This is not a post about the race for Governor. I’ve got a couple more of those in my before I crawl off into a corner and drop the conversation for a few weeks out of general disgust. This is a media post, and is my final word on the whole Freyne/Racine/Pollina/Goveror’s race issue.
Again, let’s review – but with a bit more information than we had before, and in chronological order.
There was September’s uncorroborated he-said, he-said. Freyne:
“Inside Track” learned that Shumlin has also been quietly floating the name of Progressive Anthony Pollina as a gubernatorial candidate Vermont’s Left could unite around.
Shumlin:
“Shumlin said he was trying to be diplomatic about how the Democrats and Progressives could work together,” said Ledbetter. Shummy told him, he said, that he had been “very clear and careful” in talking to Zuckerman that he was not backing Anthony.
After Freyne’s unilateral Senatorial endorsement came his first unilateral campaign abandonment in November. Freyne again:
Word this week is that former Ambassador Peter Galbraith, who had been mentioned as a possibility, now has ruled it out.
Galbraith, via email last week (expressing an opinion verified by someone he spoke to immediately after Freyne’s above quote):
“I never spoke to Peter Freyne before he wrote his piece nor have I told him (or anyone else) that I am not considering a run for Governor, because I am considering it.”
And, most recently, last week’s announcement by Freyne of Doug Racine’s true feelings:
The recent floating of former Democratic Lt. Gov. Doug Racine’s name was less than a genuine trial balloon. Doug is not interested. Trust me.
Followed by Racine’s inconvenient response:
“Unlike journalists, I guess (Freyne) doesn’t have to call somebody to find out what they’re doing. He never talked to me about it,” Racine said Wednesday. “I am considering it.”
And, of course, both unilateral, Freyne-announced campaign abandonments were written in the context of Freyne’s waxing excited about the prospect of a Pollina candidacy.
The difference with this latest one, of course, is that people have started to push back. According to the grapevine, at last week’s Gubernatorial press conference, another member of the Vermont press corps, in response to Freyne playfully asking where he got his clothes replied to Freyne (and in full earshot of the room) “I don’t know Peter, where do you get your info on the Governor’s race?” For my part, I’m hearing several people voicing similar frustrations with Freyne’s tendency to print what he wants to print, regardless of evidence or corroboration.
I think everyone appreciates a “political gossip column,” but that’s not to say there isn’t an expectation that facts have been checked, ‘i’s have been dotted and ‘t’s have been crossed before it sees print. I think most people would agree that, gossip column or no, there are standards in play.
Professor Nicholas Daniloff who teaches (among other things) journalistic ethics at the Northeastern University Schoolof Journalism took it a step farther when I asked him about the situation, wondering if…
“a journalist or commentator (has) the right to use his journalistic position to promote – that is to propagandize, going beyond commentary – the fortunes of a political candidate?”
And make no mistake, Freyne is feeling the heat, and has already re-written history to cover his ass. His most recent response:
It also has been a hot topic over in the Green Mountain Daily Blog which Freyne Land links to column-right [a hot topic that I missed yesterday, sorry, Odum]
However, I stand by what I wrote. State Sen. Racine the distinguished auto/truck dealer is correct when he tells The Reformer I didn’t call him about it. That’s because we spoke face-to-face at the Statehouse.
Racine is not running for governor in 2008.
(BTW – that reference to me is an allusion to the email I sent him asking what was up in what I hoped was a positive and complimentary way, while still invoking the seriousness of what I was reading in his column. I received no other response)
Of course, that’s not what he claimed of Racine. Predicting he’s not actually going to run is easy – especially with Pollina playing electoral chicken with him. No, what Freyne said was:
Doug is not interested. Trust me.
Which is entirely different. And is a statement whose falsehood is now a matter of public record. Freyne apparently purported to base this looking into Racine’s soul (to the convenient benefit of the candidate whose narrative he has been promoting for months) on a brief conversation he had with Racine on the Statehouse steps about a week previously, in which Racine was deliberately vague. The fact is, of course, that Racine was playing coy and had already begun many behind the scenes conversations with potential supporters. He maintains he gave Freyne no such indication – and why would he?
The suggestion clearly defies reason and common sense.
I’m going to suggest a word for this, based on a cartoon series that my son and I never miss on Friday nights: newsbending. JD, in the context of this matter, compared Freyne to David Broder, and I think he misses the mark. Broder is someone blinded by his own archaic, myopic view of Washington politics and his own inflated place in it. He is pompous and windbaggy, and as a result clueless, but he is not a newsbender. For a real comparison, we should look to the netroots other favorite fourth estate punching bag, Joe Klein.
Joe Klein (often referred to as “Joke Line” by his netroots detractors), has a long history of acrimony with the activist left, and his most recent blunder is an illustrative example.
Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com latched onto Klein’s “reporting” (again, another reporter-columnist… thin ice indeed, that comes with an extra burden of responsibility to get the facts straight, IMO). If you haven’t been following it, Wired gives a rundown of the convoluted back-and-forth:
For most people the third time is the charm, but in the case of Time columnist Joe Klein writing about proposed changes to the nation’s spying laws, even his third draft gets it wrong.
