Burnt Orange Report

December 29, 2003

Evil Media Clowns

By Jim Dallas

You know it's an election year when you start to see shoddy smear-jobs against candidates.

The absolute worst so far this season has been John Solomon's AP story which magically transforms Howard Dean into a "hypocrite" using old quotes taken out of context, bad analogies, and the selective use of facts.

John Solomon's AP story is a travesty. If it ran in your newspaper today, I strongly urge you as an American to write a letter to the editor and tell the whole story.

The lead paragraph pretty much sets the tone --

Democratic presidential hopeful Howard Dean, who has criticized the Bush administration for refusing to release the deliberations of its energy policy task force, as governor of Vermont convened a similar panel that met in secret and angered state lawmakers.

Much is made in the story about how "similar" the two task forces were. Solomon makes a point of beating the idea into the readers' head in the 9th-to-last paragraph, in which he writes "The parallels between the Cheney and Dean task forces are many."

And while the story does make a cursory run through the facts, which in totality show that the "parallels" are few, the empasis remains on the claim that the task forces are somehow equal.

True, both task forces held secret sessions and talked about energy, but that's about as far as the comparison goes.

Moreover, many of the facts of the story are buried so far down that most small papers, like the Galveston County Daily News, cut them out entirely. Here is the letter to the editor that I just wrote about this --

Your snippet on Howard Dean (Monday, A4) is lamentable. The AP story from which it was cut is a biased piece of "gotcha" journalism, using a lot of old quotes, flimsy analogies, and over-reaching generalizations to imply hypocrisy on Gov. Dean's part, when none exists.

Howard Dean’s energy task force in Vermont was not comparable to Dick Cheney’s energy task force in Washington.

First, the Vermont task force held a public hearing (Cheney did not). Second, the Vermont task force had balanced input from a number of citizens' groups, not just "liberal" ones like the AP story implies.

Third, the Vermont group listed the participants publicly in their final report. To this day, Vice President Cheney formally refuses to even say who he talked to, and is fighting in the Supreme Court to prevent the people from finding out. The Daily News left this out.

There is no comparison.

That pretty much sums it up, although I'm leaving out another detail (but, heck, so did John Solomon).

The reason why Democrats want to get their hands on the Cheney task forces' deliberations is a little complicated. Under one interpretation of Federal Advisory Committee Act, secret task forces aren't supposed to exist on the federal level at all. The Vermont task force, was, of course, governed by Vermont's open-meeting law, so there's your number one difference.

The thing about FACA, though, is that it only bans secret meetings if non-government personnel are involved.

Although the White House claims the only participants were government officials (and hence, not covered by FACA but by other, more generous acts), there has always been a pretty deep suspicion that energy industry lobbyists were participating within the definition of FACA. If they did, then the Vice President may very well have broken the law.

The only way to know whether the energy task force was operating within the law is to look through the deliberations.

That is why Cheney is stone-walling the Sierra Club, Justice Watch, and others. It's not political, it's legal. Much as Richard Nixon sought to block access to the Watergate tapes to prevent people from finding out what he knew about CREEP's illegal activities, Cheney may very well be blocking this to save his own hide.

What happened in Washington may have been a crime, and essentially the White House is trying to obstruct justice, in the broadest, non-legal sense of the term.

Now, my understanding is that the secret meetings of the Vermont task force were fully within the laws of the state of Vermont. While it would be nice if the task force unveiled their records (as a matter of public curiousity), there aren't any legal ramifications.

At any rate, John Solomon's AP story about Howard Dean leaves all of this out, instead blurring the story as if it were solely about "secrecy." Secrecy has a place in government -- if it's within the law and handled professionally, as Howard Dean's task force handled it.

My gut feeling is that this story probably came out of a "blast fax" from either the Republicans or a Democratic rival. Too many of the points made in the story seem like they were dug out of Lexis-Nexis by an over-eager oppo researcher.

Again, please write your newspaper editor and kill this story. Do not let ignorance and Below-The-Beltway sophistry taint a good man!

Posted by Jim Dallas at December 29, 2003 10:34 AM | TrackBack

Comments

Anybody who's regarded as a serious candidate for president is held up to much closer scrutiny by the media, regardless of ideology. And Dean's "shoot from the lip" style, which endears him to so many people, causes the media to take an even closer look at what he's saying than it otherwise would. Since media coverage is never perfect, much of this attention is also imperfect.

