by David Brock
For his part, Shapiro didn’t even pretend to have learned anything from the fiasco. “The story Breitbart News ran originally was accurate and clearly caveated,” he wrote. Shapiro also accused the Daily News reporter of lying about being the inadvertent source, scoffing, “Welcome to the Obama media, where protecting Chuck Hagel and attacking any media who question Hagel is par for the course.”
A week before the 2012 election, the Daily Caller ran a story by its “Investigative Reporter,” Matt Boyle, making a similarly incendiary claim:
Two women from the Dominican Republic told The Daily Caller that Democratic New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez paid them for sex earlier this year.
In interviews, the two women said they met Menendez around Easter at Casa de Campo, an expensive 7,000-acre resort in the Dominican Republic. They claimed Menendez agreed to pay them $500 for sex acts, but in the end they each received only $100.
Five years earlier, when Republican senator David Vitter was accused of visiting prostitutes, Daily Caller editor in chief Tucker Carlson vehemently defended him, scolding the media for potentially destroying a public figure by digging into his private life.
Now, however, the Daily Caller was out in front on a big story that might end Menendez’s career, and help give the outlet new credibility in Washington.
As it turned out, Republican operatives had also pitched the story to outlets ranging from ABC News (which also interviewed the women making the claim) to the Star-Ledger in New Jersey and even the New York Post. None found it credible enough to write. But based on a brief Skype interview with the women, the Daily Caller ran the story—which was quickly picked up by Fox News and the rest of the right-wing media, giving national Republicans an excuse to talk about the allegations.
And once that happened, the mainstream media followed up. Stories about whether or not Menendez had patronized prostitutes appeared in major publications across the country. But real reporters soon found that the women’s claim simply wasn’t credible. The Washington Post reported:
A top Dominican law enforcement official said Friday that a local lawyer has reported being paid by someone claiming to work for the conservative Web site the Daily Caller to find prostitutes who would lie and say they had sex for money with Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.).
The lawyer told Dominican investigators that a foreign man, who identified himself as “Carlos,” had offered him $5,000 to find and pay women in the Caribbean nation willing to make the claims about Menendez, according to Jose Antonio Polanco, district attorney for the La Romana region, where the investigation is being conducted.
In a Fox News media blitz that included at least twenty different segments, Tucker Carlson asserted on The O’Reilly Factor that the Caller’s sources have “received no money from anyone.” Once the story fell apart, however, Fox went silent—and while Carlson kept being invited back on the air, he was never asked about his website’s embarrassing failure. There was no price to be paid for faking it.
In early June, the Republican oppo group America Rising tweeted out a seven-second video from the campaign trail, hyped as showing Hillary telling a supporter who asked her to sign something to “go to the end of the line.” The clip was meant to portray a cold and imperious Hillary blowing off a voter. It soon popped up on the Drudge Report with America Rising’s framing. When I saw that I had two thoughts: There’s probably something off about the video, and Hillary’s in for a drubbing nevertheless.
Predictably, the video ricocheted through the right-wing online world, where a narrative was gelling and our researchers were capturing and noting every instance:
The Weekly Standard promoted the video of Hillary Clinton telling a supporter to “go to the end of the line” outside a campaign event in New Hampshire.
Moments later, Twitchy picked up the video, referring to Clinton as “Queen Hillary” and linking to several disparaging tweets.
The Daily Caller also deemed Clinton “Queen Hillary,” suggesting the video was evidence that Clinton wanted to be “coronat[ed]” rather than elected in 2016:
“Most peasants are happy just to feel the breeze of Hillary Clinton’s passage through their meager, insignificant lives. But every once in a while, a serf forgets his or her place. Every once in a while, Her Majesty must put the rabble back where they belong….
“Honestly. Why is she being forced to put up with this sort of impertinence? Can’t we just coronate her already?”