After being called to task last week for writing a dangerously misinformed column on changes to the nation’s spying laws, Klein concedes that he might have made a mistake when he said a House bill would “require the surveillance of every foreign-terrorist target’s calls to be approved by the FISA court, an institution founded to protect the rights of U.S. citizens only.” But then again, he thinks maybe he didn’t.
I may have made a mistake in my column this week about the FISA legislation passed by the House, although it’s difficult to tell for sure given the technical nature of the bill’s language and fierce disagreements between even moderate Republicans and Democrats on the Committee about what the bill actually does contain.
In his two follow-up blog posts, Klein compounds his errors and valiantly argues he is right that the Dems are coddling terrorists because a bill passed by the House says that if the NSA targets a foreigner or group of foreigners who will likely communicate with someone inside the United States, the spies need to get court approval.
Klein says this gives foreign terrorists the same rights as Americans.
But this restriction is only true when the nation’s spies are wiretapping fiber optic cables, telecom switches and web mail providers INSIDE the United States.
Klein continues to miss this most crucial distinction in the debate, which is why THREAT LEVEL, paraphrasing Klein’s column, continues to believe that Klein is well beyond stupid. He’s dangerous.
Klein says the Senate bill, with its expansive domestic spying powers and immunity for the governement’s partners in a secret and likely illegal spying operation, “could have set an important, if belated, precedent for the limits of executive power.”
Passing a virtual surveillance wish list that has a bit more oversight than the president would like and dismissing legal challenges to the executive branch’s unilateral targeting of Americans for wiretapping strikes a blow for limiting executive power?
Who gave this man a column?
Klein is, of course, among the most highly lauded columnists in the country, and is frequently presented as a “liberal.” He was the celebrated “anonymous” author of the Bill Clinton themed, cutesy hit-book, Primary Colors. What happened in this case is that Klein had a narrative – of the weak-on-terror Democrats who are jockeying for political advantage at the expense of national security, and the “grown up” Republicans who just aren’t as bad as the crazy bloggers say. As such, he apparently based his column entirely on what the GOP told him the bill was about, and why those weasely Democrats were trying to coddle the terrorists and mess it all up. So smug was he in his own knowledge and arrogance, that he didn’t even check with the leading Democrats to get their side of the story, or even to corroborate the basic facts. Nor would Time Magazine even let them refute Klein’s nonsense.
To Klein, this was the reality, and the details were irrelevant. The Republicans needed to be supported, civil liberties be damned. He would report what he had already decided the reality should be, rather than what the reality was. The fact that he didn’t due his due diligence before going public suggests he really didn’t care what the reality was, one way or the other.
Now, let’s talk bending.
Here’s from wikipedia’s entry on the Nick series Avatar: The Last Airbender:
Avatar: The Last Airbender takes place in a fantasy world, home to humans, fantastic animals, and supernatural spirits. Human civilization is divided into four nations-the Water Tribes, the Earth Kingdom, the Air Nomads, and the Fire Nation. Within each nation, an order of men and women called “Benders” have the ability to manipulate their native element. These Bending arts combine a certain style of martial arts and elemental mysticism. The Bending types are Waterbending, Earthbending, Firebending, Airbending.
So, while most mere mortals in the respective elemental kingdoms work with, or even around the unchanging elements, there are a few people in each kingdom who seem to be graced with the ability, through experience and martial sleight-of-hand, to bend these elements to their wishes and produce desired effects.
I look at the fourth estate and see a news kingdom, where most of it’s residents must work with the facts of the news – perhaps going around them at times, sure, but the facts are the facts.
Unless you’re a bender – someone who, thorough sleight of hand, and their position can manipulate those facts into a shape that suits their purposes: newsbenders.
It’s a frustrating thing to watch; or at least it should be. One would think we could all agree that this sort of manipulation of journalism into propaganda should be frowned on. That’s an axiom, in fact, that the blog movement is largely predicated on. For my part, I depend on Freyne for a lot of information. Now, I’m always going to think twice and get that queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach when I do.
But it’s clear from many of the comments on this site, as well as on Freyne’s own blog that, for many, the means justify the end. That manipulating the news to a desired political end by traditional media is only bad when it benefits the bad guys. For many who see Pollina as the good guy, it;s just fine. These are presumably the same folks who have for years scornfully dismissed the very concept of an electoral “spoiler” in a three way election, but now rush gleefully towards the opportunity to label any Democrat who would enter the race after Pollina with the same shingle.
For some of us, “what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander” is also axiomatic.
There are also a couple commenters who feel that a Doug Racine candidacy could potentially spoil the narrative of Vermont Democrats as a bunch of Keystone Kops (although I’m not sure why), and they are gripping onto that narrative as though it’s a life raft – even at the expense of concerns about basic accuracy and journalistic integrity.
Whatever. people will be people, and pick all kinds of rationales to justify their impulses and desires. For the rest of us though, these axioms matter. They are an integral part of the implicit social contract we all live under.
And I suspect most of us would say: no more newsbending. Period
(Non-political blogging alert!!) In terms of fantasies that have no basis in reality, yet have been believed by zillions of living breathing, human beings, Santa Claus is on a par with little else besides Iraqi WMDs, the idea that your government would never wiretap you without a warrant, and the notion that our last President did not have sexual relations with that woman (well, okay, so nobody ever really believed that last one…).