This Week: From “Eloise at the Plaza” to Obama at the madrassa Chris Matthews to fellow journalists: Do as I say, not as I do

From “Eloise at the Plaza” to Obama at the madrassa

Media Matters senior fellow Duncan Black argues on his personal blog, Eschaton, that as bad as current political news coverage is, it was worse just a few years ago:

As awful as our media can be now, as awful as it was post-9/11, as awful as it was in the runup to the Iraq war, 1998-2001 is really the period when they collectively lost their minds, from The Blowjob through the Gore campaign, the contested election, and the post-Clinton “pardongate”/“white house trashing”/etc. Fox News, while annoying, was irrelevant because they really weren't any different than the rest of the media, where Lanny Davis represented “The Left.”

The media problem was a political problem as well because for some reason the Democrats have a history of caring what these blubbering idiots think of them. So, “our side” takes it cues from Meet the Press and the Washington Post, constantly trying to please them and compounding the problem. But, fundamentally it's a media problem.

(Duncan goes on to offer a reading list for those interested in delving further into the “media problem.” Those interested can find the list here.)

Over at The Daily Howler, Bob Somerby has been wrestling with the question of whether the “media problem” is getting better or worse. On Tuesday, Somerby wrote:

For starters, an embarrassing admission. Until this weekend, we'd never dreamed that another White House campaign could be covered as falsely as Campaign 2000. We thought that campaign was a Perfect Storm, unlikely ever to be repeated. But then, in the wake of the Clinton announcement, a wave of spinning and utter nonsense put a surprising new thought in our heads. Omigod! The press corps' demonization of Dems could be just as bad this time around! The thought had never crossed our minds -- until this weekend's events.

As bad as the media's coverage of prominent Democrats from the late 1990s through the 2000 campaign was -- and it was almost indescribably bad, though that doesn't stop us from trying to describe it -- we aren't sure it's much better now. It's hard to identify improvement when someone like Glenn Beck -- who has fantasized on-air about murdering Michael Moore, said he hates the families of 9-11 victims, and demanded that a Muslim congressman-elect “prove to me that you are not working with our enemies” -- gets hired by both CNN and ABC.

If media coverage of politics has gotten better since 2000, it's better in the same way that getting punched in the face is better than getting kicked in the groin -- neither one is much to write home about.

But, as Somerby pointed out on Wednesday, there are hopeful signs:

But in one major way, things are much better. Already, bogus claims about Democratic candidates have been debunked -- in the mainstream press! Congratulations to the Washington Post and CNN for going after the gong-show claim that Barack Obama attended a madrassa, for example. Meanwhile, turmoil is spreading about John Solomon's puzzling report in the Washington Post concerning the sale of John Edwards' home. Post ombudsman Deborah Howell has already challenged the story on her web site. Apparently, she will address the issue in this Sunday's column.

In each case, a bogus or shaky claim has been quickly debunked or challenged. Simply put, this never happened in the astonishing two-year war the press corps waged against Candidate Gore -- the war which sent George Bush to the White House. We're looking at a massive change in the way our politics works.

Somerby's post caused us to think about how the media's coverage during the 2000 presidential campaign of then-Vice President Al Gore's childhood differs from the past week's coverage of Sen. Barack Obama's childhood education.

Throughout the 2000 presidential campaign, news reports portrayed Al Gore as having grown up in a “vast” “penthouse suite” in the “elegant” and “swank” Fairfax Hotel, a “luxury Washington hotel.” It wasn't true, as we'll see, but that didn't get in the way of its ubiquity.

That image of young Gore growing up in the swank Fairfax Hotel was helped along by a stunt conducted by then-RNC Chairman Jim Nicholson on the day Gore announced his candidacy. Ceci Connolly's Washington Post's article about Gore's announcement noted:

Gore chose the tiny west Tennessee town of Carthage for his announcement today to highlight the parts of his biography not connected to Washington. While his late father, Albert Gore Sr., served in Congress, Gore attended prep school in the nation's capital but returned to the family farm here each summer.

