Radar's media critic on Karl Rove and Hillary Clinton's campaign

Spiro Agnew's Revenge

When Newsweek made Karl Rove one of its columnists last week (along with Markos (Daily Kos) Moulitsas for balance), there was one big question: Could the number of new readers attracted by this fancy new hire possibly exceed the hordes of freshly canceled subscriptions?

The early betting was heavily against any circulation increase. And the odds didn't get better with Rove's first column. His biggest scoop was about the "full-length vanity mirror" found in the West Wing office he inherited from Hillary—and the fact that she had denied putting the mirror there (twice). This, you see, is Rove's idea of "a small but telling story: She is tough, persistent, and forgets nothing." Rove's hiring (which the New York Times didn't even bother to report) makes him the latest in a long and distinguished line of politicos turned pundits who owe their big journalism careers almost entirely to the flowery rhetoric of Spiro T. Agnew.

NIXED MEDIA Rove (left), Agnew (right)

For latecomers to this never-ending melodrama, Agnew was Richard Nixon's first vice president—the one whose main qualification for the job was this: "No assassin in his right mind would kill me,'' Nixon explained. ''They know if they did that they would wind up with Agnew!" Once Agnew started his blistering attacks on the commie-pinko-liberal press, he became a celebrity in his own right. He called reporters "an effete corps of impudent snobs" and television commentators ''a tiny fraternity of privileged men elected by no one and enjoying a monopoly sanctioned and licensed by the government.''

Since almost all of these haikus were written by conservative White House speechwriters Bill Safire and Pat Buchanan, it was only fitting that they would be among the first to benefit from them.

After a brief push back from shocked newspaper big shots, opposition to Agnew's slanted-media thesis crumbled. In 1973, Nixon alum Bill Safire landed on the op-ed page of the New York Times. (Agnew was actually forced to resign later that same year, after being caught up in a kickback scandal that dated from his tenure as governor of Maryland, but conservatives have continued their nonstop anti-press campaign ever since.) Around the same time, George Will began appearing more regularly in the Washington Post (while still moonlighting as a speechwriter for Jesse Helms). And then came the ubiquitous Pat Buchanan.

The success of Safire, Will, and Buchanan is a good barometer of just how far right you can go in Washington and still remain an honored member of the old boys' club. In his new book about the 1960s, Tom Brokaw explains that Buchanan's "good humor" has made him "enduringly popular even with liberal observers."

That's the genius of Washington—just because you've written that Adolf Hitler was "an individual of great courage" (Google "anti-Semitism of Pat Buchanan" and you get 231,000 hits), dismissed the idea that "white rule of a black majority is inherently wrong" in South Africa, or shown your lavender-friendly side by pointing out that "homosexuality involves sexual acts most men consider not only immoral, but filthy," none of that will prevent you from continuing as a regular on Meet the Press. (And you're surprised that Tim Russert was never offended by Imus?)

For its part, Time magazine said nothing publicly about Rove's arrival at Newsweek, but a well-placed source told me that Bob Barnett (every Washington literati's favorite lawyer, including Bill Clinton) had traveled to the Time-Life building on Sixth Avenue to offer Rove's services before Newsweek snared them. Time's editors apparently felt the cost/benefit analysis wouldn't be in their favor if they embraced the man who has done more than anyone to keep the spirit of Joe McCarthy alive and well in American politics. (Read Joshua Green's definitive profile from the Atlantic in 2004.) "Time thought this wouldn't be like hiring George Stephanopoulos," my source explained. "They think Karl is essentially like an unindicted coconspirator in a whole string of felonies."

Besides the obvious shock value, there was another reason Rove's arrival in the fourth estate was inevitable. In public, Rove is one of dozens of conservatives who assiduously bash the press. Last summer, channeling Agnew, Rove told Rush Limbaugh that "the people I see criticizing [Bush] are sort of elite effete snobs." But at the same time, Rove was constantly massaging big-time Washington journalists over long lunches at the Hay Adams Hotel.

The result of this continuous media handling was a mostly kid-glove treatment of Rove by great Washington political reporters like Anne Kornblut. The day after Rove dodged an indictment by the special prosecutor, this is how Kornblut appraised him in the New York Times: "a cheerful, sharp-witted operative fond of sparring with reporters off the record." It's that kind of hard-hitting approach that got Kornblut stolen away by the Washington Post—but also makes it possible for Jon Stewart to provide an essential reality check on our nation's capital. At the moment, the Daily Show is condemned to reruns for the length of the writers' strike, but last week there was a magnificent moment of serendipity. The same day Newsweek announced its new hire, the show rebroadcast a feature on Rove from the week after he left the White House.

"Washington was very shaken last week," Stewart intoned, "with news that Karl Rove, whose bountiful advisory teats had fed so many Beltway insiders for lo these six and a half years, was capping the spigot and moving on." Then Chris Wallace was shown offering up a list of "Karl Rove's greatest hits." Cut to Stewart:

"I just bought those: John McCain's black baby; Max Cleland, the one-limb pussy; The Queers are coming!; and, of course, Schiavo-a-go-go. No need to call now—your phones have already been tapped."

Hit: Ryan Lizza's interesting take in the New Yorker on Barack Obama' s relaunch, but the piece is already a little dated because it was written before the Las Vegas debate.

Hit: As usual, Frank Rich tells you details of Bernard Kerik's indictment that you won't learn anywhere else—and he wonders if Judith Regan will supply the silver bullet that could destroy Rudy Giuliani's campaign.

