Blinded by the Bias
Corry, John
"Blinded by the Bias" Skeptical readers will also recall the columnists who so often get caught passing off their infantile fantasies as real people ground down by cruel America. Remember Mike Barnicle of The Boston...
...One such Spectator story, she writes, was about the "murder"—the quotation marks are hers—ofVincent Fos-ter...
...Toward the end of her piece, Mayer quotes Brock's contention that the players at "the heart of the anti-Clinton conspiracy turned out to be a virtual Bush government in exile," and then draws her ominous conclusion: "With the publication of Blinded by the Right, Brock is more of an outsider than ever...
...in fact, she thinks he's a snake...
...Besides, Arming America came out in paperback in 2001...
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...They make up the paper's "steering committee...
...She likes the idea that malicious, half-crazed conservatives planted stories about Bill Clinton (especially in The American Spectator) and that the stories were "distorted and in some cases fictionalized, and presented without context," and then picked up by the national media...
...To us modernists on the Coogler Committee, it all depends on the meaning of the word year...
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...As I say, these hoaxers are not necessarily discredited by being exposed...
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...That is what truly shocks" And The New Yorker: "The big shocker has been not so much the abuse itself . . . as the coldly bureaucratic `handling' of it by hierarchs...
...For over a year, ever more of the book's deceptions have been exposed, yet the Bancroft still glitters on Bellesiles' chest...
...For a dozen Becton-Dickinson 3-ml syringes, I paid 56 cents...
...1998 Ruffin Mill Road N Colonial Heights, VA 23834 about forcing sex on minors...
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...Goodwin is actually boasting of her plagiarism as the mark of a very hard-working "wife and mother...
...Nonetheless, the media decline to recognize this, and instead practice journalistic sleight of hand...
...Let the carpers complain that the book was actually published in the year 2000...
...Oh, come on, Andy, you think...
...For a month's supply of prednisone, I paid 63 cents...
...A 22-page New Yorker article about the Times media people love to read about one another says, among other things, that publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., executive editor Howell Raines, managing editor Gerald Boyd and editorial page editor Gail Collins meet for lunch once a week...
...He stands by his story as adamantinely as Alger Hiss once stood by his.And his thesis really is implausible...
...Conservatives as well as liberals can, and do, play the game, and while both can be tendentious and tedious, liberals have an advantage...
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...There is, however, a more pernicious side to the dominant culture...
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...And The New Republic: "We all know the sexual abuse of minors is horrific...
...health care system works—and it works better than it is popularly supposed to work, if not yet quite as well as it could...
...but somehow the bishops did not react with horror...
...The pre-tense is that this has no effect on how news is reported, but it does...
...But many of those whose secrets he tells are now on the inside, where, instead of rewriting history, they now can make it...
...Recall Michael Daly's resignation from the New York Daily News for passing off a fictional character as real flesh and blood or Patricia Smith's sad departure from The Boston Globe...
...It is also a tale about how the U.S...
...The book is a nonsense and a fraud...
...The literary world knows what it knows, and its thinking is cast in cement...
...and in fact the media are supposed to keep an eye on things, and vigilance is often required...
...Better he should criticize the hierarchy than be accused of homophobia...
...So let me make a small rejoinder...
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...The dominant media culture is more supportive of them than it is of conservatives, and they are encouraged to roam about more freely.You never know where one will pop up next...
...But obviously it would not do to mention that...
...But he neglects to say what I wrote about it, and the omission, I am sure, is purposeful...
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...In other words, the right-wing conspirators won, and with Bush in the White House they are even more dangerous now than before...
...A year ago this past April, the book won America's most prestigious award for history, the Bancroft Award, despite its fabricated sources, misstated historical events, implausible thesis and the author's inability to defend its integrity...
...Then there is the inimitable Michael G. Gartner who in 1993 resigned as president of NBC News after acknowledging that one of his news teams had broadcast a hoax...
...No one will take them seriously...
