slew of Clinton speeches paid for by TD Bank, a major shareholder in the project. As proof of how crucial Clinton’s support for the pipeline was to the bank, Schweizer quotes a press release that claimed TD Bank would ‘begin selling its $1.6 billion worth of shares in the massive but potentially still-born Keystone XL crude pipeline project’ after Clinton left office. The press release was quickly revealed to be fake in 2013. Yet Schweizer, apparently unaware of the hoax, remarks, ‘Too bad for TD Bank. But the Clintons got paid regardless.'”

In its recounting of the TP article though, Media Matters focuses only on TP’s criticism of the book, omitting any talk of legitimate questions about “unsavory donors and possible conflicts of interest.”

The same thing happened when ABC News reviewed the book:

"An independent review of source material by ABC News uncovered errors in the book, including an instance where paid and unpaid speaking appearances were conflated. Schweizer said the errors would be corrected. But those same records supported the premise that former President Clinton accepted speaking fees from numerous companies and individuals with interests pending before the State Department."

In recounting this, Media Matters notes the critical portion but omits the rest. This kind of raw and apparently uncritical boosterism for a political candidate, taken to the point of misrepresentation, is out of character for the org and quite unbecoming. The corporate press needs critical watchdogs more than Hillary Clinton needs unofficial publicists.

[Note: This article was written for MRC Watch, a blog dedicated to a critique of the Media Research Center]

Drennen Gets It Wrong on “Soros-Funded” Expert

MRC Watch Dept. - Kyle Drennen thinks a “Soros-Funded Expert Changes Tune: Clinton Foundation a ‘Slush Fund.'” Last week, Drennen and Curtis Houck followed a particularly dismal MRC practice in deploying the anti-Semitic Puppet Master trope, dismissing the Sunlight Foundation’s Bill Allison, the expert in question, as merely a mouthpiece for wealthy Jewish philanthropist George Soros.

Today, Drennen recounts that, in a soundbite aired Thursday and Friday on NBC, Allison was “dismissing the Clinton Foundation scandal: ‘There’s no smoking gun, there’s no evidence that she changed a policy based on the donations to the foundation.'”:

“However, as reported in Sunday’s New York Post, Allison seemed to change his mind, now describing the nonprofit as ‘a slush fund for the Clintons.'”

Drennen declines to outline how this brief quote can possibly be regarded as a change of tune–it’s obviously possible that both the Foundation is a slush-fund and the allegations now circulating around it lack any substantial evidentiary basis. As detailed here Saturday, the Sunlight Foundation is, contrary to the MRC writers’ comments, extremely critical of Hillary Clinton and of the apparent shadiness of some of the dealings surrounding the Clinton Foundation. That earlier article quoted a blog post written by Allison last month:

“A trio of super PACs — Priorities USA Action, American Bridge and Ready for Hillary — are promoting Hillary Clinton. One of them, Ready for Hillary, successfully fended off a complaint to the FEC last month over its purchase of the mailing list compiled by Clinton’s last presidential campaign. The FEC concluded that the sale by Clinton’s 2008 campaign, which comprised names of her donors and supporters, to a super PAC promoting her 2016 campaign did not require Clinton to register as a federal candidate.

“That decision has allowed Clinton — and the two floors’ worth of close associates she brought with her from the State Department — to continue her work with the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation undisturbed, an organization that takes funds, sometimes in multi-million dollar chunks, from foreign governments, foreign corporations and foreign individuals, among others.”

Allison was writing about the Clinton Foundation years ago. A blog post from 2009: “Digging down deep into the list of Clinton Foundation donors, the New York Times finds that a donor had gotten considerable help from Sen. Hillary Clinton.” It concludes by asking, “How many other donors to the foundation also had business before the junior senator from New York?” Two days later, Allison followed up, citing that earlier entry and a story in Forbes about donations to the Clinton Foundation from Iranian interests to argue in favor of a bill requiring more stringent disclosure of donors to presidential libraries. Months before that,

Bill Allison and Larry Makinson of Sunlight created a DabbleDB database of the Clinton Foundation donor list released yesterday. This database is the place to go if you’re interested in pouring through this data without trying to access the constantly crashing – thanks to the journalist/blogger stampede – Clinton Foundation web site. (It’s as though journalists and bloggers have this obsession with the Clintons. Who knew?) And just to make sure we cover all our bases, here’s a quote from Bill (emphasis mine):

“I should also note that disclosing this information isn't required by any law (but should be); the Obama transition and the Clintons themselves deserve some marks for releasing the information. But all these donations to presidential foundations–for Bushes as well as Clinton (and Carter) should be publicly disclosed.”

The lesson here is that, while anti-Semitic tropes can inflame and excite those moved by such rot, they provide no basis for understanding the real world.

