Fooling America : how Washington's power brokers manipulate the conventional wisdom to mislead journalists, Congress, and the American people

322 Pages·1992·1.66 MB·English

by  Robert Parry

ISBN 0-688-10927-6
©1992 $25.00
A behind-the-scenes look at how government seduces the free press into
abandoning hard investigation and insight. Former Associated Press and
Newsweek reporter Parry calls on the public, press, and Congress to
reassume their bipartisan responsibility to challenge Conventional Wisdom
and uncover the truth.
Fooling America : how Washington insiders twist
the truth and manufacture the conventional wisdom
Parry, Robert, 1949-
This book was produced in EPUB format by the Internet Archive and
converted to EPUB format automatically by outdated software. Some
semblance of readable text was restored by hand editing, but like
automated conversions, perfection is an elusive prey.
Contents
PART 1
1 The CW Runs for President
2 The CW Takes the White House
3 The Governing CW
4 The CW Goes to War
5 CW, Noriega, Contras and Drugs
6 The CW Fights a Middle East Bad Guy
7 The CW, the al-Sabahs and the CIA
8 CW and Peace
9 CW Versus the Vietnam Syndrome
PART 2
10 CW and the CIA Director
11 CW, the Sandinistas and Buzz Words
12 CW and the Mighty Wurlitzer
13 CW and Contra-dictions
14 CW and a Man Named North
15 CW and the Cover-up
16 CW, Breakthrough and Cover-up Redux
17 The CW and America’s Future
Notes
PART 1
1 The CW Runs for President
Newsweek’s Mickey Kaus chomped into a greasy hamburger at the
incongruously named Burger Heaven restaurant on Forty-ninth Street in
midtown Manhattan. The two-level coffee shop with fake brown wood and
slow-moving waiters may have seemed an odd place to divine what
Washington insiders were thinking about the down-and-dirty 1988
presidential campaign. But on many Friday afternoons, a day before
Newsweek goes to press, Kaus and his collaborator, Jonathan Alter, would
take a break from the magazine’s office across the street, order some burgers
at Burger Heaven and muse about the campaign’s conventional wisdom.
Starting in early 1988, the pair had written a weekly tongue-in-cheek chart
for Newsweek 's Periscope page that, with arrows up, down, or sideways,
kept track of what the insiders were thinking about the campaign. Although
partly a spoof showing how often the pundits ended up with egg on their
faces, the CW Watch was the first systematic endeavor to follow the periodic
twists and turns of Washington’s influential conventional wisdom.
By 1988, the conventional wisdom had emerged as arguably the dominant
institution in the nation’s capital, even though it lacked a building, had no
roster of deputy assistant secretaries and never convened an 8:30 a.m.
intelligence briefing. Through its power to legitimate and delegitimate, the
CW exercised enormous influence over the direction of the nation’s public
debate and especially the presidential race. The CW’s disdain guaranteed that
a candidate had little hope of getting his message to a national audience and
could hasten his departure from the campaign.
Yet while munching hamburgers at Burger Heaven and mulling the latest CW
on the 1988 campaign, Kaus and Alter would readily agree that the
conventional wisdom they tracked had been a “reign of errors,” the title of a
CW wrap-up piece they wrote on the election. “For years there has been an
informal but discernible universe of reporters, consultants and commentators
who reach the same predictable conclusions about the same political events at
roughly the same time,” Kaus and Alter wrote in Newsweek. “After a few
days, of course, these political creatures often change direction (and analysis)
completely, en masse and without apology, like a school of fish. . . . Cursed
by its need to constantly find something new to say, by its slavish devotion to
polls, its insular reliance on the Washington-New York gossip axis, the CW
has compiled a track record this year that is even more abysmal than usual.
