The Old Gray BimboBy JAMES TARANTO
February 22, 2008A memorable event in the history of contemporary sex scandals led to the creation of an amusing prize:
The Bimbo Award recognizes dumb public comments made during the year. The criterion for nomination is that the speaker causes the listener to believe exactly the opposite of what is said. The award is a reminder that repeating negative words only reinforces the negative message as well as misses the opportunity to convey the right message to the reader or listener.
The Bimbo Award was created by Merrie Spaeth, former Director of Media for President Reagan at the White House, memorializing the protest of a young lady whose tryst with a well known evangelist some years ago made news around the world. Her comment, "I Am Not A Bimbo," became the headline in scores of newspapers and a cover of People Magazine in 1987.
From Editor & Publisher comes our nomination for this month's Bimbo Award:
Appearing on NPR's "All Things Considered" [Thursday], Bill Keller, executive editor of The New York Times said its John McCain/lobbyist bombshell was "not a gotcha story about some kind of quid pro quo. . . . We don't know if there was a quid or a quo in this case. What we do know is that people very close to him, who watched him day after day, were worried enough by his behavior that they felt that he was endangering his career."
Ponder this, and you will find that it is wonderful on many levels. First, of course, there is something satisfying about the reversal of roles. Instead of a figure in a real scandal protesting that he is not guilty, we have a scandal-mongering newspaperman defending a substanceless report about a supposed scandal, protesting that he and his colleagues are not engaging in "gotcha" journalism.
To be more precise, what Keller says is that the McCain report was "not a gotcha story." In a sense, that is true--it was not a "gotcha story" in that it didn't "get" anything. The Times merely printed a bunch of rumors without bothering (or being able) to find out whether there was anything to them.
Here is Keller's explanation for why a story with such a minuscule fact-to-rumor ratio was newsworthy:
"He [McCain] came back from Vietnam a hero, entered into public life and then was felled by the Keating Five scandal, if you read his books, it was clearly a humiliating event for him. And he subsequently built his political life on themes of redemption, reform, you know, rectitude, if you will--and became the scourge of lobbyists, the champion of campaign finance reform, and so on, in Washington.
"Yet, according to some people who knew him best, he can be surprisingly careless about his reputation, and that's what I think this, his relationship with this particular lobbyist illustrates, although I think there's a lot of other illustrations as well in the piece."
In other words, McCain has put forward a narrative about his own personal and political character--a narrative that "some people who know him best" think is at odds with the truth. What is newsworthy about the Times story, Keller seems to be saying, is that it lets the public know that not everyone in a position to know buys into the McCain narrative.
The New York Times, by publishing this story, is putting itself in precisely the position of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth vis-?-vis John Kerry. As we've analyzed many times before (most notably here), Kerry offered a narrative that centered on his having been a Vietnam war hero. "Yet, according to some people who knew him best," this narrative was at odds with the truth.
We learned this not from news reports but from the Swift Boat Veterans, a political advocacy group, which built a case against Kerry in part on claims that were unsubstantiated because unverifiable (he faked his medals) and in part on facts that were a matter of public record (he slandered his fellow servicemen after returning home). Because of the latter element, there was more substance to the Swift Boat Veterans' attack on Kerry than to the Times's attack on (or "story about") McCain.
The Swift Boat Veterans were a political group with open political goals. By contrast, the Times (at least on its news pages) is supposed to report the news, not take sides. Yet the Times and the rest of the mainstream media, having for the most part uncritically accepted the Kerry narrative, sided with him when the Swift Boat Veterans came forward.
News organizations inevitably have an effect on the events they cover, but good newsmen are circumspect about the line between reporting and political advocacy. The Times's treatment of this McCain story suggests that the desire to make an impact overcame that circumspection. And it seems to have led to an epiphany for McCain, the longtime media sweetheart. As the Times itself reports in a follow-up story:
Mr. McCain said he knew nothing about an account in The Times from John Weaver, a former top McCain strategist and now an informal campaign adviser, who told the newspaper that he met with Ms. Iseman at Union Station in Washington at the time of Mr. McCain's first run for president in 1999 and told her to stay away from the senator. "I don't know anything about it," Mr. McCain said. "Since it was in The New York Times, I don't take it at face value."
Not long ago, Rudy Giuliani was ribbing then-rival McCain for having been endorsed by the Times; and back when Giuliani's campaign was still a going concern, he tried appealing to the right by making a target of the media and especially the Times. This experience may serve McCain well by leading him to a more realistic view of the role that the mainstream media, and especially the Times, have come to play in American politics. If he internalizes the experience, he will understand that the old gray lady is not his friend and at least sometimes is his enemy.
The Old Gray Bimbo