–j.

[Note: This article was written for MRC Watch, a blog dedicated to a critique of the Media Research Center]

Special Report: George Soros, Anti-Semitism & the Media Research Center

MRC Watch Dept. - On Thursday, the NBC Nightly News devoted a segment to detailing allegations found in an upcoming book ("Clinton Cash") that, as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton helped facilitate the sale of an American-owned uranium mine to Russian interests to the benefit of donors to the Clinton Foundation. The MRC's Curtis Houck spotlighted the piece, but objected to the fact that the segment included an "expert"--Houck put the word in quotes--from the Sunlight Foundation, which, he wrote,

"has received funding from left-wing billionaire George Soros… To no one's surprise, the expert parroted some pro-Clinton talking points: ‘There is no smoking gun. There's no evidence that she changed a policy based on, you know, the donations to the foundation.'"

The next day, Kyle Drennen objected to how "NBC keeps trying to dismiss Clinton Foundation scandal with Soros-funded ‘expert,'" and relates how,

"After using an ‘ethics expert' from the Sunlight Foundation – an organization funded by left-wing billionaire George Soros – to dismiss the Clinton Foundation scandal on Thursday's NBC Nightly News, correspondent Andrea Mitchell appeared on Friday's Today using the same so-called expert… to reject corruption allegations against Bill and Hillary Clinton."

Founded by lawyer and businessman Michael Klein and Ellen Miller of the Center for Responsive Politics, the Sunlight Foundation is a D.C.-based public interest group dedicated to increasing government transparency. In short, just the sort of people a journalist would consult on a question like this. The Foundation's mission is, of course, inherently liberal, but contrary to the crude implication in the MRC articles, Sunlight certainly isn't any sort of Clinton or Obama apologist--it, in fact, regularly attacks both for the same shady practices deplored by the MRC. The Foundation is funded by a variety of sources, but the one funding source about which the MRC wanted its readers to know, the one both its writers took pains to say made the Sunlight expert an "expert" who can be regarded as discredited merely as a consequence of the connection, is the rich Jew George Soros.

The Puppet Master is, of course, a stock anti-Semitic trope, a dark, racist conspiracy fantasy about evil, wealthy Jews who pull the strings from the shadows, manipulating events in our world to their own sinister ends. In propaganda, the Puppet Master is often depicted as an octopus, its crafty tentacles creeping their way into everything. It's proven depressingly long-lived, deployed over the years by everyone from the Russian Tsars to the Third Reich to the lunatic fringe here at home. And when, in recent decades, the American conservative elite began to mainstream elements of that lunatic fringe, the fringe brought the trope with them. For those unscrupulous enough to engage in this despicable breed of racist dog-whistling, Soros, a wealthy philanthropist who gives generously to various liberal causes, has proven a lightning rod. On Fox News, both Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly have prominently blown this tune,[1] but few have devoted as many words over as long a period to inflame and delight these particular low-dogs as the Media Research Center.

The MRC, in fact, maintains an entire subdivision dedicated to this project, dubbed, appropriately enough, "The Soros Project." It grinds out rubbish like this "special report" entitled "George Soros: Godfather of the Left." Written by Dan Gainor and Iris Somberg and principally concerned with putting Soros's fingers in every conceivable pie while treating this as, in itself, sinister, the ponderous piece is astonishingly sloppy, even by MRC standards--little more than a compendium of anti-Soros allegations, wild assertions and data points reduced to a hopeless mess by the authors' refusal to contextualize or demonstrate the relevance of the various items they outline, their constant delving into marginal tangents and asides, their failure to substantiate or even significantly evaluate most of what they relay and their complete lack of any focus beyond a caveman's grunt of "Soros Bad."

The claim in the article's preface that Soros has helped "foment revolutions" is certainly eye-catching. And in the entire painfully lengthy article, this is the sole item Gainor and Somberg offer to substantiate it:

"In 2004, ‘two young me threw water and mayonnaise at him' in Ukraine, accusing Soros of trying to push a ‘velvet revolution' just like had happened in Georgia, reported the BBC."

Soros is accused, at one point, of being "pro-government controlled media"; the authors offer nothing to support that one either, and, in reality, Soros projects have spent years battling state-controlled media apparatuses in repressive regimes around the world.

It's true, as the article says, that Soros was "convicted of insider dealing in France and fined $3 million." It's also true, though entirely unmentioned by the authors, that the French regulator declined to pursue Soros on the matter on the grounds that the anti-insider trading laws in question were, in the words of Bloomberg News, "too vague to determine whether he'd broken them." Soros's lawyer, citing this fact, asserted, "It is inconceivable to expect that the citizen has a better understanding of the law than the authority in charge." The European Court of Human Rights, who heard Soros's appeal and eventually upheld the conviction, decided Soros was an experienced businessman and should have known better, and that's probably true. It's also true--and also unmentioned by the authors--that no one in French history had ever been prosecuted under the law used to nab Soros.

