James Fallows

The three Obama "scandals" have varying characteristics and varying levels of legitimacy, but all three share a meta-story. And I think I know whereof I speak as a former GOP staffer.

 

Beginning with the dethronement of Jim Wright and the House banking scandal, and achieving escape velocity in the mid-1990s with Matt Drudge becoming the virtual assignment editor of the mainstream press during the Clinton impeachment, the Washington press corps has become increasingly "wired" to accept the Republican view of what constitutes a scandal. The public has been ignoring Benghazi for 8 months; as for the Washington press, we saw how Jonathan Karl got played by Republican staffers' misrepresentations of the administration's e-mails.

Let's think about the modern history of "the scandal," and how such episodes emerge. 

The modern saga all starts with Nixon. Obviously there have been scandals throughout political history, and in the immediate pre-Nixon era you had Bobby Baker, Billy Sol Estes and Walter Jenkins with LBJ; Sherman Adams under Eisenhower; and such different political dramas as the Army-McCarthy hearings in the early Eisenhower era and the Bay of Pigs aftermath under JFK. But Nixon marked the beginning of the modern scandal era. That is because the phenomena of the televised high-stakes public inquiries (as with the Watergate hearings and impeachment preparations) really dates to then, as does modern press-consciousness of how coverage of a big, exciting scandal looks and feels.

I. The main stops along the way:

  Nixon: Watergate -> hearings -> dramatic revelations -> Supreme Court hearing -> impeachment -> resignation.

  Also under Nixon: Spiro Agnew taking a brown paper bag full of bribery money, in his Vice Presidential office, and having to resign, something barely remembered now.

  Nixon era: Teddy Kennedy and Chappaquiddick.

  Ford: None really.

  Carter: No long-running ones, despite flaps about his budget director and his chief of staff. But his era marks a major change, since round-the-clock news coverage was just getting going then, and Ted Koppel's Nightline, originally known as America Held Hostage, pioneered what we now think of as scandal-style coverage, of the American captives in Teheran.

 Reagan: The Iran-contra mess, complete with Fawn Hall and Oliver North.

 GHW Bush: None, really, though the Clarence Thomas nomination got scandal-style coverage because of the charges against him and the dramatic hearings.

Clinton: First the phony scandals of Whitewater and Vince Foster. Then the real problems via Monica Lewinsky. Clinton era notable for the creation/revelation of something like a permanent-scandal mentality in politics and the press.

GW Bush: Few scandals in the technical sense. But the election, recount, and judicial overreach known as Bush v. Gore got scandal-style coverage. Then Abu Ghraib, waterboarding and torture, and the war as a whole.

Obama: In his first term, the phony scandals of birtherism and Shirley Sherrod. Now the three-"scandal" combo made of elements that have nothing whatsoever to do with one another and don't necessarily have anything to do with Obama himself but that nonetheless satisfy that phantom-limb craving for a good exciting scandal.

II. What a Scandal Takes, to Take Off

  1. An underlying offense people can understand. Clinton and Monica meet this test. Also Nixon ordering wiretaps, or Agnew taking a bag of money. Iran-Contra was always sort of a struggle on this front -- for people to grasp what exactly the offense was. Today's IRS/Tea Party accusation meets the test (despite complexity of the underlying reality); Benghazi, less so.

  2. Evidence of president's personal involvement. The Watergate tapes again lead the way here -- Nixon's own voice, cursing and swearing. Monica and Clinton -- whew. Obama "scandals" lacking here.

 3. A formal hearing/ investigative structure that guarantees an ongoing daily drip-drip-drip coverage. When there is a schedule of witnesses for a hearing, an upcoming set of votes, or a sequence of new revelations, then the story can keep going for weeks, months, even years. Darrel Issa, listen up!

 4. A press culture and DC culture that is now wired to swing into "scandal mode," and start writing stories and giving commentary reflecting that "narrative." 

5. A structure of news coverage that keeps the scandal narrative going. This was probably at its strongest in the era of the weekly news magazines (Time, Newsweek, etc.) Then you would have: daily coverage in the papers; nightly coverage on TV news; weekly advancing of the narrative by news mags (and Sunday talk shows); analysis of "Administration in crisis" and "President under pressure"; and it would all keep going. Now, in a sense, the hourly / minute-by-minute cycle can make scandals "burn out" too fast. 