Week after week, what seemed obvious to every respected analyst on
Monday morning looked ludicrous by Tuesday night.” 1
Nevertheless, each week of the presidential campaign, Kaus and Alter, with
the help of political correspondent Howard Fineman, charted the CW. They
gave arrows up and down to candidates, staffers, strategies, hot issues, even
occasionally other journalists. A typical construction would be Old CW-New
CW, showing how last week’s brilliant insight would be this week’s
campaign refuse. In the April 18, 1988, issue, for instance, Democratic front-
runner Michael Dukakis got an arrow up, “Old CW: Attempt at humanization
pathetic. New CW: Attempt at humanization brilliant.” George Bush,
meanwhile, got an arrow down, with the comment: “If he’s such a shoo-in,
why is Dukakis beating him in the polls?” Sadly for Dukakis, it would be his
Old CW that would prevail in the November elections, as Bush rolled to a
landslide victory as the “shoo-in” that the CW had mocked. With CW, the
trend’s the thing, not long-term accuracy.*
*A good example of the CW’s long-range unreliability came in a “special
glasnost edition” of the June 6, 1988, CW Watch, which tried its punditry
hand on Soviet political rivalries. Boris Yeltsin was “x’d” off the list
altogether with the clever remark “Forget those comeback rumors. If the
party confab drafts him, it’s for the army.” Three years later as the elected
president of Russia and the man who faced down a hard-line-communist
coup, Yeltsin stood as a major international figure and the man who forced
Mikhail Gorbachev into retirement.
Newsweek’s CW chart was born from the frustration Alter and Kaus felt
about the magazine’s constant temperature taking of the political campaigns.
“One week in 1987,” Alter said, Newsweek’s editors “wanted some kind of
political piece that had all the hackneyed political handicapping in it. I
thought why not do it as a chart. . . . The main motivation behind it [was as] a
way of freeing up the Nation section [of Newsweek] for doing something
more interesting. Very quickly, it took on a life of its own.” Before long, the
chart was the most talked-about feature in the magazine, and its “findings”
were even promoted in news releases touting Newsweek's top stories.
The magazine was on to something with the Conventional Wisdom Watch.
The chart hit an immediate and responsive chord with many readers,
especially the younger ones. Its clever, often snotty tone captured the public’s
new cynicism toward government. The Watch was making fun of politicians,
just as Americans were sensing their own impotence over the nation’s
political process. Not only did the snappy put-downs report the thinking of
Washington’s insiders, they gave voice to the public’s contempt for those
who fancied themselves the nation’s leaders.
But the CW Watch and the growing derision toward politics that it spoke to
further cheapened the campaign debate. Conventional wisdom obsessed over
personality flaws, emotional issues and outright trivia. Candidates of
substance got little hearing. Those who staked out gutsy positions on
controversial issues found their seriousness rated not for its wisdom but for
its effectiveness as a political gimmick.
Former Arizona governor Bruce Babbitt ran a colorless, issues-oriented
campaign for the 1988 Democratic nomination, which the CW found
charming but hopeless. Early in the primary season, Babbitt got a sideways
arrow with the puckish observation: “Good news: ideas being examined. Bad
news: ideas being examined.” A week later as the Iowa caucuses neared,
Babbitt was arrowed down, with the observation: “Live by the CW, die by
the CW. Bruce Babbitt was praised as too-candid-to-win. Now he’s
dismissed as too-candid-to-win. ” After poor showings in Iowa and New
Hampshire, Babbitt was “x’d” off the CW Watch's list of candidates: “Just
shows best man can’t win.”
Candidates suffered, too, when they took positions that lacked the blessing of
Washington’s insider community. Congressman Richard Gephardt raised the
CW’s hackles over his “protectionist” trade policies. For some reason,
possibly connected to the number of Washington power brokers on the
Japanese payroll, the CW has long been hostile to any populist message
aimed at limiting “free trade.” The CW’s hammering on Gephardt grew so
numbing that Alter cited it as one of the worst CW excesses of 1988.
“Sometimes there was piling on,” he said of the Gephardt experience.
But the CW was mixed on the reddish-haired, fair-complexioned Gephardt.