Did you know that Soros's grants to Bard College included some that went to "a Palestinian youth group and an initiative to educate prisoners across the country"? Gainor and Somberg certainly want you to know it. They first bring it up as support for their notion, expressed in a subheading, that "Soros Indoctrinates Students Around the World." Then only four paragraphs down, they write, "Programs at Bard include a Palestinian youth group, an initiative to educate prisoners across the country…" Then, a little further down:

"The grants to Bard College show exactly what type of efforts Soros gives to in order to train student activists. Programs at Bard include a Palestinian youth group, an initiative to educate prisoners across the country, and various other groups for ‘community service and social action.'"

And they're not done with it yet--further still, they bring up that youth group again and quote the youth groups "about us" page:

"Their about us section states that they want 'civil engagement, cultural exchange, and education are the fundamental means to building a viable and sustainable Palestinian state.' Below they describe the TLS as a program that ‘encourages and supports students to do challenging, even brazen acts of world change.'"

Real subversive stuff, eh? Equally so is the prison initiative, which then makes yet another appearance, described as "a degree program held in five New York correctional facilities. They provide degree programs for incarcerated men and women and created the Consortium for the Liberal Arts in Prison to promote similar programs around the country."

Another cited example of how Soros indoctrinates students: "One professor at CEU [Central European University, which Soros founded] praised the Occupy movement combining environmentalism, feminism, the labor movement, and social justice." Goodness gracious alive! Four paragraphs down, we again hear about how that professor "proudly described how the [Occupy] movement combined feminism, environmentalism, social justice, and the labor movement all under one roof." And yes, further along, it's repeated again, nearly word-for-word, followed by, "Praise for the extreme views of the Occupy movement came from one program director." Is this the same professor? It would appear to be so! Gainor and Somberg outline a video in which she was featured: "Earlier in the video, she praised the Occupy movement for combining the environmental, social justice, feminist, and labor movements to talk about issues that ‘really mattered.'"

The authors describe the dastardly mission of the Central European University:

"CEU [Central European University] is dedicated to promoting Soros's idea of an open society and ‘that professors and students could be recruited internationally to build a new and unique institution, one that would train future generations of scholars, professionals, politicians and civil society leaders to contribute to building open societies and democracies throughout the region and beyond.'"

Other horrors: In 2011, one of the school's intellectual themes was "the social responsibility of academia," which the authors denounce as "this indoctrination," without offering so much as a word to substantiate the charge. Unforgivably, the university hosted lectures by Soros himself--its founder. Its president John Shattuck "described the universities mission as one to promote open societies around the world, ‘CEU is committed to provide intellectual support for building and strengthening open and democratic societies that respect human rights.'" And so on.[2] Reasonable observers could be forgiven for failing to find much of anything terribly sinister in any of this, and if the dependence on constant repetition leaves one with the impression there exists a distinct sparsity of facts to support the authors' premise, well, one is paying attention.[3]

Gainor and Somberg tell us that "while Soros has even been nominated for Nobel Peace Prize, many governments have viewed him as the enemy." And what governments are those? Astonishingly, the authors proceed to offer up a laundry-list of charges against Soros made by authoritarian regimes. The witnesses for the prosecution include Belarus, Croatia, Albania, Serbia (under war criminal Slobodan Milošević), Malaysia and Russia. The politically-motivated, often outlandish charges they've flung at Soros over the years are repeated largely without any critical evaluation[4] and without giving readers any indication of the corrupt, repressive nature of these governments. Elsewhere, the authors assert that "there's been lots of negatives in Soros's past as he's spread his influence around the world" and snipe at Soros because he "wears criticism like a badge of honor," but that Soros's work on behalf of free and open societies has earned the enmity of these regimes is highly commendable. Gainor and Somberg treat them as a stain on his character--an item on his rap-sheet.

In outlining some of Soros's philanthropy, the authors engage in an orgy of numbers porn. Soros spent millions-of-dollars here, Soros spent billions there. The numbers are both overlapping (a fact the authors obscure) and are, like so much else, repeated and repeated--huge figures filling their pages. That makes it particularly amusing when they turn to electoral politics and try to tie their target to that black guy in the White House:

"When you like a product, you give it your stamp of approval – whether it's the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval or the USDA imprint on food. But if you love a product, then you pony up the cash… There's no product the Soros family likes better than Obama. The Democratic president has received more money from Soros and his kin than any other political candidate in the last 11 years – $16,000 and counting. They gave an additional $250,000 to the inauguration fund, with five members of the family each giving the maximum contribution of $50,000."