Recently I posted a couple of pictures illustrating the role that airport-terminal floors play in the Atlantic's article-production process.

The category, I guess, is "It Was Ever Thus for Journalists, Even Before The Internet."

This is, by the way, my all-time favorite photo of my dad.  How happy I am to find it on The Atlantic's own website! [In an item about David Broder by Ron Brownstein.]

In turn, one lovely detail in this photo made me think of a famous shot from the historical archives. It's of Adlai Stevenson, during his 1952 presidential campaign:

This is the kind of item I can post while finishing a print-magazine story. A friend in China sends this compare-and-contrast photo:

I have been in transit or otherwise offline since early yesterday, and so I am seeing only now the item that Ta-Nehisi Coates posted about the Atlantic's Michael Kelly, who was killed ten years ago this week while serving as an embedded reporter during the invasion of Iraq. 

>>[The speech] distinguished Gore, now and forever, as someone who cannot be considered a responsible aspirant to power. Politics are allowed in politics, but there are limits, and there is a pale, and Gore has now shown himself to be ignorant of those limits, and he has now placed himself beyond that pale.

Gore's speech was one no decent politician could have delivered. It was dishonest, cheap, low. It was hollow. It was bereft of policy, of solutions, of constructive ideas, very nearly of facts -- bereft of anything other than taunts and jibes and embarrassingly obvious lies. It was breathtakingly hypocritical, a naked political assault delivered in tones of moral condescension from a man pretending to be superior to mere politics. It was wretched. It was vile. It was contemptible. But I understate.<<

The journalism world is a scene of unending flux, but I was particularly sorry to hear of upheaval that affects two of my DC-based colleagues, Neal Conan and Timothy Noah.

As I've written repeatedly in this space, journalism is fleeting, and so too is the renown and influence of nearly all its practitioners. Thus it is possible that, even though Anthony Lewis was a powerful twice-weekly presence on the New York Times's op-ed page for more than 30 years, many of today's readers may not recognize his name or, on the occasion of his death at age 85, fully appreciate what he brought to journalism and public life. (CPJ photo.) He deserves to be remembered.

I first learned about and followed Tony Lewis's work when I was a college student, during the late Vietnam War years, when through his NYT column he was a leading critic of the LBJ and Nixon approaches to the war. Then I learned about his book Gideon's Trumpet, which (as Andrew Cohen has very eloquently explained) had a profound effect on prevailing understanding of the law itself, of the Supreme Court's role in interpreting the law, and on the potential of truly literary journalism to improve the law and civic life more generally.

Over the years I came to understand a part of his influence that most of the public wouldn't have known about but that is being noted in many of the appreciations of him, including Andrew Cohen's. Tony Lewis was a remarkably generous, patient, and good-humored mentor and sponsor to young people trying to make their way across the often-discouraging and always-uncertain terrains of journalism and the law. I benefited from his taking time to offer counsel at several tricky times when I was in my 20s -- and he didn't have any particular reason to be helpful to me. I have heard enough similar stories to believe that he just assumed he should make time for young people, and be of use. All this was at a period in his own life and eminence when he could instead easily have considered himself too busy, too important, or too intent on extending his own influence to make space for other people.

David Halberstam was a very different sort of person, writer about the Civil Rights and Vietnam eras, and journalistic standard-setter from Lewis. But on the news of his death in a car crash six years ago, I was struck by a similar point: how often he had been willing to go out of his way to listen to, take under his wing, and help people from the next generation. J. Anthony Lukas, author of the monumental Common Ground and many other works (and a contemporary, friend, and rival of Halberstam's), lived the same message. You would never have described any of these people as "easy-going" or "uncomplicated," but they made time for others. Now these three writers are gone, and the newspaper journalism through which they originally made their names is, like all journalism, perishable. Each of them wrote books that may last; but I think an even more important legacy may be their example of making time to help and encourage.

Ten years ago today the U.S. began its invasion of Iraq. I argue that it was the worst strategic mistake since the end of World War II, and probably the biggest "unforced error" in American history. 