Republican National Committee Chairman Jim Nicholson today mocked Gore's promotion of his rural roots, riding up to the elegant Washington hotel where Gore grew up in a wagon drawn by a pair of mules. He then led reporters on a tour of the rooms that were once the Gore family residence, what he referred to as the “real Gore homestead.”

But the Nicholson stunt wasn't the genesis of the media's obsession with Gore's childhood in the swank hotel. Months earlier, Maureen Dowd wrote in her New York Times column:

As the son of Senator Al Gore Sr. of Tennessee, Prince Albert grew up as the capital's version of Eloise at the Plaza, ensconced in a three-bedroom apartment in the elegant Fairfax Hotel on Embassy Row. Sometimes, when his parents went out, the future Vice President would order room service from the hotel kitchen, now transformed into the pricey Jockey Club restaurant.

(The “Eloise at the Plaza” language stuck: in September 1999, The Washington Post's David Von Drehle wrote in a front-page article: “Hanging over Al Gore is the image of lucky little Eloise, the girl who grew up in the Plaza Hotel. Gore's father was a senator from Tennessee who kept his family in a suite at the old Fairfax Hotel on Embassy Row. Young Gore attended prep school at St. Albans, then headed off to Harvard.")

On March 24, 1999, the Post ran an op-ed by Michael Kelly titled “Farmer Al” -- a deeply dishonest hit piece that suggested Gore had lied about doing chores as a child and portrayed him as having grown up in a “vast” apartment on the “top floor of the Fairfax Hotel.”

The Fairfax Hotel canard was alive and well in the pages of the Washington Post and New York Times through the end of the campaign, well more than a year after Nicholson's stunt; more than a year and a half after Dowd's “Eloise” column.

In August 2000, the Post's David Broder wrote that Gore spoke “about the values he had learned from his hard-working father and mother, about his youth (though nothing much about living in the swank Fairfax Hotel or attending elite private schools)."

In mid-October 2000, just weeks before Election Day, the Times ran an article headlined “THE 2000 CAMPAIGN: THE CREDIBILITY ISSUE; A Sustained G.O.P. Push To Mock Gore's Image.” The article's hook was what it described as “a skillful and sustained 18-month campaign by Republicans to portray the vice president as flawed and untrustworthy.” In doing so, the Times noted:

On the day Mr. Gore formally announced his candidacy in Carthage, Tenn., his family's hometown, Jim Nicholson, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, had a more elaborate stunt. He rode in a wagon pulled by mules to the Westin Fairfax Hotel on Embassy Row in Washington where Mr. Gore lived for much of his youth." He has tried to pass himself off as this hardscrabble, homespun central Tennessee farm boy and that is not what he is," said Mr. Nicholson, playing off the fact that Mr. Gore had told The Des Moines Register that he had learned to slop hogs and clear land on the family farm. Friends later told reporters that Mr. Gore's father had kept him on a backbreaking work schedule during summers on the family farm.

But, even as it noted the “sustained 18-month campaign” by the GOP, the Times made no effort to assess its truthfulness. And, as it happens, there was a problem with the “swank hotel” story: it was complete bunk, as Bob Somerby has explained:

When the Gores lived in the building in question, it was actually a residential hotel -- the Fairfax Apartment Hotel -- known as “Washington's family hotel.” Though it would later be sold to the Ritz Carlton (and renovated), it was neither “fancy” nor “elegant” at this time, according to a string of Gore biographers. In February 1998, for example, Marjorie Williams did a profile for Vanity Fair in which she examined Gore's childhood years. “Although the Fairfax Hotel later became the Ritz-Carlton,” she wrote, “it was not a posh place at the time Gore was growing up; in any case, the apartment was in their reach only because the hotel was owned by a cousin.” Bill Turque agreed in his later biography. "[T]he Fairfax was a bit more modest in Gore's day," he wrote. "[T]he bare linoleum floor and thick steel doors suggested transience and utility."