NPR has a great weekly media criticism program called "On The Media". If you think you have a case against Mr. Solomon, bring it to the attention of OTM.
http://www.wnyc.org/onthemedia/

Posted by: Tim Z at December 29, 2003 06:02 PM

All this Bish, Inc. sponsored anti-Dean stuff actually makes my heart sing. It means that they are scared shitless of him.

Why does the National Review BEG that he be the Nominee? Because they want to dupe Democratic voters into fearing that Dean cannot beat Bush, and nominate someone whom Bush can trounce. (Since when should any Democratic primary voter listen to a damn thing the National Review says - the logical thing would be to do the exact opposite of what it says).

The Dean / Clark ticket (and Edwards as AG) is going to send Bush crying home to his momma.

Posted by: WhoMe? at December 29, 2003 07:11 PM

Why does the National Review BEG that he be the Nominee? Because they want to dupe Democratic voters into fearing that Dean cannot beat Bush, and nominate someone whom Bush can trounce.

While you still have your tinfoil thinking cap on, consider: actually, another level - they want to dupe Democrat voters into thinking they are belittling Dean because they actually fear Dean, but actually they don't fear Dean, NR just wants you to think they are promoting him disingenuously because they fear him.

Interesting conception: infinite regression conspiracy mongering!

Posted by: Mark Harden at December 30, 2003 12:53 PM

WhoMe? I have to stand with Harden on this one- it reminds me of what the CEO of Coca Cola said when media reports accused him of promoting "New Coke" and taking a hit in sales in order to reintroduce the original formula to bigger sales- "We aren't that dumb and we aren't that smart."

Still, I'd like to suggest that people read Lou Cannon's masterful Governor Reagan: His Rise to Power. The problem with Reagan bios is that about 99% of them are written by people who idolize him and write away all of his faults and make him out to be some kind of golden god and about 0.9% are written by people that hate him and turn him into some sort of monster. The reality is of course somewhere in between and Cannon- a reporter from California who started covering Reagan in the mid-60s and who seems to like Reagan personally but doesn't idolize him whatsoever talks about Reagan's proclivity to "shoot from the lip." He said things like trees cause more pollution than factories, suggested that we restructure the federal government in a way that would be actually impossible, he told an improper ethnic joke while cameras were rolling and on and on. Liberals say that this shows he was dumb, the truth is he simply misspoke when he got going in front of a crowd. Dean is much the same way. It seems that Reagan had no trouble getting elected and while Dean will most likely have a much tougher job than the Gipper ever did, I don't think his "fast talking" ways will be what sinks him.

Posted by: Andrew D at December 30, 2003 11:00 PM

It is interesting, though, just how dumb and/or gullible reporters can be. "I've got a great idea for a story- now if I can only bend the facts to fit just a little more..."

Posted by: Brady at December 31, 2003 07:41 PM

Hey, following the thread, Solomon is at it again today:

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20040109/ap_on_el_pr/dean_speaking_fees

Not surprisingly, I guess, is that this is just a lot of slanted innuendo, without anything to indicate that Dean actually DID anything untowards.

First, he took a "lot" of money (well, I guess $60K is a lot if you're a Democrat. It wouldn't even register in the Republican world.) Well, took is a funny way to put it, when it's shown that $62,500 was money pledged to a charity Dean created. Maybe if the reporter did a bit of digging to show that there was some way which Dean was actually profiting personally or politically from the work of the charity that would be a story. But I just don't see it here.

Second, he took 13K in speakers fees - much from a company which was involved in a federal suit. Of course, Dean was in no position to influence the federal harassment suit, but why would the AP reporter want to point THAT out?

Third, it's pretty slimy to spend such a large part of the article discussing whether receiving honoraria is legal in other states. The question is whether it's legal in Vermont, which it was. Then to quote the current governor 's spokesman who "believes it 'unlikely that he would accept honoraria to speak on a subject clearly related to his duties as governor,' " - WITHOUT doing anything to tell readers whether the speeches Dean gave were 'related to his duties as governor' or not - is really really lazy, really really stupid, or just something unrelated to journalism altogether.

Fourth, nice play up on the "gifts". I'm sure that AP has the resources to investigate a little deeper on what they might have been, or whether the tax breaks mentioned targeted Primmer in some way, or were just general tax breaks. Why not bother?

Looks like Solomon will spend the whole season throwing s*** against the wall, to see if something will stick.

Posted by: Phil at January 9, 2004 04:58 PM

News, Politics, and Fun From Deep in the Heart of Texas

December 29, 2003

Evil Media Clowns

By Jim Dallas