The Silencing (8 page)

Yale criminal law school professor Jed Rubenfeld wrote a
New York Times
op-ed questioning the ability of university administrators to adjudicate rape. He also noted the obvious fact that false rape accusations are a serious problem that can destroy people’s lives.
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Gloria Steinem protégé Jessica Valenti attacked Rubenfield as a rape apologist and victim-blamer in the
Guardian
. Blasting Valenti for her unhinged smear campaign,
Reason
’s Robby Soave wrote that Valenti “established that critics of her liberal feminist view are not opponents in a public policy debate—they are the enemies of rape victims. This is totally unjustified demagoguery. She might as well be saying, ‘You’re with me or you’re with the terrorists.’”
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If the illiberal left has such an airtight case regarding their claims about campus rape, then they should make them without trying to delegitimize people who make reasonable, thoughtful arguments against their narrative. Instead, they seek to silence anyone who points out flaws in their claims. They know from experience that they can shut down debate with smear campaigns, so they do.

Rather than apologizing, Emily Yoffe responded to her critics. “As I was working on this story, several of my friends counseled me not do [sic] it,” she said. “Talking about things women can do to protect themselves from rape is the third rail, they said. But why be a journalist unless you’re willing to dig into difficult subjects and report your findings?”
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Yoffe is one of the few brave journalists willing to face the inevitable illiberal onslaught in her quest to report the truth. But there are far more
journalists like those who counseled Yoffe to not go off script. The silencing campaign is effective.

CLOSET CONSERVATIVE

One of the favored silencing tactics is to accuse those who refuse to sing from the illiberal song sheet of being secret conservatives. We saw this with lifelong Democrat Michelle Rhee and the self-identified independent Campbell Brown. This tactic is most often used on journalists who investigate Democratic politicians or express views at odds with liberal orthodoxy. The uber-bully in this regard is Media Matters, a non-profit organization funded by some of the Democratic Party’s most influential donors. Its mission has been explained variously as an attempt to root out conservative misinformation in the media and to wage “guerrilla warfare and sabotage”
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against Fox News. Media Matters works in tandem with other illiberal left media outlets, which treat their propaganda as actual news. One of their favorite tactics is to “out” mainstream journalists as conservatives when they start down the wrong trail of reporting. It’s done to delegitimize journalists who file stories that could damage the Democratic Party or the left’s collective credibility.

The treatment of Sharyl Attkisson’s resignation and book,
Stonewalled: My Fight for Truth Against the Forces of Obstruction, Intimidation, and Harassment in Obama’s Washington
is Exhibit A of this tactic. Attkisson is an award-winning journalist who worked as an anchor for CNN from 1990 to 1993 and as an investigative reporter at CBS from 1993 to 2014. She won a prestigious Edward R. Murrow award and five Emmy awards for her investigative work and was one of the first journalists to fly with combat missions over Kosovo. She became a target of the illiberal left due to her investigative efforts into the Obama administration, from the Fast and Furious gun scandal to the controversy over the Benghazi attack that killed an American ambassador to the administration’s failed green-energy investments.

Suddenly, a tough reporter who had exposed fraud and corruption on both sides of the aisle was transformed by the illiberal left into a secret conservative who couldn’t be trusted.

In a piece headlined “Was Reporter Sharyl Attkisson Too Right-Wing for CBS?” Lloyd Grove quoted a former CBS News colleague making the anonymous accusation, “‘She is definitely not being truthful about being non-partisan. She has an agenda and a political bent.’”
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This is eerily familiar to the claims the teachers unions made about Campbell Brown—all of which turned out to be false. A gigantic fly in the ointment for the illiberal left is Attkisson’s history of investigating both Democrats and Republicans. If she had a conservative agenda it’s hard to explain her investigative work on Republican fundraising and uncovering fraud around Halliburton’s contracts in Iraq. One of Attkisson’s Emmys was awarded for an investigative series titled, “Bush Administration’s Bait and Switch on TARP and the Bank Bailout.” These inconvenient facts are deliberately ignored because they would undermine the campaign to delegitimize Attkisson, who was simply doing the job that other reporters neglected to do in holding the Obama administration accountable for its actions.