But the Post and the Times didn't tell their readers that -- indeed, not only did they unquestioningly quote the false Republican claims that Gore had grown up in a “swank hotel,” they adopted the construct as their own. To pick but one example, Broder didn't attribute his description of the Fairfax as “swank” to Nicholson, he simply asserted it on his own.

This despite the fact that the Post, in a Style section look back at the Fairfax published before Gore became a presidential candidate, reported that the Fairfax was popular with foreign-service families because “The hotel apartments were the only ones with kitchens that were within the State Department's stingy temporary-housing allowance.”

As Somerby further explained, not only was the Fairfax itself not “swank,” the Gores' apartment was not particularly “vast”:

“Until he graduated from high school in 1965, Gore's home was Apartment 809, a smallish, two-bedroom suite,” he wrote. And yes, you read that passage correctly -- the Gores' abode was so vast and so lavish that, until Gore's older sister went to college, the pampered siblings shared a bedroom. Indeed, Williams had long debunked the notion that the Gores were wealthy when Gore was a youth (another treasured RNC/press corps spin-point). "[Gore's father] would become rich after he left the Senate, in the employ of Armand Hammer," she wrote. “But the senior Gores' correspondence is full of suggestions that, when Al was young, the family's upper middle-class existence was a stretch.” Gore's biographers agree with this assessment. To state the obvious, none of this trivia should have any bearing on who gets elected to serve in the White House. But for those who want to deal in facts instead of invidious partisan spin-points, the Gores weren't “rich” when Gore was a kid -- and the Fairfax Apartment Hotel wasn't “swank” at the time.

Not only did the Times and the Post fail to debunk the lies that were told about Al Gore throughout 1999 and 2000, they actively spread those very lies. They adopted them as their own. They endlessly repeated the lie that “Prince Albert” had grown up in the “vast” and “swank” “luxury hotel” even though the Post itself had previously reported that the hotel was modest!

Compare that behavior to what has happened this week with the Obama-madrassa smear.

Once again, the early stages of a presidential campaign feature right-wingers smearing a prominent Democratic candidate with lies about his youth.

In 1999, Republicans portrayed Al Gore as an out-of-touch liar, misleading the nation about his spoiled childhood living in a luxury hotel. It wasn't true, but the media quickly joined in.

The early stages of the 2006 presidential campaign have featured media figures like Chris Matthews and Jeff Greenfield noting the similarities between the names “Obama” and “Osama” and suggesting that Obama's middle name (“Hussein”) and frequent style of dress (open-collard shirts, no tie -- just like Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad!) might be a political liability.

Predictably, the right-wing media have taken this even further, delving into Obama's childhood in order to suggest that he has lied about his purported “Muslim background” and education in schools that “den[y] the rights of non-Muslims.”

This latest comes from InsightMag.com, a rancid website that describes itself as “America's premier weekly Internet news magazine.” Under the headline “Hillary's team has questions about Obama's Muslim background,” InsightMag.com pulled off an impressive two-fer, “reporting” that Hillary Clinton's campaign has investigated Obama's background and “concluded the Illinois Democrat concealed his prior Muslim faith and education.”

Relying on nothing but anonymous “sources,” InsightMag.com claimed:

Are the American people ready for an elected president who was educated in a Madrassa as a young boy and has not been forthcoming about his Muslim heritage?

This is the question Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's camp is asking about Sen. Barack Obama.

[...]

Sources said the background check, conducted by researchers connected to Senator Clinton, disclosed details of Mr. Obama's Muslim past. The sources said the Clinton camp concluded the Illinois Democrat concealed his prior Muslim faith and education.

“The background investigation will provide major ammunition to his opponents,” the source said. “The idea is to show Obama as deceptive.”

[...]

The sources said the background check concerned Mr. Obama's years in Jakarta. In Indonesia, the young Obama was enrolled in a Madrassa and was raised and educated as a Muslim. Although Indonesia is regarded as a moderate Muslim state, the U.S. intelligence community has determined that today most of these schools are financed by the Saudi Arabian government and they teach a Wahhabi doctrine that denies the rights of non-Muslims.