That Soros sure does love Obama, doesn't he? I'm sure Obama, who raised more than $1.7 billion in his presidential races, was touched by that $16,000. The authors dismiss Soros's assertion that he doesn't involve himself very heavily in electoral politics while still telling us that whopping figure, combined with the inauguration fund donations--the cumulative amount given to Obama by not only Soros but Soros's entire family--marks Obama as the candidate who has received more Soros money than any other. Soros the Puppet Master is deceitful and operates from the shadows; while he "has claimed he tried to stay out of domestic political turmoil, his political donations show otherwise… Soros just wanted to give the appearance of distance."

Much larger than the Obama contributions is $550 million Soros is said to have given to liberal causes from 2001 to 2009. One suspects a rather broad definition of "liberal causes" in that accounting but that's of little importance here. Some basic facts about the nature of the recipients of this largesse in comparison with the MRC's treatment of same help underscore that the MRC's invocation of Soros is merely anti-Semitic dog-whistling. Most of the groups that make up this seeming infinity of orgs are, broadly, liberal but each has its own individual mission, its own staff, its own goals.[5] Sometimes those goals are similar, sometimes they're in conflict.[6] For some, Soros money pays most of the bills; for others, the Soros contribution to their budget is relatively insignificant. Soros doesn't direct their affairs. He exercises no control whatsoever over the overwhelming majority of them. They are independent entities--that's reality. But they're diligently treated by the MRC as one entity: George Soros. The MRC's persistent implication is that they're under the direction of George Soros, serving the evil agenda of George Soros and entirely discredited by the association with George Soros, no matter how tenuous that association may be. When Gainor and Somberg write about Soros's contributions to media outlets, they describe it as "his extensive network of liberal media outlets"--he is the Puppet Master and "his hold over the American political left is especially strong." The MRC's stomping-ground is the U.S.--furthering that same imagery is the only reason Gainor and Somberg spend so much time and space on some Hungarian university. The MRC regularly indulges in a basic fallacy of suggesting any source that is liberal--typically defined as anything not of the MRC's particular breed of far-right-ness--is inherently without credibility or merit. Yet when discussing orgs that have received funding from Soros, its writers never fail to wave the Soros voodoo fetish, displaying it prominently in their headlines.

To overtly state the screamingly obvious, the MRC's treatment of Soros is not rational. Nothing about it can be defended as such. And that's precisely the point--it isn't meant to be.

This week's invocation of Soros by Houck and Drennen is a case-study.

The Sunlight Foundation, being all about transparency, helpfully lists its funding sources online. Looking over its last two full years, these sources are many and varied. The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Rockefeller Family Fund, the Ford Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation--there are over 100 named in only a two-year period. Soros foundations are there, but they make up a relatively small portion of it. In 2013, Soros's Open Society Foundations and Foundation to Promote Open Society offered $175,000; in 2014, Soros foundations contributed far less, a little over $40,000. By contrast, Omidyar Network (established by Ebay founder Pierre Omidyar) ponied up over $4.5 million in that same two-year period, the Knight Foundation over $2.2 million and Sunlight founder Michael Klein himself contributed more than $1.3 million.

Yet Houck and Drennen focus on one rich Jew as the source of Sunlight's funding, describing the org as "Soros-funded" (in both headlines), "an organization funded by left-wing billionaire George Soros", an org "which has received funding from left-wing billionaire George Soros." Sunlight's Bill Allison is described as "Soros-backed," his views discredited by the association--he's ridiculed as an "expert" (the word placed in quotes) and a "so-called expert."

Sunlight has been very critical of both Hillary Clinton and Obama for many of the practices the MRC itself decries. A recent Sunlight blog entry salutes Republican presidential candidate (and MRC darling) Ted Cruz for becoming "the first major presidential candidate from either party to start playing by the presidential rules" while condemning both Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton for declining to officially announce their candidacies in order to continue shady campaign practices. The Clinton Foundation's fundraising, the very burr up the MRC's butt in the Houck and Drennen articles, is singled out for attention:

"By contrast, all but declared candidates like former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush can, and do, raise money in huge chunks. Because Bush has not uttered, tweeted or otherwise expressed the magic words, he's able to ask donors for contributions of $25,000, $100,000 or more for his Right to Rise super PAC (Sunlight's Party Time shows quite a few examples). Part of Bush's strategy for winning the nomination is a campaign of shock and awe fundraising; should he declare his candidacy, he'd have to leave the six- and seven-figure solicitations to others.