Hit: Media Matters has come under attack for being a Hillary mouthpiece, but nevertheless performs a useful service here by debunking the idiotic Hillary restaurant-tip-gate story.

Hit: Two excellent pieces in Slate here and here about America's outrageous neglect of Iraqi refugees.

Hit: Is this the biggest book story ever, or another electronic bust? Newsweek puts the Kindle—a scary $399 e-book reader from Amazon with which you can instantly change the font to accommodate middle-age eyes, receive e-mail, and subscribe to the Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and Le Monde—on the cover. FCP hates the idea of electronic books, but with all those possible subscriptions, it could become the news junkie's new permanent appendage. Worst newsmagazine sentence in the cover story: "The battery has to last for a while [30 hours] since there's nothing sadder than a book you can't read because of electile dysfunction." Andy Rosenthal anticipated this toy in an interview with FCP two weeks ago. Did he know something we didn't know?

Hit: The LAPD abandoned an outrageous plan to map all the Muslims in the neighborhood after the Los Angeles Times exposed it.

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ON THE RECORD

NO COMMENT Clinton

Michael Crowley wrote in the New Republic that Hillary Clinton's campaign has gone to unprecedented lengths to intimidate reporters and control their coverage. The biggest surprise: So far the strategy seems to be working. "'It's one of the few times I've seen journalists respect someone for beating the hell out of them,' says a veteran Democratic media operative." While Crowley was forced to rely heavily on anonymous reporters ("'They're too smart,' one furtively confides. 'They'll figure out who I am'"), Full Court Press got the chief political correspondents of the New York Times and the Washington Post to discuss the matter on the record—perhaps because neither of them joined in their colleagues' criticisms of team Clinton. Adam Nagourney of the Times and Dan Balz of the Post both thought Crowley's story was completely plausible—but they also said that they didn't find anything exceptional about the Clinton campaign's strong-arm methods:

Adam Nagourney: I might get treated differently because of who I am and where I work. Are they more impenetrable than the Bush campaign or the Bush White House? No. And I don't feel mistreated by them. I find other campaigns are as apt to call aggressively and complain as the Clinton campaign. A bunch of them make a real effort to keep track of what reporters are doing and to some extent to control the reporting. I think the Clinton people are doing it more effectively than any other campaign. But not in a way that crosses the line. For me, crossing the line is lying or misleading, and the Clinton people have never done that to me. I think they have much studied the Bush campaign of 2004, which in many ways was like this.

Dan Balz: I would come down where Adam is and probably for many of the same reasons. They're obviously tough and they play hard, but I think all of the campaigns do. And I think they look for opportunities to push back at reporters and opponents. As Adam said, because there are a number of people in the campaign that I've dealt with for a long time, I think that the nature of those relationships is somewhat different. If they've got a disagreement, I hear about it. But you learn over the years the difference between a serious complaint and one that is just obligatory. They don't give away things. They're basically always on the message of the day. But I can't criticize them for that. They don't just want to win every news cycle, but every minute of every news cycle. It was always hard to knock the Bush people off the message of the day. And the same is true of Clinton.

Winner: Glen Greenwald for continuing the war on torture by highlighting Jonah Goldberg's deeply "conflicted" (and really disgusting) thoughts on war and torture.

SINNERS: The New York Times news desk, for proposing to eliminate dates from datelines. A draft policy now circulating proposes to end one of newspaper's oldest traditions: telling the reader when the reporter filed the story he or she is reading. "We'll still call them datelines, but they will now give only the name of the place, with no date," a Times memo explains. The "significant advantages include doing "away with datelines that are several days old, which can make a story seem stale rather than immediate." Bottom line: another case where less is really less.

Sinner: Tom Friedman, for the worst idea since he campaigned continuously in favor of America's invasion in Iraq. His new thought: Inject some Dick Cheney into Barack Obama.

Winner: John Solomon of the Washington Post, 60 Minutes producer Ira Rosen and correspondent Steve Kroft for a blockbuster investigation of a gigantic miscarriage of justice that occurred over four decades. Solomon writes: "Hundreds of defendants sitting in prisons nationwide have been convicted with the help of a forensic tool that was discarded more than two years ago. But the FBI lab has yet to take steps to alert the affected defendants or courts, even as the window for appealing convictions is closing." The science, known as comparative bullet-lead analysis, was first used to analyze the bullets that were supposed to have come out of Lee Harvey Oswald's rifle.


Meet the Press celebrated its 60th anniversary (again) and shattered all previous FCP records: sound bites from 42 white men in a single program! Tim Russert also assumed the carriage and the camera angles of his "I am the Pope, and you are not" posture.

Box Score
Sunday, November 18, 2007

	Meet the Press (NBC–Russert)	Face the Nation (CBS–Schieffer)	This Week (ABC–Stephanopoulos)
White Men	42!!	2	7
White Women	7	2	3
Black Men	3	1	0
Black Women	2	0	1
Gay People	0	0	1*

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Charles Kaiser is the author of The Gay Metropolis and 1968 in America. He has been media editor for Newsweek, a member of the metro staff of the New York Times, and a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, where he covered the press and book publishing. He has also written for Vanity Fair, The Los Angeles Times, New York, The Washington Post, The New York Observer, Rolling Stone, Details, Interview, The Advocate, Vogue, and Salon. He has taught journalism at Columbia and Princeton. To find out more, visit charleskaiser.com. Research assistance: Thomas Rogers, Richard Vanderford