You know the syndrome. And, hey, if you've forgotten, check these two recent examples. Today several hypotheses about its origins. First, from a reader in Colorado, the idea that the false-equivalence reflex -- "extremists on both sides are blocking progress on the budget" -- comes from a kind of mirror-image mentality:

I've had a similar reaction to politicians and pundits (virtually always on the right, it seems these days) who assume that just because they are for something, the people on the other side must be against it, or vice versa.

So, if they think there should be "less government," then the rest of us all think the answer to every problem is "more government." Or because they purport to be single-mindedly focused on less spending, the rest of us are for out-of-control spending. It puts a straw man front and center and then bashes it, which the press doesn't call out enough either.

A reader in Connecticut says we are seeing a grown-up, political-world version of schoolyard bullying:

I am particularly amused by the current meme that somehow the blame lays at Obama's, and by extension, the Democrats' feet.  So they have to give in because everyone understands that the Republicans are so set in their views that they won't change, so it's up to Obama to compromise?

I think that this ties in with the new attention that Emily Bazelon has given to the problem of bullying with her book [and related Atlantic article] Sticks and Stones.  One thing that hasn't been pointed out is that bullying exists, even in adults.  Furthermore, bullying by supposed adults often works at the highest levels of politics and business.  In sum, if a group of kids acted like the Republicans in Congress, refusing ever to even even acknowledge that there are legitimate points of view that contradicted their own, and refusing to do anything unless they got their way completely, wouldn't the teacher think that they were attempting to bully the rest of the class?

Another reader, Shreeharsh Kelkar of MIT, offers a social-science explanation:

I share your frustration with the false equivalence that's practiced by the big newspapers.

But I wonder if I might offer a perspective on bipartisan think based on my discipline: the history and sociology of science.

You say in one of your posts that the thinking behind it seems to be that reality is somewhere between the positions of the two parties. And there's something to that. But I think one of the ways of explaining it is using a concept called "boundary work." 

Boundary work is a kind of rhetorical work that is performed in public argument: something is asserted to be science by stressing what it is not (pseudo-science, or faith, or religion, or what have you). Even Tim Geithner did it in his exit interview when he painted his own work as just a kind of technocratic problem-solving rather than politics, see this analysis. 

It seems to me that our political discourse also contains a similar kind of boundary work -- between "politics" and "policy." Our politicians will always say: what I'm doing is just plain old common sense or the right thing or just good policy, or just the solution to a problem; whereas what my opponent is doing is playing politics. And if one sees politics as actually a way of managing relations between conflicting groups of people, one can see why they do that. 

For instance, reforming the American health care system is almost certainly a matter of redistribution: taking money from older people and giving it to others (the uninsured, younger people, etc.). But one can't say that if one is a politician, and so there is a delicate balancing act: one's own work is constructed as problem-solving and policy-making, the opponent is portrayed as playing politics (where politics is understood to be trading off between different social groups).

I think this kind of boundary work exists in journalism too (and more on why it exists later); it's what you call false equivalence (and Yglesias calls bipartisan think). Here the newspaper is seen as above politics, which is what grubby politicians do. And therefore the contrast between the policy that the newspaper is advocating (which is not politics but merely good moral sensible stuff), and that what the politicians are doing. It is imperative, I think, in this model that both parties be painted in the same brush. Because if you don't, then you agree with one of the parties, which therefore makes you political.

Why should the newspapers practice this kind of boundary work? My sense (which comes straight from Paul Starr's history of the media) is that it's a holdover from the times when the newspaper industry changed. As we all know now (from arguing about partisanship), newspapers in the 19th century were unabashedly partisan. They also catered to niches, and made money from subscriptions. And that changed sometime in the 20th century when newspapers started to make money from advertisements -- and therefore they had to be less partisan and attract more people. Hence the objective tone of the reported stories (he says, she says) -- and also I think the false equivalence of the editorials.