"A trio of super PACs--Priorities USA Action, American Bridge and Ready for Hillary--are promoting Hillary Clinton. One of them, Ready for Hillary, successfully fended off a complaint to the FEC last month over its purchase of the mailing list compiled by Clinton's last presidential campaign. The FEC concluded that the sale by Clinton's 2008 campaign, which comprised names of her donors and supporters, to a super PAC promoting her 2016 campaign did not require Clinton to register as a federal candidate.

"That decision has allowed Clinton--and the two floors' worth of close associates she brought with her from the State Department--to continue her work with the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation undisturbed, an organization that takes funds, sometimes in multi-million dollar chunks, from foreign governments, foreign corporations and foreign individuals, among others."

Another blog notes that, while the Obama administration "has made some strides in making government records more accessible," it "has picked up where its predecessor left off in stonewalling the media, avoiding disclosure and thwarting accountability":

"Take its treatment of email. In addition to Hillary Clinton's private server, there is former Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lisa Jackson, who used the nom de pixel Richard Windsor for her email correspondence to evade FOIA requests. (In what must be some kind of record for government ineptitude, the EPA gave Richard Windsor an ethics aware.) The Internal Revenue Service's series of claims as to the disposition of Tea Party targeter Lois Lerner's emails turned out to be no longer operative, while the president himself invoked executive privilege to shield from disclosure emails sent by Attorney General Eric Holder relevant to the Fast and Furious scandal."

Regular readers of the MRC will recognize many of these as longrunning causes célèbres of the org. And the article continues to list even more Sunlight grievances against the administration.

But, as mentioned earlier, Houck, in discussing Sunlight's Bill Allison, threw in the Soros association then wrote, "To no one's surprise, the [Sunlight] expert parroted some pro-Clinton talking points"--Allison, you see, is just a mouthpiece for the Puppet Master.

Allison, by the way, authored both of the blog posts just quoted.

This same irrationality permeates all of the MRC's anti-Soros commentary.

When rolling out Soros as a magnet for its own fundraising, the MRC's rhetoric is savage, unambiguously referring to him as "The Master Puppeteer":

"George Soros has spent an astounding $52 million building the ‘Soros Web'--a vast array of organizations and associations dedicated to wiping freedom and democracy off the face of the earth. "These Soros legions are riddled with hundreds of America's most well-known media personalities, including CNN's David Gergen and Christiane Amanpour and the New York Times Executive Editor Jill Abramson. They represent only a tiny percentage of elite media leftists who are associated in one way or another with a Soros-funded entity. He is the puppet master of the liberal media."

The assertion about Soros's goal is, of course, laughable,[7] but insofar as the ugly anti-Semitic appeal, it can at least be said that the MRC knows its audience.

–j.

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[1] Beck, in an example that became notorious, took to his incredibly popular Fox News show in 2010 to launch an extended attack on Soros, not only portraying him as a Puppet Master but openly calling him a "puppet master." Never one for subtlety, Beck fired off this first of what would become several volleys at Soros on the anniversary of Kristallnacht, the Nazi kickoff to the Holocaust. Only last month, Bill O'Reilly–the host of the top-rated show on Fox News–was plumbing the same dismal depths:

"Soros has now taken his ill-gotten gains and is financing the most radical left-wing organizations in America. He is the shadow puppet master behind corrupt far-left groups like Media Matters. Soros has his tentacles into political organizations like the Center for American Progress, which has provided operatives for the Obama administration, some of whom are now going over to Hillary Clinton's campaign. Few Americans even know who Soros is, but the 84-year old uber-leftist is behind much of the political strife in this country."

[2] For all the time Gainor and Somberg devote to it, Central European University--as the name itself informs us--isn't even an American institution. It's based in Soros's native Hungary. Soros himself founded it and it's the primary recipient of his donations to higher education. The authors quote Soros as saying that, "as a general rule I do not support higher education in the United States," then write that "this is inherently false seeing as  Soros gave more than $100 million to U.S. universities." But by their own figures, 3/4 of that total went to only one institution, his ex-wife's home base at Bard College. Elsewhere, they write that, "together, CEU and Bard received roughly 75 percent of Soros's total [education] contributions." In their frequent tangents and asides, the authors try to compare the global educational spending of Soros to educational spending in the U.S. by the oil billionaire Koch brothers, inevitably managing, in the process, to distort and misrepresent the criticism leveled at the latter.

[3] The authors will throw in just about any anti-Soros story they can find, no matter how minor:

"He ran into trouble in Thailand in 1997, as well. ‘The financier George Soros canceled a speech in Bangkok in February when protesters, including some respected local businesspeople, threatened to pelt him with rotten eggs and fruit.'"

And two paragraphs later:

"The next day he had to cancel a trip to Thailand ‘after protestors threatened to pelt him with rotten eggs and excrement.'"