The Western Journalism Center suggested that the seconds-long video of the interaction between Hillary Clinton and a supporter “could have long-lasting implications for a presidential campaign already suffocating at the bottom of a growing pile of scandals.”
The British tabloid Daily Mail pointed to Clinton’s “blunt tone” while promoting the video in an article titled “Condescending Hillary Clinton tells autograph-seeker to ‘go to the back [sic] of the line.’” The article also noted that some Twitter users were mocking Clinton’s “royal-like demeanor, calling her Queen Hillary.”
And Fox News followed suit:
On Fox News’ Hannity, conservative columnist Ann Coulter used the short clip of Clinton’s interaction with a supporter in New Hampshire as evidence that Democrats “are waiting for old, white people to die off” so they can advance “the browning of America.”
On Fox and Friends, cohost Kimberly Guilfoyle pointed to the video as further proof that Clinton “is not known to be very friendly, or, you know, warm, or engaging” in person. Cohost Steve Doocy also claimed that the interaction was “a great moment in retail politicking” that would have created a “media freak out” if a Republican candidate such as Governor Scott Walker had said it.
Later, on the same edition of Fox and Friends, Doocy claimed that Clinton is simply “not a good politician,” pointing to America Rising’s video as “exhibit A.” Conservative radio host Laura Ingraham agreed, adding that Clinton would never send “influence peddlers in foreign countries, and big corporations… [to] the back of the line” the way she apparently did in the video.
On America’s Newsroom, cohost Martha MacCallum noted that the video “will get played over and over” throughout the 2016 campaign and is “not good for Hillary Clinton, regardless of what the circumstances exactly were.”
But then the story took an unusual twist. It turned out America Rising released only 7 seconds of a 17-minute video. Guy Benson, an enterprising conservative blogger at the news aggregator site Townhall, explained after personally examining “the full 17-minute video” that there was “nothing out of the ordinary” about the scandalized interaction. According to his review, “the added context casts the awkward exchange in a far less damaging light” and “the short sound-byte contained in the tweet above isn’t representative of her attitude or actions”:
When I wondered about context on Twitter, one of the organization’s representatives was kind enough to email me the full 17-minute video, which I’ve since examined. As I suspected, the added context casts the awkward exchange in a far less damaging light. Hillary emerges from the building and slowly makes her way down the line of well-wishers, taking photographs, shaking hands, and making small talk. She’s not a natural politician, and many of the interactions feel stilted and perfunctory, but it’s nothing out of the ordinary. When people start asking her to sign items (books, photographs, even baseballs), Hillary seems to make a snap decision that she’ll accommodate their requests, but not until she’s made it all the way through the crowd. Hence, the “end of the line” request.
Sure enough, the last four-or-so minutes of the complete video features Hillary Clinton dutifully autographing paraphernalia for all comers, asking questions like, “want me to make it out to you?” Mrs. Clinton appears ill at ease and not especially eager to stick around throughout much of this extended rope line-style interaction, but the short sound-byte contained in the tweet above isn’t representative of her attitude or actions. She’s slightly uncomfortable and less than enthusiastic; she
isn’t hostile or rude.
Media Matters flagged the Townhall post and raced to get it into the hands of legitimate news outlets, where the story died.
Opposition research works only when reporters can reliably cite it without fear of getting burned. In this case, America Rising deceptively edited a seventeen-minute video to seven seconds, and then used Twitter to hoodwink the media. It was a black eye for the group, though it remained to be seen whether the media it relies on to distribute its content would wise up and stop reflexively pushing the group’s agitprop. There was some grounds for hope: Fox’s Greg Gutfeld, not normally known for his journalistic scruples, announced to America Rising: “We no longer trust you!” Well, we’ll see.
In the end, Chuck Hagel was confirmed, Bob Menendez was reelected (he was later indicted on unrelated corruption charges), Hillary Clinton remained the Democrats’ front-runner, and none of these fables took down their intended targets.