Although the background check has not confirmed that the specific Madrassa Mr. Obama attended was espousing Wahhabism, the sources said his Democratic opponents believe this to be the case--and are seeking to prove it. The sources said the opponents are searching for evidence that Mr. Obama is still a Muslim or has ties to Islam.

How disreputable is InsightMag.com? Wesley Pruden, editor-in-chief of its sister publication, The Washington Times, wrote a January 23 column in which he tried so strenuously to distance himself from Insight that we fear he may have sprained something.

Writing about InsightMag.com's Obama story, Pruden first described it as having “appeared in an Internet journal,” then got a little more specific, referring to “Insight, the Internet magazine.” Finally, Pruden admitted: “Insight, which is owned by the owners of The Washington Times but is absolutely, positively and entirely separate from the newspaper...” When even Wes Pruden feels the need to disassociate himself from you, it's a pretty good sign you have problems. But Pruden can't walk away from InsightMag.com so easily: His “Pruden on Politics” column runs not only in The Washington Times, but in InsightMag.com as well.

InsightMag.com's Obama story was false, of course -- but false stories there, under its previous incarnation as a print magazine called Insight on the News, have been credulously repeated by (theoretically) more responsible news organizations in the past. Among the various smears perpetuated against the Clintons in the 1990s by the media and their political opponents, it's virtually impossible to identify one that was the most vicious and irresponsible. But Insight's bogus (and quickly debunked) 1997 claim that Clinton auctioned off Arlington National Cemetery burial plots the highest bidder would have to make anyone's short list.

Neither the sleaziness of Insight's Arlington Cemetery report nor the report's lack of named sources stopped other news organizations from running with it, as The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz explained in a November 25, 1997, article:

[F]or the press, the charge that the Clinton administration was “selling” burial plots at Arlington National Cemetery was too tantalizing to resist, even though there were few facts to support it.

Within 48 hours, a story that did not include a single named source ricocheted from a conservative magazine to the talk radio circuit to Capitol Hill, and from there to such mainstream news outlets as The Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, USA Today and CNN. The administration convincingly knocked down the charges Friday but failed to bury the controversy.

InsightMag.com's 2007 Obama-Clinton hit piece was quickly repeated and amplified by other right-wing media, just as the 1997 story had been. Melanie Morgan, Lee Rodgers, Rush Limbaugh, John Gibson and others jumped on board. Fox's Steve Doocy chimed in, explaining that “the thing about the madrassa, and you know, let's just be honest about this ... they teach this Wahhabism which pretty much hates us.”

But then something unusual happened. Rather than simply going along with the smear, several news organizations debunked it. CNN sent a reporter to the school in question and aired a report shooting holes in InsightMag.com's article. ABC likewise sent a crew to the school, then reported:

An ABC News producer and crew visited the school in Jakarta, Indonesia, attended by Sen. Barack Obama in his youth and found it to be a normal government public school without even a hint of the extremist elements reported by various conservative news outlets in the last week.

Why did news organizations debunk the Obama smear rather than repeating it, as they (endlessly) repeated false claims about Gore's childhood, and as they repeated previous Insight smears of progressives?

We can't say for sure, of course -- indeed, it is likely that there are many reasons, large and small.

But it seems probable that the increased awareness -- among journalists, progressive leaders, and activists -- of what the media have done to prominent Democrats and progressives in the last dozen years or so is beginning to have a positive effect.

Media Matters didn't exist in 1999, when the Post and the Times and Chris Matthews and the rest of the media were in a frantic race to the bottom, sneering at and lying about Gore at every turn. Nor did Think Progress or the progressive blogosphere (though The Daily Howler and a few other sites were already around). Progressives weren't nearly as engaged in combating media smears as they are now.

The media are still flooded with conservative misinformation every day. Indeed, while several news organizations have debunked the Obama-madrassa smear, few have debunked the Clinton-madrassa smear: the claim that Clinton's campaign was behind the nonstory.

But recognition of the problem is growing -- as is the ability of those who care to fight back.