[4] The authors' only real stab at a critical evaluation of these charges comes when they relate Soros's public battle with Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamad. The authors relate that the attacks against Soros in that case "also were laced with anti-Semitism and easily discredited." No irony at all there, eh? If these attacks were so "easily discredited," why bring them up at all? And that this is the only listed item in this section of the "special report" that the authors challenge suggests, of course, that the other listed items from equally disreputable sources are credible.

[5] And while they advocate for their particular causes, they don't, as a rule, engage in electoral politics. They have their own separate and distinct missions--the Center for Responsive Politics tracks money in politics, MapLight correlates donations to politicians with how those politicians vote, the Drug Policy Alliance works toward ending the War On Drugs--but they're not out pimping some candidate or politician.

[6] Several of the prominent Soros-funded orgs, for example, strongly oppose the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling and seek to overturn it; the ACLU, which last year received the largest single grand in its history from Soros's Open Society Foundations, is one of the most prominent supporters of that ruling in the U.S.

[7] The notion that Soros is out to wipe out freedom is interesting, given that one of the MRC's big gripes, as expressed by Gainor and Somberg, is that "the Soros network is laughably left-wing: pro-abortion, pro-euthanasia, pro-gay marriage, pro-drug legalization, pro-union," etc.--in a phrase, pro-freedom. Something that makes the MRC laugh. Soros has a curious way of going about eradicating democracy as well–he spends several times more on democracy-promotion than the U.S. government's own National Endowment for Democracy.


[Note: This article was written for MRC Watch, a blog dedicated to a critique of the Media Research Center]

Mailman Attempts To Raise Awareness of Money in Politics, MRC Gang Goes Berzerk

MRC Watch Dept. - Doug Hughes was on a mission. The 61-year-old mailman from Florida wanted to raise some awareness about money in politics, so he boarded his gyrocopter last week and flew it into Washington D.C., violating the no-fly zone and landing on the West Lawn of the U.S. Capitol to personally deliver to congress letters expressing his concerns. As a news story, it’s a relatively minor tale about a guy who committed some minor civil disobedience in an effort to draw some attention to an important issue. But it’s a liberal issue and the response of the Media Research Center was fast, furious, preposterously authoritarian and, for such a lighthearted story, both remarkably ugly and completely hysterical.

And extensive. Newsbusters has run 8 articles in as many days on the subject of Hughes and the coverage he received. In them, Hughes is described as a “disgruntled mailman,” a “lefty gyro-copter loon” with a “liberal agenda” who carried out a “dangerous stunt“. Ken Shepherdwas appalled that MSNBC’s “seemed rather bemused rather than alarmed” by Hughes’s actions:

“Mr. Hughes is damn lucky he wasn’t injured or killed in the process of his stunt and that he didn’t injure an innocent bystander — he could have lost control of his aircraft and crashed into tourists on the National Mall, for example… [I]t is a deadly serious matter and a cable-news host like Wagner would do well to keep that in mind.”

There was, of  course, about as much "danger" in Hughes’s actions as there was of any aircraft falling out of the sky at random, but Shepherd continued this theme in another article, which objected to portraying Hughes in a less hysterical, more human way:

“It’s worth noting for the record that neither [Democratic Rep. Steve] Israel nor [Politico reporter] Vogel seemed incredibly concerned about the peril and inconvenience that Hughes unnecessarily put thousands of Washingtonians in, judging him a harmless and earnest man of sincere political conviction, if misguided tactics in communicating that vision.”

When ABC’s Good Morning America interviewed Hughes, Scott Whitlock asserted that while “no one was killed” by Hughes’s actions, “they could have been” and complained that the interview had presented Hughes as — gasp! — a likable guy!:

“…the tone of the segment was one of appreciation for an odd, but lovable rascal. [Host George] Stephanopoulos cheered Hughes’s ‘quirky sense of humor.'”

Kyle Drennen took the false assertion that Hughes’ actions were “dangerous” and tried to spin it into a standard right-wing persecution narrative, claiming that network news is “eager to falsely blame conservatives” for violent acts but that “none of the reports [on Hughes] attempted to connect the reckless action to heated Democratic rhetoric on the topic.” Drennen wants the networks to try to use Hughes to make Democrats stop talking about the issue of money in politics. Hughes “stunt,” he writer, constitutes

“reckless criminal action that could have put bystanders in real danger. Where was the press analysis of his political ideology? Where were the calls for Democrats to tone down their rhetoric to prevent such risky forms of protest?"

In another article, Drennen told us what kind of folks would support Hughes:

An update to the story at 1:50 p.m. noted Hughes winning a supporter on the Hill: “Richard Burns, 27, who said he works for a marijuana lobby group in Washington, stood in wonder and solidarity. ‘I don’t know whatever it was he was doing but I support him.'”