But we at Media Matters learned a valuable lesson about the way the new right-wing food chain works. These examples illustrate how manufactured, planted, and outright false allegations can move swiftly and seamlessly from the fringes of the conservative media to the front pages of real newspapers unless they’re caught in time—and how Republican politicians, opposition researchers, and conservative journalists work in cahoots to make it happen.
If spending eight hours watching Fox News sounds like a tough job, imagine spending eight hours scrolling through Michelle Malkin’s Twitter feed or watching James O’Keefe in a ridiculous costume trying to convince some poor intern to say something politically inopportune. In this new media environment, when the right can count on a network of semiprofessional and totally in-the-tank outlets to help legitimize smear campaigns, nipping these things in the bud has never been more difficult—or more important.
Whether it was Fox News contributor Katie Pavlich taking to Twitter during the Benghazi hearings to impugn the State Department’s impartial investigation of the matter; Republican pundit Ric Grenell tweeting “Remember: Hillary wants you to empathize with these people” during a terrorist attack in Paris; or the National Review’s Kevin D. Williamson tweeting a picture of a Chinese Communist Party meeting with the hash tag #ReadyforHillary, tracking—much less rebutting in real time—the flood of digital right-wing propaganda was no small feat.
And while the proliferation of new media outlets has made it harder for a story to rise to the top of the pile and gain a critical mass of attention, right-wing activists have many more online avenues to get their misinformation in front of voters—from Politico to BuzzFeed and beyond, there are many, many more legitimate reporters now monitoring these outlets in the hopes of finding a new lead to dig into. The rise of Twitter has only made a clubby media scene clubbier, as operatives, journalists, and those who are a little of each interact freely.
Today, understanding the pervasive reach of the right-wing means understanding the rhythms of social media. CNN’s Jake Tapper, NBC’s Chuck Todd, and Fox’s Ed Henry—and many others of similar influence and reach in mainstream media—obsess over Twitter. They get information from it, they get ideas for stories from it. They focus on how people are reacting to the things they say—which of course influences how they cover future stories.
The reason this phenomenon matters is that it exposes a vulnerability. These major media influencers are susceptible to manipulation by political forces that are able to game them. A smart operative can create an online controversy, which can very well seem to justify covering a topic that would never get noticed or pass editorial muster otherwise. In this way, the massive right-wing noise machine online can expose illegitimate material to a broad audience of news consumers.
And their techniques for exercising this influence are constantly advancing. One aspect of the new media landscape is known as leapfrogging, which basically disrupts the older notion—first laid out by Chris Lehane back in 1995—of the media food chain. Previously, you’d need a right-wing outlet to cover something, and then it slowly worked its way up the chain before it became a big story. It just wasn’t possible for information to really enter the zeitgeist unless it went through this food chain. This is partly why Media Matters’ war on Fox was so important—for a period of time, Fox News was a key gatekeeper. They were a critical point in the chain, often making or breaking stories.
Leapfrogging changes all that. Leapfrogging is when a piece of information—or misinformation—spreads so far and wide through social media channels online that it doesn’t matter whether news outlets cover it, because it’s already spread and been ingested by the body politic. It’s like one of those e-mail chains someone’s wacky relative would send in the days of old, except on steroids and with more perceived legitimacy. Sure, established media outlets can ignore a lot of these viral stories, but in reality, the traffic potential is just too good to pass up, so oftentimes they pile on.
In this kind of media environment, the scandal launderers are free to launch as much, and as egregious, misinformation as they want. They rarely pay a price. They rarely lose their credibility with the mainstream press. They can pull the football away time and time and time again, and Charlie Brown will still come running, hoping that, this time, he’ll get to kick it.
Meanwhile, even as it’s gotten easier to introduce misinformation into the public discourse, it’s gotten hard to ferret it out. This is due to a phenomenon known as a “filter bubble.”
