Lies & the Lying Liars Who Tell Them_ A Fair & Balanced Look at the Right - Al Franken [56]
Which is perhaps why FNC’s Brit Hume said of the Ron Brown shooting-crashing-dying conspiracy, “It’s a story that’s worth giving airtime to.” And given airtime on Fox and ink in the Washington Times, the story inevitably made its way into the mainstream media (New York Times, Washington Post, Time, and ABC News) if only in reporting, as Newsweek put it, “The Life and Times of a Rumor.”
Though outraged at Clinton’s unquenchable thirst for murder, it was his career as a serial rapist which provided the bitterest grist for the right-wing rumor mill. “Who cares if our president is a molester, a rapist, even a serial rapist?” Joseph Sobran inquired rhetorically of Washington Times readers. The influential website NewsMax.com, available to most Americans thanks to Al Gore’s visionary funding of the Internet, explained in their probing story-behind-the story, “Bill’s Biting Ways,” why Clinton nearly bit Juanita Broaddrick’s lower lip in two while raping her.
Bill O’Reilly deplored not only Clinton’s alleged rape of Broaddrick, but also the mainstream media’s rape of the American public in failing to report the alleged rape. In a 2001 interview with Media Week, O’Reilly declared that the Los Angeles Times was an abysmal paper, in part because “they never mentioned Juanita Broaddrick’s name, ever. This whole [Los Angeles] area out here has no idea what’s going on unless you watch my show.”
LA Times editor Melissa Payton corrected O’Reilly by pointing out that her paper’s archives contained twenty-one articles mentioning Broaddrick and that, contrary to O’Reilly’s further claim, virtually her entire newspaper is devoted to information about “what’s going on,” including not only news, but movie times, and also free community events for the whole family, such as weekend puppet shows and please-touch nature walks at local parks.
I’m sorry. I got off the question of “Who set the tone?” and back onto the question of “Why does Bill O’Reilly lie so goddamn much?”
So let’s follow the tone. It begins with Richard “fucking” Mellon “Communist cunt” Scaife, moves through the shadowy world of sleazy right-wing operatives, into the radical-right fringe press (American Spectator), over to the thinly disguised radical right-wing media (Washington Times and Fox News Channel), and onto the quasi-respectable right-wing press (Wall Street Journal editorial page). Gathering strength, the tone finally vaults into the mainstream media (LA Times, Newsweek, ABC, CNN, et cetera), where it is disseminated into the homes of millions of unsuspecting Americans.
But even as the right was spreading filth, sleaze, and bile through its media apparatus, a parallel effort was proceeding in the political arena. Ever hear of someone named Newt Gingrich? I know, it sounds like I made the name up. But he was once one of the most powerful men in America.
He was so powerful that he said, “People like me are what stand between us and Auschwitz.” (Some believe Gingrich fell from power because of his grandiosity.)
One way Gingrich stood between us and Auschwitz was by being extremely mean and nasty. Sharing his secrets for success with Republican candidates, he sent out a letter advising them to characterize their Democratic opponents with words like “corrupt,” “sick,” “pathetic,” “greedy,” and “traitor.”
Gingrich’s recipe for success—“go negative early” and “never back off”—proved so successful that, in 1994, the Republicans captured the House and Senate by soundly defeating such pathetic traitors as Tennessee senator Jim Sasser.
Now in the majority, the Republicans were free to elevate the tone by shutting down the