While regarded favorably as a Thoroughbred entry in the political horse race,
he suffered a bashing, ironically for the CW, as a man lacking in conviction.
In the CW Watch, the insiders’ ambivalence about Gephardt often showed in
his receipt of simultaneous arrows up and negative comments. “Of course
he’ll win Iowa. But then what? Is he the foe of the establishment or part of
it?” the chart commented while giving him an up arrow before the Iowa
caucuses. Later, after solid early showings, Gephardt earned another up
arrow, but a critical observation: “He seems a phony flip-flopper, but N.H.
blue-collar voters didn’t mind acrobatics.” Prior to the Super Tuesday
primaries in the South, Gephardt again was arrowed up, with the comment:
“Only lack of money and unconvincing eyebrows holding him back now.” A
few weeks later, his candidacy pummeled by his opponents and the CW for
his alleged “flip-flopping,” Gephardt was earning a big arrow down and out.
“The CW won’t have Dick Gephardt to kick around anymore,” the Watch
lamented. Gephardt was just one more out-of-luck candidate given the bum’s
rush from the campaign.
The conventional wisdom likes nothing more than a winner. “It’s like the
stock market,” Kaus says about the CW. “It registers the dominant
expectations of the future. But in Washington, a lot of what power is, is how
much power you are expected to have in the future.” Thus, if the CW reports
that a candidate is in trouble, he is besieged with questions about pulling out
of the race—which might leave him little choice but to pull out of the race.
Fascinated with who’s up and who’s down or what’s hot and what’s not, the
conventional wisdom revels in the triviality of politics: tactics, trends, the
latest poll results.
To take the measure of this political stock market, Kaus and Alter would start
their CW monitoring a week early by watching The McLaughlin Group
shout-fest on Saturday night. There, they would hear the latest punditries
from the likes of Morton Kondracke and Fred Barnes, neoconservatives from
The New Republic; mainstream centrist-liberals such as Newsweek’s Eleanor
Clift and columnist Jack Germond; and hardline conservatives Robert Novak,
Patrick Buchanan and John McLaughlin himself. On Sunday morning, they
would tune in the more highbrow This Week with David Brinkley to hear the
insights of the thinking man’s conservative, George Will, the irascible Sam
Donaldson, the effervescent Cokie Roberts and the ever-acerbic Brinkley.
In an earlier era, reporters would sit on panels, such as Face the Nation or
Meet the Press, and simply ask news makers what they thought about issues
or events. However, the new format, pioneered in the 1970’s by Agronsky
and Company, dispensed with or minimized the role of the news maker and
let the journalists pontificate. The format spread in the 1980’s, achieving its
purest form in the “food fight” atmosphere of The McLaughlin Group. Its
regular participants achieved more influence in setting the national agenda—
and the CW—than almost any member of Congress. They also became
inviting targets for the White House, which would feed its pundit friends
tidbits that, when repeated on the shows, would seem to be independent
opinion, not just government propaganda.
Although the numbers of such shows proliferated during the 1980’s, the
punditry programs represented a remarkably small sampling of available
political thought. The regulars on one show often turn up on other,
supposedly competitor shows, giving these anointed pontificators a wildly
disproportionate chance to sound off on their personal opinions.
A television viewer wired for cable, for instance, could tune in McLaughlin
for about a half-dozen hours a week. Besides appearing on The McLaughlin
Group and Capital Gang* Buchanan would also cohost CNN’s Crossfire.
Novak, too, could scarcely be missed while sampling the channels on any
given night. The repetition of punditry appearances guarantees that few truly
challenging or original ideas will find their way onto the nation’s airways.
*A CNN promo for the Capital Gang opens with a darkened set and the chat
show’s participants, in silhouette, moving to their places around a table. The
announcer intones about the profound significance of what will take place at
that weekly gathering. “A select few,” he says, referring to the Gang, “make
judgments that affect us all.
