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Friday, February 13, 2004
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I MAY HAVE BEEN WRONG
Yesterday, in my unprincipled and bloodthirsty glee over the potential of a John Kerry sex scandal, I made the comment that "there didn't appear to be any Republican fingerprints" on the story. I made this comment because the story first appeared on the Drudge Report. While Drudge is often described as a "right-wing Internet gossip rag", it is not the favoured resort of Republican leaks and planted scandal stories. That would be too obvious. Besides, Drudge doesn't break stories very often himself and isn't the recipient of leaks from either party. Drudge covers stories that other media outlets have but are under editorial lockdown. This is how he got the Clinton/ Lewinsky story. Newsweek's Michael Isakoff had the story developed but the magazine held off on running it. Drudge reported the Newsweek embargo on the story, thereby breaking the story itself. Most of Drudge's sources are rumoured to be other journalists who want to make an end run around their editors.
While the mechanics of scandal mongering is the same for everybody, the parties have different means of starting the process. The Democrats tend to do it in a centralized way. They develop talking points which will then be delivered on television and radio by the party leaders (the DNC as opposed to office holders), and distributed to favoured talk show hosts and columnists. The consistency of the message is usually astonishing, very often the same phrases are delivered, word for word, by different people in different media. Once the story reaches a cresendo in the opinion media (ie, talk shows, higher end blogs and op-ed pieces), the straight news media will jump in and run the story themselves. This is generally how the Bush National Guard story built legs over the last 6 months.
Republicans aren't as organized but a whole lot sneakier. Republicans tend to plant their scandal stories in the British tabloid media, who are famous for running anything. Fleet Street reporters, unlike their American counterparts, will pay sources for stories as well. Therefore, the Republicans will approach a writer for, lets say, the News of the World and tell them that Person X is having a torrid affair with Miss X. The reporter will then approach "sources close to Miss X" or Miss X herself and offer a boatload of money, get the facts and then run the story. If the story plays big enough in the British press and other papers there hop on, the American media will then cover the British coverage, thereby covering the story itself while still maintaining an ethical appearence. This how a number of the "Clinton's girlfriends" stories started.
Well, guess who the first people to jump on the Kerry story were?
The British press. The only major American paper thus far to run it is the Chicago Sun-Times.
One interesting thing that's common in all of these stories is just how long Kerry's libido has been widely known in political circles. Most of these stories note that it was primarily Kerry's cock that kept him off of the Gore ticket in 2000. Who knew that so many people could know something like this and keep it quiet for so long? The Clinton stories were national news the day he announced in October of 1991. And people like me always assumed that Kerry was going to run fom the day that Gore conceded in December 2000.
Go figure, maybe Dr. Reverend is right and I really don't know anything about anything.
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