SMOKING GUN
JOHN PODERETZ - NY POST
October 12, 2004 -- CONSERVATIVES are up in arms about the memo written by the chief politics producer at ABC News, which leaked out on Friday. They shouldn't be. Mark Halperin's memo is very useful: It reveals as no other document ever has the existence of a deeply ingrained double standard in the way political news is reported in the United States.
Simply put, Republicans and conservatives are subject to exacting scrutiny of their actions, while Democrats and liberals are treated with far greater leniency.
You can see this in the memo, when Halperin informs his colleagues, "The current Bush attacks on Kerry involve distortions and taking things out of context in a way that goes beyond what Kerry has done." He also says the Bushies are making "stepped up, renewed efforts to win the election by destroying Sen. Kerry at least partly through distortions."
Let's stipulate that some of the Bush attacks on Kerry feature distortions. For example, the president's claim that Kerry is proposing a government-run health-care system is a bit of trickery. Kerry proposes no such thing — though his plans are so unbelievably costly that it's more than fair to argue they would inexorably lead to government rationing of health care. But the president doesn't really argue it. He states it as fact, and if we lived in a universe in which everybody played fair all the time, he wouldn't do that.
But we don't live in that universe. We live in a universe where politicians of both sides make ellisions in their arguments — Sen. Kerry no less than President Bush. On matters ranging from tax policy to the No Child Left Behind Act, Kerry is guilty of precisely the same sorts of distortions.
But to Halperin and his colleagues in the mainstream media, the Republican distortions seem far worse because — well, because they just don't hold the Democrats with whom they agree to the same standard as they do the Republicans with whom they disagree.
Now, Kerry partisans and others will claim that the health-care distortion is nothing compared to the supposed slanders about his war record heaped on the Massachusetts senator by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Indeed, I suspect that the Swift Boat attacks are the true source (whether consciously or unconsciously I can't say) of Halperin's assertion about the fundamentally distorting nature of the Bush campaign.
But the Swift Boat attacks weren't launched by the Bush campaign, and Halperin knows it. They were launched by an independent group, one of the 527s that has arisen in the wake of the last campaign-finance law.
Oh ho, say the Kerry skeptics. Don't be naive. Surely you know that the Bush campaign is behind the Swift Boat Veterans.
But here's the thing. It would be patently, blatantly illegal for the Bush campaign to be coordinating with the Swift Boat Veterans. Halperin knows this.
He also knows that it would be illegal for the Kerry campaign to be coordinating with left-liberal 527s, which have raised more than $150 million to defeat President Bush — as opposed to the paltry $158,000 raised by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth so far (Edit - they have raised $13 million to date).
However vilified John Kerry may feel by the Swift Boat guys, that too is as nothing to Bush-as-Hitler trope that seems to be the central ideological conceit of the anti-Bush 527s and their key organizer, George Soros.
The point here is that Republican attacks on Democrats offend the ear of mainstream-media veterans like Mark Halperin in a way that Democratic attacks on Republicans don't. And by writing his ill-advised but revelatory memo, Halperin has shown how implicit bias can become explicit newsgathering policy.
So conservatives owe Mark Halperin a debt of gratitude — for proving to all fair-minded people that we right-wingers have been hollering "foul" about media bias all these years with ample reason.
After all, how many other memos like this have been written over the decades that we haven't seen? Dozens? Hundreds?
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