Interestingly enough, we're now back in more partisan times, thanks to the Web. And it's interesting to me that you, Matt and others who call the editorials on their false equivalence operate in a completely different new media ecosystem; you have readers of a certain kind and stripe (but lots of them thanks to the reach of the Web), you don't really need to be bipartisan. But I think the example of Ezra Klein proves my point: ever since he's moved to the Washington Post, he's a lot less rough(er) on Republicans than he used to be. He won't fall into the false equivalence trap for sure but he's certainly adapted to a different audience. (I think it's great that he's reaching more people).

So - I don't think the WaPo is ever going to abandon its false equivalence model; not unless it becomes a completely new kind of WaPo (which it might very well become!).

I don't mean to suggest of course that all editors are dumb actors acting out a premediated sociological script; just that the roots of false equivalence go pretty deep into our current system.

I suspect this analysis is not particularly new to you (with some jargon added!).

Indeed this is an analysis I've thought about before -- thanks to Starr's book, and Jay Rosen's, and many others', and Breaking the News back in the 1990s. But I had not known about the "boundary work" label, which is usefully clarifying. It's a long road ahead.

I seem to be one of the few people in journalism who never worked or wrote for the Boston Phoenix. I certainly read and admired it, and feel the same general malaise at news that it is gone.

Wen Stephenson, an Atlantic veteran who was closely involved in our first online versions (called "Atlantic Unbound") nearly 20 years ago, says that the Phoenix has played an increasingly important role in climate coverage, and thus its absence will be felt there as well as in other fields. I turn it over to him:

A Death in the Family
By Wen Stephenson

We got the news, of course, on Twitter: "Thank you Boston. Good night and good luck."

That tweet came yesterday afternoon from the Boston Phoenix, the storied but struggling alt-weekly, for which the current print issue will be its last. There will be an online-only issue next week, containing an important piece by my friend and fellow climate activist-journalist Bill McKibben. And then the rest is silence.

But a lot of us can't stay silent, and won't. There are a great many people in Boston right now, and around the country, who care deeply about everything the Phoenix has always represented, right down to the end -- smart, fearless, fiercely independent journalism -- and want to say a few things about what this means for our impoverished media landscape.  Many thanks to Jim for lending me this space to offer a few words of my own.

I was proud to be associated with the Phoenix, even if briefly. My cover story last fall, called "A Convenient Excuse" (right), took serious issue with the way our mainstream media has covered -- or failed to cover -- the climate crisis. One of the places I criticized was The Atlantic (though I spent seven years as an editor at the magazine, from 1994 to 2001, and still have friends there). [JF note: see my discussion of that piece.]

The Phoenix has run three more of my pieces on climate and the climate movement in these past four months (you can find them, for now at least, here); the last one was just this week, an online piece about a stunning student-led protest against the Keystone XL pipeline at the TransCanada office in Westborough, MA, in which 25 (mostly young) climate activists were arrested for peaceful civil disobedience (a remarkable local story, with national resonance, that the Boston Globe, incredibly, has failed to cover).

There's a reason I'm mentioning these pieces, and it's not to promote my own work (ok, maybe just a little; I'm a freelance writer who just lost my main outlet!).  In all sincerity, it's to pay heartfelt tribute to my editor, the guy who commissioned and expertly edited these pieces -- the last editor-in-chief of the Boston Phoenix -- Carly Carioli.

To put it simply and bluntly: Carly championed not only the climate issue but, equally important, the young and increasingly powerful grassroots climate movement, at a time when virtually no one else (outside of environmental blogs and magazines) could be bothered to give them a serious thought. Those pieces of mine -- to my utter amazement -- went somewhat viral, garnered national attention to the Phoenix, and put the climate movement on the map for a lot of readers. I know an awful lot of people right now who feel a piercing sense of loss, and powerlessness, and quite frankly, real anger, knowing that the only widely-circulated publication in Boston paying serious attention to climate change has gone away.

In today's paper, the Globe's editorial page had an eloquent euology for the Phoenix, where editorial page editor Peter Canellos, like a long list of other accomplished journalists, spent some formative years of his career.  Acknowledging the Phoenix's "proud journalistic tradition," the editorial notes that the alt-weekly's audience "was anyone who believed that powerful institutions and other engines of society deserved a kind of scrutiny that went beyond mere reporting, and who wanted to see the fundamental ills of the social order exposed." And it concludes:

Now, with Thursday's announcement of the Phoenix's demise, much will be written about the paper's impact on local politics, music and film criticism, and the various journalistic careers it launched. It's a substantial legacy, by any measure. But better to focus on the careers that might not be launched, the questions that might not be asked, and the stories that might not get told.

