WASHINGTON — In her moment of utter humiliation, exposed on videotape by a journalistic impersonator, Sarah Ferguson didn’t blame the press.
That’s a rarity these days.
The Duchess of York could have railed against the lying media after a News of the World reporter posed as a businessman brandishing $40,000 in cash, a down payment for Ferguson’s promise to introduce him to her ex-husband, Prince Andrew. Instead, she apologized for her clumsy attempt at influence-peddling.
But other public figures keep trying to shift the blame from their own missteps to the news outlets that report on them — a time-honored tactic designed mainly to get them off the hook.
Rand Paul, the GOP Senate nominee in Kentucky, spent nearly 20 minutes with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow talking about his objections to the part of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that affects private businesses.
Maddow is an unabashed liberal who was taking on a “tea party” champion, but she gave her guest one opportunity after another to explain his position, with minimal interruption.
Even when Maddow asked “how about desegregating lunch counters?” Paul offered philosophical musings rather than flatly backing a concept that has been settled law in this country for nearly half a century: “Well, what it gets into is, is that then if you decide that restaurants are publicly owned and not privately owned, then do you say that you should have the right to bring your gun into a restaurant, even though the owner of the restaurant says, ‘Well, no, we don’t want to have guns in here’?” When Paul talked to conservative radio host Laura Ingraham the next day — and issued a statement backing off his position — he accused Maddow of “wanting to make this an issue of you supporting abhorrent practices, which I don’t support. . . . They conflate things, want to say, ‘Oh, you believe in beating up people that were trying to eat in restaurants in the 1960s.’ . . . She went on and on about that.” Paul later told WHAS-TV that he had been “tortured” by Maddow, though he conceded the interview had been fair.
Sarah Palin picked up the theme on “Fox News Sunday,” saying Paul had run into “a media personality who has an agenda, who may be prejudiced. . . . They’re looking for that ‘gotcha’ moment.” Leaving aside that her own network employs people who are just as ideologically committed, the lengthy Maddow interview was the opposite of “gotcha” — and, in fact, Paul had made essentially the same point to the Louisville Courier-Journal a month earlier. (Most of the national press just missed it.)
Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal refrained from launching a frontal attack on The New York Times after the newspaper revealed that he had not served in Vietnam, as he had claimed on numerous occasions. But Blumenthal made clear that he thought members of the media were taking “a few misplaced words” and using them to “impugn my record of service to our country.” The so-called misplaced words, however, amounted to outright deception when the Democratic Senate candidate said, for example, that “I wore the uniform in Vietnam.”
Nearly a week after the initial Times article, Blumenthal finally told the Hartford Courant he had “made mistakes and I am sorry.” The Times reporting had flaws. The paper should have acknowledged that Blumenthal’s Republican opponent, former wrestling executive Linda McMahon, had provided some of the negative information, as she was happy to boast once the piece was published. Readers deserved to know the source of some of the opposition research. And the Times should have posted the full video of an instance in which Blumenthal said he had served in Vietnam, which included an earlier — but not contradictory — reference to having served during Vietnam. On balance, though, the article was accurate.
Fox’s Sean Hannity, while interviewing McMahon, said he is “always suspicious when the New York Times breaks a story on a Democrat because they don’t do that very often.” Perhaps he missed the paper’s reporting that prompted Eliot Spitzer to resign and his successor, David Paterson, to withdraw from the governor’s race.
But where is it written that journalists get to decide when to give themselves permission to lie? If it’s all right to pose as a businessman, what about a doctor? A lawyer? A soldier? (Most American news organizations now avoid the practice, immortalized when the Chicago Sun-Times set up a bribe-dispensing bar in 1977, although some television programs still do hidden-camera investigations.) Those who say the ends justify the means sometimes adjust their views depending on the target. When conservative activists James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles posed as pimp and prostitute while secretly taping ACORN staffers, commentators on the right praised them as heroes and liberals challenged their tactics.
Howard Kurtz writes for The Washington Post.
Tina Griego’s column will return Thursday.