And so on.[*] Press outlets who offered any less-than-negative coverage, from the Tampa Bay Times to the Washington Post to Hardball, have been raked over the coals by the MRC gang.

All this over a mailman who simply wanted to draw some attention to money in politics.

–j.

---

[*] The MRC’s ideological jihadists make a regular practice of challenging the conservatism of conservatives who express any view with which the jihadists disagree and Scott Whitlock took the Hughes story as an opportunity to slam Nicolle Wallace of ABC’s The View on the grounds that she “yet again failed to offer the conservative perspective.” Her sin? “Wallace praised Doug Hughes, the postal worker who landed on the grounds of the Capitol, hyping, ‘He had a cause and I think he probably did his cause some good.'”


[Note: This article was written for MRC Watch, a blog dedicated to a critique of the Media Research Center]

Dickens Laments Declining Clinton Email Coverage, Declines To Share Reasons For It

MRC Watch Dept. - Geoffrey Dickens on Tuesday complained that major network news coverage of the Hillary Clinton email matter has been declining. The MRC tabulated the numbers for 7 weeks of coverage since the story broke in the New York Times. The initial reaction of the networks was a feeding frenzy:

“When news first broke that Clinton improperly used her own private e-mail account, the Big Three networks actually jumped to cover the story, filling their evening and morning shows with a total of 124 minutes and 55 seconds of airtime (NBC: 53 minutes, 51 seconds; CBS: 36 minutes, 39 seconds; ABC: 34 minutes, 25 seconds) within the first two weeks (March 3-16) of coverage that encompassed Hillary Clinton’s March 10 press conference.”

But coverage by week 3 had declined precipitously. A brief uptick in week 4 was followed by another decline and “the networks have essentially discarded the story, reducing their coverage to just a total of 2 minutes and 11 seconds (CBS: 14 seconds, ABC: 42 seconds, NBC: 1 minute, 15 seconds) by the seventh week.” Dickens complains that

“The waning interest in this latest Clinton controversy actually follows a familiar pattern of the networks initially covering Obama era scandals (IRS, Benghazi, VA) only to drop them like a hot potato and sadly seems to validate the Clinton strategy of stonewalling until they and their allies in the media can claim a controversy is old news and move on without ever really getting to the bottom of the story.”

Dickens doesn't even try to substantiate the charge of a “Clinton strategy of stonewalling,” something not really in evidence in this matter, and his account of the course of the story over these weeks is, at best, grossly misleading.

The controversy began on 2 March with a sloppy article in the New York Times that sought to scandalize Clinton’s use of a private email server for official business during her years as Secretary of State and alleged Clinton “may have violated federal requirements that officials’ correspondence be retained as part of the agency’s record.” It’s all a lot of “may haves” because the author, Michael Schmidt, apparently didn't bother to learn anything concrete about the rules in place during Clinton’s tenure regarding such records or the procedure by which such records are preserved or if there even was an established procedure and if Clinton followed it. In the wake of the Times story, the press pounced, and the intense and extensive interest documented by the MRC ensued.

And the story began to fall apart almost immediately.

Clinton loyalists noted that, while the fact that Clinton had used a private email server was breathlessly treated as a scandalous revelation, it has actually been a matter of public record for 2 years. As the Times had noted, Clinton returned 55,000 pages of emails in response to a request by State last year, asserting she’d only withheld some that were of a personal rather than official nature. Old news. In spite of the Times’ insinuation that emails were supposed to be filed on official servers in real time, that was actually a feature of a law signed by Obama two years after Clinton had retired as Secretary of State. Experts including Jason Baron, who, in the Times piece, had raised serious concerns about Clinton’s practices, conceded there was nothing illegal about these practices. Clinton returning her emails after she retired apparently satisfied the regulations existing during her tenure.

That disposed of the most explosive of the Times’ allegations, using one of its own sources, no less.[1] Though this took a lot of the steam out of the story, Dickens doesn't even mention it in his detailed bemoaning of the decline in coverage.

While Dickens asserts that “unanswered questions still persist,” there’s really only one unanswered question related to Clinton herself: What was withheld? To that, we have Clinton’s insistence that she only withheld personal material and anything beyond that is probably unknowable. Lost to history. As a Clinton story, it quickly became a dead end. Clinton’s behavior reflects badly on her and has significant implications for her fitness to hold the executive office she now seeks but though Dickens complains about the story coming to be seen as a partisan fight, those are partisan political arguments and not subject to infinite clamor on the evening news without any new developments to cover.