The news and information that people are served when they surf around online is, more and more, being determined by sophisticated algorithms designed to show you stuff you’re likely to be interested in. So, if you’re a right-winger, you’re more likely to see more right-wing news. But if you’re a media watchdog, it can be hard to identify the spread of misinformation—and much harder to ever reach these misled audiences with the truth. The more time people spend inside these ideological bubbles, the harder it is for fact-checkers to do their jobs—and the easier it is for extremism to fester.
By the spring of 2015, with the Clinton campaign officially under way, scandal laundering moved front and center in the Republican playbook, and the GOP thought it finally hit pay dirt with a book called Clinton Cash by GOP operative Peter Schweizer. I wish I could say that book was dead on arrival, but the catnip in it—which claimed that Hillary Clinton made decisions about U.S. security policy as secretary of state to curry favor with donors to the Clinton Foundation—proved irresistible to the entire political press corps.
I’ll have much more to say about this in a later chapter. While we couldn’t stem the tide of media interest, our fact-checkers manned the barricades and affected coverage, publicizing Schweizer’s partisan background and history of botched reporting—and spoiling the book’s launch.
We were ready for such right-wing attacks, because we’d been busy getting ready for Hillary ever since she left her State Department post back in 2013. Our organized pro-Hillary effort was unprecedented, fitting for what we hoped would be an unprecedented candidacy.
Chapter Five
Getting Ready for Hillary
Washington, DC, is a ghost town in the last month of even-numbered years, as losers clear out their offices, winners measure the drapes, staffers circulate résumés, and everyone tries to squeeze in a vacation before the next cycle begins in earnest. And I was away for the Christmas holidays when word came that Hillary Clinton was in the hospital.
In stark contrast to her 2008 campaign, when Hillary served as secretary of state, she enjoyed mostly fair and accurate press coverage. Playing a nonpolitical role, Hillary also got a respite from right-wing attacks.
But as she prepared to leave office, that all changed. In mid-December 2012, Hillary, who had been suffering from a stomach virus, fainted at home and ended up hospitalized with a concussion and a blood clot. The good news was that she was fine. The bad news was that conservatives were already using this health scare to spin a wild web of conspiracy theories.
Hillary’
s condition led her to cancel an appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where she was scheduled to answer questions about the Benghazi tragedy. And the right began to question whether she was really sick at all, or whether they had finally found the missing piece they needed to turn Benghazi into a real scandal.
“I’m not suggesting she didn’t get a concussion,” said Megyn Kelly on Fox News less than forty-eight hours after Hillary was hospitalized. “But there is a legitimate question about, is—do we believe this is an excuse and that she really will show up to testify?” Her guest, Monica Crowley, a former aide to the disgraced Richard Nixon, responded by describing Hillary’s illness as “this virus with apparently impeccable timing.” And the race was on.
Over the next three days, nearly every program on Fox featured speculation about whether Hillary was faking it. Former U.N. ambassador John Bolton suggested that Hillary was suffering from “a diplomatic illness” that, he said, often afflicted those who “don’t want to go to a meeting or a conference or event.” Syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer diagnosed Hillary as “suffering from acute Benghazi allergy which causes lightheadedness when she hears the word ‘Benghazi.’”
The conspiracy theory spilled into the print press, with the New York Post running the headline HILLARY CLINTON’S HEAD FAKE and even the Los Angeles Times polling its readers on the question: “Did she fake it?”
Predictably, this malicious fantasy quickly fizzled. Hillary’s doctors released a statement explaining that, no, Hillary was not faking her concussion—in fact, the blood clot that resulted from her injury was serious enough to require treatment to prevent lasting damage (which would later give rise to the opposite, if equally false, conspiracy theory that Hillary was, in fact, far sicker than she let on). And a month later, after she recovered, Hillary did, in fact, appear before two congressional committees to talk about Benghazi, appearances that proved she wasn’t shrinking from a confrontation with the Republicans to dispel their conspiracy theories. To the contrary, even Brit Hume said on Fox that Hillary hit the ball out of the park with her testimony.