Yes, it's a little ironic to read that on the Globe's editorial page, in whose offices (as I described in the Phoenix) I protested the paper's lack of climate coverage.  We can only hope that the Globe -- or somebody -- will fill the void now left on Brookline Ave. in Boston.

From today's Politico story about the prospect that an assault-weapons ban will be filibustered in the Senate. Note the three passages in boldface:

The Senate Judiciary Committee has approved a hugely controversial ban on assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition clips, but the measure faces nearly certain defeat on the Senate floor....

The Senate now faces a floor fight in coming weeks over Democrats' push to dramatically alter U.S. gun laws for the first time in two decades. While the Feinstein assault weapons ban is unlikely to overcome GOP opposition and get a vote -- as well as concerns from red state Democrats up for reelection in 2014 -- Democrats and the White House will continue their drive to enact universal background checks on all gun sales.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), a member of the Judiciary Committee, acknowledged that the assault weapons ban will have a hard time overcoming opposition. "It's pretty clear the other side is locked in opposition [to assault weapons ban.] -- [I] don't see us getting 60 votes," Whitehouse said, referring to the necessary bar to pass the Senate.

I recognize that this theme now lacks novelty value. But here is why it matters to track an engineered usage-change as it is underway:

• It takes 51 votes to "pass the Senate."
• It takes 60 votes to break a filibuster.
• Through the past six-plus years, the GOP minority-power strategy in the Senate has deliberately aimed to make the filibuster, historically a rarity, seem routine and acceptable. Every news account that presents the super-majority 60-vote threshold as the "necessary bar" for Senate passage, and a majority of 55 votes as "certain defeat," ratifies this strategy. Especially in an "informed" insider political-specialist publication.
  

It wouldn't take any extra space to make things clear. The first highlighted passage could say "nearly certain filibuster" rather than "nearly certain defeat." The last passage could say "necessary bar to break a filibuster" rather than "necessary bar to pass the Senate." To look on the bright side, the middle highlighted reference is exactly right: the strategy is designed to keep the proposal from ever coming to a vote. (Thanks to AS for the lead.)

OK, I can't resist: Let's bring George Orwell to bear on this question. Naturally I'm talking about "Politics and the English Language":

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better.

Two days ago I mentioned the venerable and Onion-esque Chinese media practice of featuring various "beautiful journalists" who are covering the big-deal political conferences underway now in Beijing. A sample from this year's installment in People's Daily:


Of course he's right. I'll have to get back in the game.

False equivalence. My heart sinks, as does yours, at the mere sight of these words. But just when I was ready to post a picture of a great new beer -- from Utah! -- plus some interesting/alarming Chinese news, I made the mistake of reading the lead editorial in the Washington Post today. Oh boy. I realize it would be false equivalence of its own rococo triple-backflip variety to avoid mentioning the most classic case yet. I'll try to move through it quickly.

Most Republicans in Congress have been utterly irresponsible in this debate. They pretend that they could balance the budget without more revenue, an arithmetical impossibility, and they have failed to put forward realistic, near-term entitlement reforms. But we take little comfort in Mr. Obama's being less irresponsible. [!!!!] He is the president; his party colleagues are increasingly intransigent on entitlement reform; and it will be his -- and their -- progressive goals that suffer most if the nation continues on its current path.

From a reader in Manhattan:

I often feel that the true expression is:

Democrats: 1+1 = 4
Republicans: 1+1 = 12
Press: 1+1= 10, probably, though some experts disagree.

And from another reader:

Democrats: 1 + 1 = 3 (multiplier effect)
Republicans: 1 - 1 = 3 (trickle down)
Media: 1 = 0

__

This is nicely done.To anticipate 99 percent of incoming hostile mail and online trollery: the point of this distillation is not what it says about the two political parties. You can reverse them if you want -- although in the struggle over "the sequester," I think it's right as is. The real point is what this says about the predicament and habits of the press. 