Media Matters posted a piece about Attkisson that claimed she might be promoting a political (read: conservative) agenda because Republican Congressman Darrell Issa of California toasted her at a party for her book. Case closed. “She left CBS amid claims from colleagues that her work, which often focused on trumped-up claims of Obama administration misdeeds, had a ‘political agenda,’” Media Matters’ Matt Gertz wrote, “‘leading network executives to doubt the impartiality of her reporting.’” Gertz based his accusations on quotes from anonymous sources cited in a post by another news outlet.
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The claims were directly at odds with everything Attkisson had said publicly about her departure.

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes recorded an interview with Attkisson ostensibly to discuss her book. When the segment aired, he introduced it by portraying his guest—who could not respond to his allegations since she
was not there—as a suspicious character. He intoned, “Attkisson departed CBS News amid criticism over her reporting on Benghazi, Fast and Furious and other alleged scandals being pursued by conservatives and Republicans.” Who criticized her? What appeared on the screen as Hayes made this claim was a screenshot of the same piece that Media Matters cited. Never mind that all the sources were anonymous. Hayes continued, “While CBS executives reportedly came to doubt the impartiality of her reporting, conservative groups honored Attkisson as a mainstream media ally.” Translation: if conservatives applaud your reporting and think you are “mainstream” then you must be a right-wing mole. When liberals think a reporter does good work, that’s “mainstream.”

The interview had Hayes asking Attkisson, “People are watching you like, ‘Are we going to see you as a Fox News contributor or writing for a conservative outlet next’; can you tell me right here that this is not the way this is going?”
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When journalists work for media networks known to be liberal it proves absolutely nothing. But if you go to Fox News, which Attkisson did not, then in Hayes’s book you are not legitimate. (He learned this from the Obama White House.) Hayes later sneered, “You’re like the toast of the town over at Fox News.”

If Attkisson needed someone to commiserate with, she could always talk with Peter Boyer. During his career, he has worked for many of the most respected names in journalism—including eighteen years as a staff writer for the
New Yorker
. Boyer’s resume also includes such names as PBS, NPR,
Vanity Fair
, the
New York Times
, and a stint as senior correspondent for the merged
Newsweek
and the Daily Beast. He now serves as editor-at-large for Fox News, an unpardonable sin to many liberals.

But long before he landed at Fox News, illiberal left busybodies were busy smearing a great journalist for being too fair-minded. Matt Yglesias at the
American Prospect
wrote that “Boyer appears to have made something of a career for himself as a conservative interloper at otherwise liberal media outlets.”
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His proof? Boyer’s
Vanity Fair
profile of Rush Limbaugh “drew praise from the conservative Media Research Center
as being ‘fair.’”
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His complaint speaks volumes. Yglesias believes that treating conservatives fairly is proof that you are not a real journalist, when the opposite should be true. The notion of a “fair” journalist doesn’t belong in the illiberal left lexicon; a journalist is either with them or he or she is a secret conservative, by which they mean traitor to the properly left-wing media. Yglesias also complained about Boyer’s numerous investigative segments on the Clinton administration scandals as a PBS
Frontline
correspondent. He took particular issue with the fact that a few of the segments focused on scandals where the accused was exonerated.

So, a reporter doing an investigative piece into accusations makes him a bad journalist and undercover ideologue if the subject is later exonerated. What does that mean then for the armies of journalists who were the judge, jury, and executioner for Scooter Libby who they “knew” leaked Valerie Plame’s name? The illiberal left didn’t investigate Scooter Libby, they obsessively harassed and accused a person who ended up not being the leaker. Anyone who questioned their attack was smeared as well. When it was revealed that Colin Powell’s chief of staff leaked Plame’s name, nobody in the media stepped up to take responsibility or apologize. Yglesias has no problem with that, but smears a journalist for doing investigations into the Clinton administration, as if investigating presidential administrations isn’t the job of a reporter.

