More Praise for the Media

Last week I praised an article by Glenn Kessler at the Washington Post which made a long-overdue attempt to debunk the President's strange and inaccurate description of "the enemy." In Monday's New York Times, there's another journalistic rarity, a mainstream news article explaining how the right wing noise machine works.

The article, written by David Kirkpatrick, delves into the genesis of the false claim that Barack Obama attended a radical madrassah as a child:

Jeffrey T. Kuhner, whose Web site published the first anonymous smear of the 2008 presidential race, is hardly the only editor who will not reveal his reporters’ sources. What sets him apart is that he will not even disclose the names of his reporters.

But their anonymity has not stopped them from making an impact. In the last two weeks, Mr. Kuhner’s Web site, Insight, the last remnant of a defunct conservative print magazine owned by the Unification Church led by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, was able to set off a wave of television commentary, talk-radio chatter, official denials, investigations by journalists around the globe and news media self-analysis that has lasted 11 days and counting.

The controversy started with a quickly discredited Jan. 17 article on the Insight Web site asserting that the presidential campaign of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton was preparing an accusation that her rival, Senator Barack Obama, had covered up a brief period he had spent in an Islamic religious school in Indonesia when he was 6.

(Other news organizations have confirmed Mr. Obama’s descriptions of the school as a secular public school. Both senators have denounced the report, and there is no evidence that Mrs. Clinton’s campaign planned to spread those accusations.)

The article also notes that Insight's "assertions about Mr. Obama resemble rumors passed on without evidence in e-mail messages that have been widely circulated over the last several weeks." In other words, Insight's "anonymous source" may in fact be a spam email.

The article ends with this revealing statement:

After Insight posted the article on Jan. 17, Mr. Kuhner said, he was disappointed to see that the Drudge Report did not link to it on its Web site as it has done with other Insight articles. So, as usual, he e-mailed the article to producers at Fox News and MSNBC.

Hilarious. This smear was so ridiculous that even Matt Drudge wouldn't bite, so Kuhner went with Plan B: Fox News. And, of course, Fox News picked the story up and ran with it.

I'm sure that mainstream journalists have understood for some time now how the right wing noise machine works, how it generates disinformation and amplifies it through its echo chamber of shills and partisan hacks. It's still nice, though, to see a mainstream journalist lay it all out there for the public to see. For too long this clown show has been allowed to operate with little to no scrutiny from real journalists. I think mainstream journalists are slowly becoming more savvy about all this; they're beginning to realize that their options are not limited to repeating these lies or ignoring them. They have a third option; they can investigate the origin of the claims in question and expose the hacks and propaganda artists for what they are.

When it comes to covering elections, this is by far the most important public service a reporter can do.