I agree with (my former Atlantic colleague) Andrew Sullivan that the bright new age of "sponsored" online content creates all kinds of challenges for publications, readers, and even advertisers.

Mike Lofgren, long-time Republican Senate staffer and author of The Party Is Over, says that both Jonathan Chait and I went too easy on the Washington Post editorial that presented an "all sides are to blame! please stop the posturing!" perspective on the sequestration stand-off. He writes:

It's worth pointing out that the partisan positions on deficit reduction which the Washington Post refuses to acknowledge are even worse than the mere binary choice of some spending cuts and some increased revenue versus all spending cuts and no increased revenue. As more than one House-passed "sequester avoidance bill" in the previous Congress has made clear, it is not just that the GOP wants all deficit reduction to be accomplished by spending cuts alone. It is that the GOP would prefer all deficit reduction to be borne by domestic spending alone through exempting the Pentagon. That is even more stark, don't you think?

 

An intriguing side note of this issue is Panetta's, the Joint Chiefs' and other Pentagon officials' wolf-crying to the effect that reducing the Pentagon budget from $600 billion to $550 billion "invites aggression" or leaves the US "vulnerable to coercion." Given the current partisan dynamic in Washington that I described in the previous paragraph, which party are Obama's own appointees objectively aiding?

And from another reader:

I understand the core of your false equivalence jihad.  But you are stretching it here.  Your use of "DC centrist" position as a benchmark means you are anchoring "truth" to political insider argument.  I happen to agree with  that position on this issue, but a wide range of approaches are very reasonable in this discussion.  There has been some tax increase, and some spending reductions since the base-line everyone quotes.  It is completely fair to debate whether or not the "DC centrist" position is in fact correct, and it is wrong to assume that a group that is farther from that position is "wrong." There is a reason economics is called the dismal science; unfortunately it often describes the effectiveness of predictions by economists (yes, I know that is not really the genesis of the saying).

 

We are in pretty unique economic times.  Out of the crisis.  In a recovery, which is very slow and uneven.  Profits and the stock market are up, unemployment seems stuck at 8%.  Small business are selling out in number you would not expect in a recovery. The federal government's share of the economy, and its debt level, are both at high points for most of the century.  Debate ranging from "it should be all taxes" to "it should all be spending cuts" is, unfortunately, all worth exploring.  Even if  neither extreme answer could win politically, it does not preclude a reasoned discussion on both points.  False equivalence exists, but let's not use it just because something is outside of opinion consensus.  Let's use it when it is outside of facts.  After all, there was a time that a strong consensus existed that the sun orbited the earth.

Fair points. But Chait anticipated them in his original item. Of course you could argue for a range of responses to fiscal problems: spending cuts only, tax cuts only, a mixture of the two, even no response at all. 

That's not what is happening here. The Post's editorial page clearly favors the mixed approach, which Chait labels "D.C. centrism." But when only one of the parties embraces that view, the Post appears to feels awkward saying so, lest it seem partisan. Instead it strikes a "false equivalent" stance of saying everyone is to blame for a big mess. That's why the subhead on Chait's item was "People Who Agree With Obama But Have to Pretend Otherwise."

For a clarifying comparison: I'm not a big fan of the WSJ's ed-page operation, but I would never accuse them of false equivalence. Same with Fox News.

An item today by Jonathan Chait, on New York magazine site, is as clear a dissection of "false equivalence" as you will ever see. It is worth reading carefully, for reasons of both tactics and strategy. Tactically, it is a very useful guide to the arguments you'll be hearing during Countdown To Sequester these next few days. Strategically, it explains the tics and tells that give away "false equivalence" reasoning in general.

Respectable centrist position agrees with Obama's position. But to agree with one party is not a respectable centrist thing to do. And so a wide stream of coverage and commentary on this issue is dedicated to actively misleading Americans about what the two sides are proposing.

How much of this illustration, now zooming around the Internet, is actually "true"? I don't know. But if you haven't seen it yet, enjoy.

Just now on CNN, the estimable* Candy Crowley asked a panel about the endless partisan standoffs and battles between the Obama administration and the Republican opposition.__