Chris Matthews to fellow journalists: Do as I say, not as I do

On the September 21, 2006, edition of MSNBC's Imus in the Morning, Chris Matthews complained that “the news media” was doing a poor job of covering “this bullshit war”:

MATTHEWS: The news media, which I have to say sucks lately in covering the Iraq war -- it's like, we're at war, we've lost -- we've killed 50,000 people over there in that war, that died in that war, we still get guys knocked off every couple of days, a couple of more guys are killed, and yet, it's not on the tube. It's like, are we bored with the war now? Is that the new thing? We don't cover a war our guys are fighting? And I watch the news and I don't see the war anymore. It's been taken off television. And Bush must love it, because certainly Karl Rove loves the fact that the Iraq war has gotten boring for the American people. ... I have been a voice out there against this bullshit war from the beginning.

On January 23, during MSNBC's State of the Union coverage, Matthews again criticized the lack of “focus on the cost of this damn thing”:

MATTHEWS: I was watching -- I think it was another network the other night, and I was talking -- listening to a young serviceman who was having treatment at a field hospital in Iraq. And he was telling the doctor -- well, the doctor told him, we're going to have to take off your left leg. And he was pleading with the doctor. In a very manly way he said, you know, can't you try to save it, Doctor? Can't you try to save my leg? And the doctor, who was doing his job, said, no, we can't, we can't save it. We just can't save it. But we can save your right leg. And the young service guy, God, he must have been on morphine, but God, he was bold, He just said, well, good.

You know, that kind of courage and sacrifice, it doesn't get talked about. It's all about vague heroism and the medals people win. But there's nothing about what is going on in our military hospitals now. Why don't we focus on the cost of this damn thing?

Matthews hosts not one but two national television shows -- the daily Hardball on MSNBC and weekly The Chris Matthews Show, which is syndicated by NBC and airs on CNBC -- and he frequently appears on other MSNBC and NBC programming.

In other words, few people in America have greater power to focus publicly on “the cost of this damn thing” than does Chris Matthews.

If Matthews wants news “about what is going on in our military hospitals now,” he can use his two national television shows to air that news.

Instead, the January 21 edition of The Chris Matthews Show consisted largely of juvenile mockery of prominent Democrats and other inanities. In discussing Hillary Clinton, for example, Matthews bizarrely equated being “polarizing” with 1988 Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis:

MATTHEWS: Why do they think she won't win a general?

NORAH O'DONNELL [MSNBC chief Washington correspondent]: Because they believe that she is too polarizing a figure because of her past.

MATTHEWS: Yeah. Dukakis in a dress.

O'DONNELL: Mm-hmm. Your words, not mine.

HOWARD FINEMAN [Newsweek chief political correspondent]: You said that. You said that.

Dukakis in a dress? What does “too polarizing a figure because of her past” have to do with Mike Dukakis? “Too polarizing because of his past” probably wouldn't top many lists of the negative traits commonly associated with Dukakis. But “Dukakis in a dress” isn't just a non-sequitur, it's also one of Matthews' favorite sneering descriptions of Hillary Clinton, as Media Matters has documented. It's his all-purpose dismissive phrase for her, leaving regular viewers to wonder if he's simply amused by the alliteration, or if it's an image he can't get out of his head.

But Matthews was just getting warmed up. Rather than giving viewers a glimpse of “about what is going on in our military hospitals now,” he joined with Newsweek's Howard Fineman for this exchange:

MATTHEWS: Before we go to break, hey, good-looking, what you got cooking? Obama's declaration he's exploring a presidential run, sort of like Ted Kennedy explores an ice cream cone, has made Obama this week's star of the runway. So it's not just his political chops that's attracting stares these days. People magazine ran this picture of him striding from the Hawaiian surf looking, hey, like JFK. But enough of the swimsuit competition. Let's not forget that People magazine once named John Edwards, quote, “the sexiest politician alive.” Check out that crewneck sweater.

Howard, in your online column this week, you talked about Hillary in this high school social competition. Who's Hillary in this mix?

