Here is the audio from On Point at WBUR radio March 21, 2002.
Audio about 48 minutes long in Real Player format.
David Brock on Being Blinded by the RightDavid Brock has a confession to make. Almost everything the best-selling onetime rightwing hero journalist wrote in the 1990's was a lie. And not little white lies that don't matter. But big lies with huge consequences. Lies that discredited Anita Hill in her battle with Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. Lies that almost brought down President Clinton.
In his new book, "Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative," David Brock takes it all back. He says he was fanned and funded by hardcore rightwing zealots hell-bent on bringing down an enormously popular Democratic President. They would stop at nothing, using rumor and smear campaigns to get their revenge on Bill Clinton.
He makes the statement about that conversative movement stance: "Facts mattered somewhat." How very scary.
Here is more from him about the section about Anita Hill. He did some pretty terrible things, but does not sugar coat them. I guess we owe him for writing about it openly.
Blinded by the RightThe truth is that with my woefully inadequate training at the Washington Times and the American Spectator, I didn't know what good reporting was. Like a kid playing with a loaded gun, I didn't appreciate the difference between a substantiated charge and an unsubstantiated one. The cardinal rule of the journalism profession, that every allegation must have at least two sources before it may be printed, was not enforced at the Times, and it was unheard of at the Spectator. My sources did tell me all the things I quoted them as telling me. I didn't have the judgment to know that people will say anything, particularly in an incendiary conflict such as this one. Every source I relied on either thought Thomas walked on water or had a virulent animus toward Hill. Already conditioned to think the best of Thomas and the worst of Hill, I did nothing to test these sources or question their motives. That almost all of the "kooky" quotes were voiced from behind a shield of anonymity gave me no pause. My incompetence was compounded by an uninformed bias, by the grip of a partisan tunnel vision that was by now such a part of my nature that it distorted my work, disabling me from finding the truth, without my even knowing it.
Of course, to most readers outside the conservative world my reportage was self-discrediting. But my piece had a certain power in its presentation. Despite my roiling emotions, the cognitive part of my brain was built like a steel trap. Though I was really nothing more than a promising Republican operative in training, what made me unique was that I was in a position to put their legalistic, highly analytical theories, defensive hair-splitting, derogatory gossip, and political spin into print, where I presented it all as fact. Alone among them, I considered myself a reporter. I was a clear writer, so many people read the piece and believed it.
..."Some conservative friends outside the Spectator did warn me quietly that the "little bit nutty and a little bit slutty" line, a reference to the classic nuts-and-sluts defense in sexual harassment cases, was in poor taste, or at least politically foolish, in that it handed my critics a club with which to beat me. The phrase certainly stuck, and it would be unearthed and brandished in my face in all future controversies over my work. Clearly, the ugliness that the Dartmouth Review had introduced to conservatism, and that I had once rejected back in Berkeley as irresponsible, now came easily to me.
He himself says it is a terribly depressing book. I agree. I want to get the copy with the index. My original did not have one, and besides I lost it.
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