...Department of Commerce...
...I have not read Brock's book, and because it has no index I could not look up pertinent references...
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...Why these varying charges...
...DRUGS AND ME BY LAWRENCE HENRY This morning, I picked up two prescriptions at the local pharmacy...
...Smith, though always dubious, had been nominated for Pulitzers...
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...But in the 1950s, as National Review tartly noted, Mailer was co-founding The Village Voice and "flacking for the Soviet Union," and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was in the Gulag, writing on scraps of paper, which he then had to destroy after memorizing what he had writ-ten...
...Or so goes, more or less, the working assumption now in the dominant media culture...
...Government wants to, so they created the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a component of the U.S...
...What in the world are you talking about...
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...But Mayer and her like-minded colleagues have learned from the past and will do their best to keep the old conspirators from making new and even more terrible mischief...
...The world has become a smaller place in the past few decades...
...As evidence, Eberstadt quotes The New York Times: "It should be clear by now that this scandal is only incidentally The media see only what they want to see...
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...But in fact I was quite pleased with myself on that occasion, and anyway I do not drink...
...Her source, of course, is Brock, and while she admits he may not be entirely trustworthy, she says that "for the most part he is writing here about episodes he witnessed firsthand" Moreover, Mayer says, on the things she herself knows "firsthand," Brock is telling the truth...
...Many go on to higher things, for plagiarism and fraud are becoming marks of genius among some of America's most famous intellectuals...
...If the belief in theexistence of a vast right-wing conspiracy were to be discredited, liberal-left politics might never recover...
...BY JOHN CORRY Political and social commentary is a game anyone can play...
...22 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • JULY/AUGUST 2002 Atomic digital watch keeps time and date accuracy by reading from the official time transmitter...
...It is not that she likes or admires Brock...
...You need only to pretend to know what you're talking about, and while you may know nothing at all, you will never be penalized for being wrong...
...Andy Rooney of 60 Minutes, for example, goes on Larry King Live and tells Larry that Attorney General John Ashcroft has put "the fear of God into reporters," who are now afraid to ask him questions...
...Well, the U.S...
...Most live in a world where everyone believes the same as they do...
...The insurance company pays 80 percent of medical charges...
...No matter what the factual con-text, the words "homosexual" or "gay" are usually missing...
...we pick up the remaining 20...
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...He left for a small Iowa newspaper where four years later the Pulitzer Conunittee awarded him a Pulitzer for "editorial writing...
...Things get put together at lunch...
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...We writers felt much more excitement than today," he said...
...What 24 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • JULY/AUGUST 2002...
...Thus the scandal is never about predatory male homosexuals.The dominant culture protects them, and the scandal is supposed to be about something else...
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...But nowhere is the cement more evident than in the articles that touch on politics.The view is always from the left, and the right is con-signed to darkness.There is a nice example of this in Jane Mayer's review of David Brock's book, Blinded by the Right...
...Within the past year, illustrious historians have admitted to repeated acts of plagiarism, for J. Gordon Coogler circa 1897 instance, Stephen Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin...
...And Bellesiles defends his position by citing documents that no other scholars can find...
...Friends, however, tell me I am mentioned twice...
...At a panel discussion entitled "Writers and Cold War Culture," sponsored by The New York Times (and more about the Times later), Norman Mailer talked about life as a writer in the 1950s...
...News stories in the limes read increasingly like editorials, and now we know why...
...Constant vigilance is needed, however, and should vigilance fail, remember the warning from Andy Rooney: That's how dictatorships get started...
...To charge it to your credit card, enclose your account number and expiration date...
...BLINDED BY THE BIAS Why bother being serious...
...And so it is that this year in recognition of this promising trend in our intellectual life the J. Gordon Coogler Award for 2001 goes to the most gifted of the New Charlatans, Professor Michael Bellesiles, author of Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture...
...Protected sensibilities—feminist, gay, minority—must not be offended...