FINEMAN: Well, Hillary's Miss Perfect. She's the one we all saw in high school, carrying all those multicolored binders down the hallways, filling out three-by-five cards about every student, having the whole thing wired --

MATTHEWS: And the poodle skirt.

FINEMAN: The poodle skirt.

MATTHEWS: All right.

FINEMAN: And then the mysterious transfer student comes in. That's Barack Obama, you know.

MATTHEWS: OK, she's so perfect. That's perfect. Anyway, who's going to win the social competition? When we come back, is Al Gore ready to get out of hibernation now that global warming is warming?

As a guest on other people's television shows, Matthews thunders that “the news media” does an inadequate job of telling people about the human cost of “this bullshit war.” But as a host of his own show, he leads his guests in empty discussions of poodle skirts and crewneck sweaters. While complaining that his peers fail to feed the public broccoli, Matthews uses his own show to pass out snow cones.

But we've saved the worst for last. The exchange about Fineman's column was largely pointless; when Matthews and David Brooks focused their attention on Al Gore, they turned cruel:

MATTHEWS: Well, we put it to the Matthews Meter: Can Al Gore win the Democratic nomination? The Meter is split with six voting yes, six voting no. David, you say: Can't do it.

BROOKS: Well, first of all, I think a black woman -- a black man and a white woman can do it, and I think there's a lot of evidence to support that, so I don't think the party needs him.

MATTHEWS: Win the general?

BROOKS: Yeah, can win the general, so I don't think the party needs to do that. Second, I've heard no evidence that Al Gore wants to run for office, and unless there's a sharp increase in sales in Slim-Fast --

MATTHEWS: That's what I say. That's what I say.

Video of the exchange shows that Matthews exploded in laughter at the mention of Slim-Fast -- actually doubling over, as though it was the funniest thing he'd ever heard -- before continuing:

MATTHEWS: Can a black man win the presidency? Can a woman win the presidency? Can a fat white guy win the presidency? is the other question.

BROOKS: I'm not one to talk, of course.

MATTHEWS: You're not overweight, not compared to him.

BROOKS: But -- and finally, you know, they've got stars running for office. They've got three real stars.

MATTHEWS: OK. If we see a plummeting in the scales of Al Gore this summer, a super Slim-Fast diet, does that say this guy's getting back in there?

FINEMAN: It'll be front-page news. Al Gore buys a package of Slim-Fast. But, you know, I don't know --

MATTHEWS: Norah, what do you think? Are we going to watch the scales here to see how it's going?

O'DONNELL: I think that's unfair. But I think --

MATTHEWS: There's always somebody to put me in the position of bad guy. I'm going for the white guy. You're talking about the black guy.

On January 21, Chris Matthews and his cohorts used his nationally broadcast television show to mock Al Gore's weight -- Slim-Fast! HA-HA! Get it? He's overweight! HA! -- and conjure images of Dukakis in a dress; of crewnecks and poodle skirts.

Then, on January 23, Matthews wondered, “Why don't we focus on the cost of this damn thing?”

When Matthews said “this damn thing,” he meant the Iraq war.

But he may as well have been talking about The Chris Matthews Show -- for the cost of that damn thing is a viewing public that is encouraged to think about elections in the stupidest, most superficial ways possible -- and is kept in the dark about “what is going on in our military hospitals now.”

If Matthews is serious about the need for “the news media” to cover the Iraq war better, he can start by using his own television shows to bring attention to serious stories rather than sophomoric chatter and insults.

He could, for example, dedicate a portion of every show to “what is going on in our military hospitals now.”

Or he could replace the inane exchanges with Howard Fineman about poodle skirts with an interview of CBS News chief foreign correspondent Lara Logan, who has been unable to get her compelling report "Battle for Haifa Street" on the air. Or he could simply tell his viewers about the report.

Sure, he would be promoting a reporter from a rival network. But that would only serve to show his peers in the media how serious he is. Maybe some would follow his lead. Besides, it would hardly be unprecedented for NBC to promote a rival news personality -- Fox's Bill O'Reilly has been invited to appear on Today several times.