In a post that would have made Joe McCarthy proud, a Media Matters headline blared “Who Is Fox News’ Peter Boyer?” Like Yglesias, Media Matters found Boyer very suspicious because there are conservatives who don’t hate him. Media Matters breathlessly recounted that Rush Limbaugh once called Peter Boyer a “great, great guy,” and Sean Hannity thought that Boyer’s
Newsweek
profile of Sarah Palin was “actually somewhat favorable.”
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Media Matters acknowledged that Boyer had an “impressive resume” but insinuated he was hired by Fox News because he wrote a 2011
New Yorker
profile of Roger Ailes that didn’t depict the Fox News CEO as Satan (Media Matters’ preferred storyline). Their cherry-picked facts from
a nearly forty-year career in journalism were presented as an open-and-shut case against Boyer.
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Ron Fournier, editorial director of the
National Journal
, previously worked at the Associated Press for two decades and won the White House Correspondents’ Association Merriam Smith Award four times. His credentials suddenly meant nothing when he dared to write pieces about liberals and Democrats that were less than glowing. During the 2008 election when he was AP’s Washington bureau chief, Fournier wrote that then-Senator Barack Obama was “bordering on arrogance.” He quoted several of the candidate’s statements, such as Obama’s belief that he would overtake Senator Hillary Clinton’s lead in the polls because, as the Illinois senator said, “to know me is to love me.”
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“You’d think that writing a content-free hit piece like that would mean that the writer is a friend of the Clinton campaign. Not so much,” read a post at the progressive news site Firedoglake. “This guy has an agenda in play, and he is not on our side. He wasn’t on our side when he took a bat to Edwards’ kneecaps, he wasn’t on our side when he went after Hillary, and it’s not on our behalf that he’s concerned about Obama’s character.”
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Why would a journalist at the Associated Press be presumed to be on the “liberal side”? Probably because most journalists are liberals and many aren’t great at hiding their bias. But there are a handful of journalists who aren’t partisan or ideologically aligned with either side. There are also reporters who do have a bias, but are diligent about checking that bias in their effort to provide fair-minded reporting. It would be more accurate to say that fair-minded reporting is what Fournier produces.

Still, Media Matters’ Eric Boehlert accused Fournier’s reporting of aiding Senator John McCain’s presidential campaign in 2008.
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A
Daily Kos
diarist called Fournier an “AP Conservative shill”
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who needed to be “stopped” in a piece called “No Excuses: Ron Fournier Needs to Be Recused or Fired.”
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MoveOn.org
mobilized an e-mail campaign for people to contact AP to “stop the anti-Democrat, pro-McCain bias,”
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while Firedoglake’s
similar campaign
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to e-mail Fournier’s then-boss, Kathleen Carroll, simply said “Remove Ron Fournier.”
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Most recently, Fournier has outraged the left by writing in the
National Journal
about Obama’s failure to break Washington gridlock (“What If Obama Can’t Lead?”)
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and for a piece titled “Why I’m Getting Sick of Defending Obamacare.”
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The impact of the illiberal left’s desire to delegitimize him and smear his reputation is most clearly illustrated in a hit piece by Tom Kludt at the liberal website Talking Points Memo. Kludt insinuated that Fournier was a conservative because the
National Journal
editor critiques Obama’s leadership, his columns are regularly aggregated by Matt Drudge, he’s admired by conservative MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, and as a reporter for the Associated Press, he “had an email correspondence with Karl Rove that was a bit too friendly.”
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Reporters, commentators, and fair-minded liberals beware: if you relay facts that the illiberal left doesn’t like, you’ll be labeled a biased, bitter, agenda-driven conservative who should be ignored if not outright shunned or fired from your job.

THREE

ILLIBERAL INTOLERANCE AND INTIMIDATION

              
We had other freedoms, the really important ones, that are denied the youth of today. We could say what we liked; they can’t. . . . We could, and did, differ from fashionable opinion with impunity, and would have laughed [political correctness] to scorn, had our society been weak and stupid enough to let it exist.