...But as Mary Eberstadt noted in an important piece in The Weekly Standard, "There is no outbreak of heterosexual child molestation in the American church," and "this crisis involving minors—this ongoing institutional horror—is almost entirely about man-boy sex...
...The sex abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church, for example, has generated an enormous amount of cover-age, although virtually all of it has been misleading...
...Doubtless she will remain an esteemed figure...
...Transactions take place across the world in an instant...
...My wife and I have chosen a soLawrence Henry is a writer in Westfield, New Jersey...
...And that, according to Andy, is how "dictatorships get started...
...But the media see only what they want to see, and when the culture demands it, they will see nothing at all...
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...I also said Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr was right: Fos-ter had killed himself...
...Dan Rather, your CBS colleague, dumps on Ashcroft all the time...
...In the 1960s, when Mailer was protesting the Vietnam war and generally being lionized, Solzhenitsyn was having his manuscripts confiscated by the police...
...Apparently the early American held off angry Indians and secured dinner for his frontier family by resorting to wholesome fisticuffs, perhaps heaving a few stones at the passing fauna and coaxing a nearby war party to calm down...
...In my second mention, Brock notes that I wrote for the Spectator about a book entitled The Strange Death of Vincent Foster...
...When George Will tried to raise the issue of homosexual priests on ABC's This Week, Cokie Roberts shouted him down...
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...Liberal attitudes are the norm and conservatism is an aberration...
...But you imagine the other old literary relics from the Cold War all nodding in agreement when they heard him:Yes, we were just like the Russian dissidents when we fought the Eisenhower terror...
...This article originally appeared on TheArnericanProwler.org, TAS's daily web publication...
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...Politics is one of its specialties, and its principal intellectual organ is The New York Review of Books...
...When the culture demands it, they will see nothing at all...
...Daly went on to New York magazine...
...Meanwhile, the Times: It is a very great paper, and with its abundant resources and talent, it does things no other paper can do...
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...Pay attention...
...A reporter who wrote that gay priests were a grave problem for the Catholic Church would not be making a good career move...
...Remember Mike Barnicle of The Boston Globe, gone from the Globe now but still huffing and puffing on cable television...
...Media people may see themselves as independent thinkers, but only rarely are they called on to test their perception...
...The idea that the Spectator was promoting conspiracy theories might begin to unravel, and there is no telling where that might lead next...
...On one occasion I am sup-posed to be remorseful over a project I am involved in with Bob Tyrrell, and so I go out and drown my sorrow in drink...
...But as The Neu, porker has now reported, even if it didn't quite mean to, the Times' editorial and news pages, once thought to be separate and distinct entities, are now considered as one...
...But she finds that his book has its uses...
...Mayer, I suspect, knows it's a lousy book, even if she can never quite bring herself to say so...
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...And, inevitably, The New York Review of Books: "The current scandal is not a sex scandal...
...An essential technique in this growing intellectual movement seems to be an aptitude for plagiarism...
...My basic drug regimen for most of those years consisted of Imuran, a brand-name immunosuppressant, and prednisone, a generic anti-inflammatory...
...We felt like the Russian dissidents felt later...
...Barnicle survives as a TV sage...
...The Time and Frequency Division, located in Boulder, Colorado, maintains the F-1 Fountain Atomic Clock, the nation's standard of time...
...Bellesiles claims that up through the mid-19th century guns were relatively rare in America...
...Some of the articles there are very fine, while others are windy, fatuous and much less so...
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...I said that the book—which suggested that Foster had been murdered, and was a pet project of the financier Richard Mellon Scaife—was paranoid right-wing junk...
...It wins the Coogler for the year 2001...
...John Corry is a senior editor of The American Spectator...
...COLLECT ROCKS, PLANT FLAG JULY/AUGUST 2002 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 21 ly harmless...
...Mailer's self-identification with the Russian dissidents was delusional...
Vol. 35 • July 2002 • No. 4
