Saw this on a rerun of
Meet the Press last night, and haven't seen anything here or on Media Matters about it, so I thought I'd post it--it's easy to let stuff like this slide when there's so much else going on, but we need to be vigilant.
MR. RUSSERT: Is it fair that Senator DeWine is caught up in this whole perception of corruption because it’s the governor, Congressman Ney, Jack Abramoff, Mark Foley, but it’s not Mike DeWine.
REP. BROWN: Well, it’s, it’s a bit more than a perception. Thomas Noe has contributed to money to Mike DeWine, so has Jack Abramoff.
<...>
I mean, Senator DeWine has benefited, as have so many other Republicans have benefitted from this political machine in Ohio. It’s right in the midst of the culture of corruption. But, but it’s more than that, it’s ultimately, you know, who you’re going to—who you’re going to trust to fight for the middle class when you see, not just what’s happening in Columbus, but in Washington. Mike DeWine received more than $400,000 from oil and gas interests, votes for an energy bill...
MR. RUSSERT: But, Congressman Brown...
REP. BROWN: ...that they wrote.
MR. RUSSERT: ...one-third of Abramoff’s money went to Democrats.
REP. BROWN: Maybe it did, it didn’t go to me.
Actually, maybe it didn't. A decent rundown of the actual situation can be found
here:
Wolf Blitzer was visibly frustrated when Howard Dean insisted that Abramoff, a man who said about the Left, “it is our job to remove them from power permanently,” naturally hadn’t given any money to Democrats. Katie Couric just wouldn’t accept the assertion, insisting—incorrectly—that “Abramoff and his associates” had given $1.5 million to Democrats. Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell twice asserted that Abramoff “had made substantial campaign contributions to both major parties.” None of this was true. When pressed on this, the fallback position—for Howell, the Today Show and Bill O’Reilly, among others, was that while Abramoff may not have personally donated to Democrats, his clients—Indian tribes, some of which he is charged with defrauding—had done so for him.
It is true that tribes affiliated with Abramoff have given money to Democrats, just as tribes not connected to Abramoff did. But a new study gives the lie to allegations that Abramoff directed such donations. The study, done by nonpartisan research firm Dwight L. Morris and Associates and commissioned by the American Prospect, shows that tribes’ donations to Democrats decreased significantly after Abramoff took them on as clients, while, as the Prospect’s Greg Sargent writes, “the majority of them dramatically ratcheted up donations to Republicans.” Sargent continues: “This pattern suggests that whatever money went to Democrats, rather than having been steered by Abramoff, may have largely been money the tribes would have given anyway.”
Morris himself puts it this way in Sargent’s report:
“If you’re going to make the case that this is a bipartisan scandal, you have to really stretch the imagination,” says Morris. “Most individual tribes were predominantly Democratic givers through the last decade. Only Abramoff’s clients switched dramatically from largely Democratic to overwhelmingly Republican donors, and that happened only after he got his hands on them.”
In other words, the idea, stated as fact in nearly every newspaper and TV report on the scandal, that Abramoff funneled money to Democrats through these tribes, is simply not true. So why would the press lie about it? Because the truth is not “balanced” enough. In the current media climate, it’s just not acceptable to tell the truth about this issue. Desperate to avoid accusations of partisan bias, mainstream news agencies find it preferable to tell a reassuringly bipartisan lie.
Of course, the Democratic Party isn’t a morally pure bastion of integrity. It’s pretty much impossible to get elected to congress without engaging in some influence-peddling and favor-trading. But to say that they share equal guilt, or really any guilt, in the Abramoff scandal is to tell a lie—a lie we are being told daily, and not just by the media figures we expect such lies from—the Limbaughs and O’Reillys—but by figures generally considered to be neutral, or even liberal by some—Katie Couric, Wolf Blitzer, the Washington Post, Time Magazine.
Add NBC and Tim Russert to that list. Why are they lying? And why aren't Democrats prepared to counter that lie with the truth?
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EDIT: Oops, looks like I missed an earlier
post on this.
:blush:
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