That the familiar faces tend politically toward the right side of the American
spectrum is less important to the CW than that the credentialed commentators
will endlessly reprise the same predictable thoughts. Alan Hirsch, author of
Talking Heads, a book about TV’s star pundits, sees this televised political
scrimmage pushing the ball only between the forty-yard lines. The
acceptability factor and the celebrity status achieved by some commentators
create a situation where certain journalists become ubiquitous while others
never receive public exposure,” Hirsch observed. “Even within the forty yard
lines, we would benefit from more player substitution.” 2 Despite the
hogging of playing time by a few conservative veterans and chronic liberal
laments about the political imbalance, the CW setters show few inclinations
to send in some rookies off the bench.
This small, opinion-shaping team of talking heads amounts to what another
pundit watcher, Eric Alterman, terms a punditocracy: “Composed of
journalists, columnists, former government officials and wanna-be experts,
the punditocracy is Washington’s varsity talking team, the boys everybody
turns out to see. The favored members of this tiny but influential squad are
offered the emotionally satisfying opportunity to mouth off about the issues
of the day on television . . . and make piles of money for it.” 3
As Kaus and Alter followed the CW trail through the week, they would check
up on the latest campaign shifts by reading Hotline, the equivalent of a stock
ticker for the 1988 race. A new computerized newsletter, Hotline summarized
the top political stories around the country and delivered this roundup early
each morning to the computer terminals of political reporters in every major
news organization. By highlighting pivotal news stories from around the
nation, publishing overnight-poll results and spotting campaign trends,
Hotline gave momentum to the CW as it lurched first in one direction and
then another.
One of the Hotline's founders, Ron Rosenblith, said that energizing the CW
was not his intent. He saw the computerized newsletter as a way to
“democratize” campaign coverage by giving national attention to stories from
smaller newspapers that had broken a politically important story. Rosenblith
was fond of recalling one comment about the publication: “After Hotline,
there was no such thing as a local story.”
For instance, when the Buffalo (New York) Evening News zeroed in on
Congressman Jack Kemp’s right-wing religious supporters, that story was
quickly communicated to the national campaign press corps. When the
Wilmington (Delaware) News-Journal nailed Senator Paul Simon on his
budget figures, the “Simonomics” story was flagged for the attention of the
big media. “We were waiting for someone to say it and when they did, we
played it fairly prominently,” Rosenblith recalled. “We tried to create the
opposite of pack journalism.”
But the Hotline also ensured that all major political reporters were now
reading from the same menu of available leads and stories. Further, if one
candidate were on the downward slide toward oblivion, a flurry of stories
about his demise would be summarized in the Hotline, speeding his
elimination. The never-ending progression of overnight-poll results were a
Hotline staple. That, too, accelerated the CW process.
“There was a debate within a very tight circle of people [covering the
campaign] as to whether we exacerbated pack journalism or did the opposite,
whether we were an echo chamber or the opposite,” Rosenblith said. Despite
its best intentions, Hotline created a formal means to communicate the CW
trends, which is one of the reasons the CW Watchers kept such a close eye on
whether a candidate’s value was slipping on the Hotline's political stock
ticker.
After a week of taking the CW soundings, Kaus and Alter would consult with
Howard Fineman by phone. Fineman, based in Newsweek's Washington
bureau, is a rare political reporter. He is thoughtful and self-effacing with an
intellect and a sense of decency strong enough to be horrified by how the CW
was mindlessly distorting the way Washington works and political campaigns
are fought. But steeped in the political atmosphere of Washington, he could
no more escape inhaling the conventional wisdom than he could stop
breathing.
Kaus and Alter would count on Fineman to sniff out the latest wind shifts in
the CW. On Fridays, Fineman would report in to Kaus and Alter before the
two CW Watchers would slip out to Burger Heaven or some equally greasy
dinner spot and chew over some lukewarm burgers and the hot CW. Divining
the CW “was never very hard to do,” Kaus recalled. “It was always pretty
obvious.”