Dickens mentions one such development, which didn't lead to a resurgence in coverage:

“Even a new angle on the e-mail scandal–the New York Times reported April 14 that Clinton never responded to a congressional inquiry [in December of 2012] that ‘directly asked’ if she had used a private e-mail account–failed to re-ignite the interest networks initially showed when the scandal first broke in March.”

But the Times story in question was just another sloppy job by Michael Schmidt. Its lede:

“Hillary Rodham Clinton was directly asked by congressional investigators in a December 2012 letter whether she had used a private email account while serving as secretary of state, according to letters obtained by The New York Times.

“But Mrs. Clinton did not reply to the letter. And when the State Department answered in March 2013, nearly two months after she left office, it ignored the question and provided no response.”

Schmidt obscures the fact that the congressional inquiry, which came from Darrel Issa (the clownish chairman of the House Oversight Committee), was a general letter sent, in identical form, to many cabinet officials at the same time, not just to Clinton. “Mr. Issa had sent letters to the State Department and other executive agencies,” he writes, his sole reference offered as a virtual afterthought in the closing paragraphs of his article (it was left to the Hill the next day to reproduce the letter and reveal it had been sent to 18 different officials). The letters went out only days before the Christmas break and only a few weeks before Clinton’s tenure at State came to an end. While Schmidt notes the State Department’s reply came in March 2013, he declines to share with his readers the fact that this was the same month Clinton’s private email server was first revealed to the public.[2] Schmidt does quote a Clinton aide as saying Clinton’s

“usage [of the private server] was widely known to the over 100 department and U.S. government colleagues she emailed, as her address was visible on every email she sent.”

…but he immediately drops the subject, declining to address its implications. It’s the torpedo that takes out his entire story, as among those who would have known of Clinton’s use of the private server–before it went public–were the members of the House Oversight Committee. Dickens, whose account of this is quoted in full above, is even less forthcoming than Schmidt.

There is a scandal in all of this, of course. One of the highest officials in the U.S. government was able to use a private email server over which she had complete control to conduct all of her official business. Then she was allowed to pick and choose which emails to return to the government for inclusion in the official record. The scandal is that, one of the central lessons of Watergate still unlearned, all of this was legal. The preservation of public records isn't a very sexy issue but it’s an important one to which lefty writers (including this one) and liberal interest groups have tried for years to draw attention. That article in the Hill referenced above appeared the day after the Times piece and hit this nail on the head:

“‘What she [Clinton] did was not technically illegal,’ said Patrice McDermott, a former National Archives staffer and the head of the Open The Government coalition, a transparency group.

“However, ‘it was highly inappropriate and it was inappropriate for the State Department to let this happen,’ she said…“John Wonderlich, the policy director at the Sunlight Foundation, agreed that the practice ‘seems like it’s not unlawful, which suggests to me that we’re in pretty serious need of a legal reform.’”

And reform, in fact, followed. Inadequate reform that should be followed up. That’s the matter that could have carried this story forward: it could be a spur for reform. But in spite of the MRC’s “liberal media” talk, the corporate press simply doesn't care about the concerns of public-interest-minded liberal groups who agitate on this issue and certainly isn't going to carry out a crusade on their behalf. While Clinton earns and has taken lumps for her activities being quite ill-considered and inappropriate–an outrage, really–and those who are predisposed to regard her every move as sinister see dark conspiracies in them, the policy that allows them is the real scandal, not Hillary Clinton.

Screamingly relevant to the larger project of Dickens and the MRC–portraying the media as hopelessly liberal–is that during the same timeframe as the Clinton email controversy, several “dark money” stories and scandals involving the top Republican presidential nominees have appeared in the press and just as promptly disappeared, having never been picked up by anyone. Media Matters has publicized the stories and has noted the lack of coverage given them. While, by Dickens’ own figures, the Clinton email matter has received 147 minutes of coverage on the major network newscasts, none of these stories have even been mentioned on any of those same newscasts. Not once. As MM documents, they've been almost as entirely ignored by the print media.

Don’t expect a Dickens “study” on that.

–j.

—

[1] Margaret Sullivan, the New York Times’ public editor, replied to criticism the article had received. She conceded the story “was not without fault,” but largely defended the story, limiting her own criticism to the fact that it was unclear on what regulation Clinton was supposed to have violated.

[2] The Clinton loyalists at press watchdog Media Matters provided further context the day after the Times story when they did some original reporting of their own and discovered that State’s reply to Issa, treated by Schmidt as a non-response, wasn't unusual.


[Note: This article was written for MRC Watch, a blog dedicated to a critique of the Media Research Center]

News Reviews: Critically Covering the Corporate Press

Hey, how 'bout a blog devoted to a critique of the corporate press? One day, I'll tell a story here...

--j.