Namedropper
Brock, David
BOOKS IN REVIEW Intelligence really should refocus on being head of the Intelligence Community¡ªDirector of National Intelligence¡ªand not be double-hatted as operating chief of his Agency...
...The editorial boards of the major dailies are still liberal...
...That is the conclusion less intelligent than those reading The American Spectator might come to after reading Brock's latest diatribe, The Republican Noise Machine: Right-Wing Media and How It [sic] Corrupts Democracy...
...The book is littered with examples of this kind of dishonesty...
...How many other journalists have made as nice a living as he by endlessly renouncing his past...
...Brock rips into one conservative luminary after the next, each time using the same modus operandi: questioning their motives, linking them to some shady person or group, or finding the worst possible quote and using it out of context...
...Much of Brock's fame came as a result of his reportage in this magazine during the Clinton years...
...A decade later, Brock has accomplished little else aside from a series of confessions in magazines pieces and two books throwing mud at his erstwhile allies...
...when asked why it has developed a captive audience on the Today Show, Brock shrugged it off by saying, "there's always been a market for lies and deceptions...
...The book does not contain a single cogent argument...
...He is waging a one-man jihad against American's rightof-center pundits and popular thinkers, cloaking his crusade as an attack on the financiers and ideas of the conservative movement...
...BOOKS IN REVIEW Intelligence really should refocus on being head of the Intelligence Community¡ªDirector of National Intelligence¡ªand not be double-hatted as operating chief of his Agency too, which should specialize in spying and analysis...
...brainwash Americans...
...Brock, who's now heading up his own media "watchdog" group, Media Matters for America, does no original research and makes no new arguments in this book...
...that they have no right to be seen or heard...
...Indeed, these writers pre dictably fail because they have no leg to stand on...
...The rise of the right is the result of a nefarious, decades-old campaign by conservatives to create a myth of liberal media bias...
...Brock never mentions that liberal blogger Joshua Micah Marshall was hired at the same time and paired with York...
...They dismiss the mountain of studies and surveys that show journalists over whelmingly consider themselves liberal...
...He would need to be close to the president in every sense...
...The only area where conservatives dominate is talk radio...
...Pouring through the book's 350-plus pages, I got lost trying to find any attempt to prove how democracy is being corrupted by anyone...
...To wit, during an interview flogging the book on the Today show, the author boasted "I name all the names...
...The non-liberal media are referred to simplistically as "the right wing" or "the Far Right," as if it were some kind of monolith taking orders from a central politburo...
...He is a former Washington correspondent of the New York Sun, a newspaper which Brock attacks in his book for having labeled China "red...
...It is simply a continuation of the narrative in Brock's grandiloquent memoir Blinded by the Right, a venom-filled assault on his ex-friends...
...14...
...Namedropper The Republican Noise Machine: Right-Wing Media and How It [sic] Corrupts Democracy by David Brock (Crown, 432 pages, $25.95) Reviewed by Adam Daifallah D AVID BROCK THINKS AMERICA has been duped...
...A look at the endnotes shows that most of his information was culled from sources such as Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), People for the American Way, a host of liberal magazines and websites, and Clinton apologist Sidney Blumenthal, whom Brock quotes as an authority on Matt Drudge...
...Regnery is but one of a myriad of publishing houses...
...Conservative activist David Horowitz is pilloried for supposed rabble-rousing that led to congressional hearings into bias at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting...
...He should speak for himself...
...It's an odd subtitle...
...Conservative journalists are "right-wing verbal brownshirts...
...Instead I found spin, anger, and vilification...
...Emphasis added...
...And Americans don't even know it...
...Ultimately, getting wise and experienced officers into the right slots is probably key...
...The sad thing is that Brock's work pre-apostasy still stands out as some of most interesting and consequential journalism of the Clinton years...
...Experience warns us that an agency deprived of its own intelligence entity is likely to re-grow it quite soon...
...The recently launched liberal Air America is already a failure...
...There is only one Fox News amidst the sea of available TV cable news sources...
...The "organized Right has sabotaged not only journalism but also democracy and truth...
...It's almost as if he thinks the First Amendment shouldn't apply to those with conservative views...
...But the fact that some¡ªany¡ªconservative media have succeeded at all drives Brock crazy...
...He cannot come to grips with the idea that consumers actually like what conservative media offer...
...Executing them over the screams and howls of the entrenched bureaucracies will be the real challenge...
...How else to explain the popularity of talk radio and the Fox News Channel, the success of conservative books or the sprawling right-wing presence on the Internet...
...Brock calls the investigative work of this magazine, some of the most well known of which was done by him, "dubious exposes," yet he never once offers evidence of what was wrong with it...
...So deep is his animus it has clouded his ability to think...
...In an error-laden section on media baron Conrad Black, Brock reports that when Black became an owner of the congressional newspaper The Hill, Byron York of National Review was given a weekly column...
...The latest of which, a study from the Pew Research Center, found that only 7 percent of reporters, editors, and BOOKS IN REVIEW media executives at national news organizations label themselves conservative...
...Unlike at the Journal, writes Brock, editorial writers of the Left "are not professional ideologues, reliable parti sans, or serial fabricators...
...With the same objective, he favors substantially increasing the power of the National Intelligence Council, often called NIC, to lend perspective and the long view...
...In fact, those hearings came when some PBS stations were caught providing and selling their donor lists to the Democratic Party...
...The Truth About Bias in the News (which Brock draws upon), no convincing evidence is put forward here to show a sinister right-wing plot to brainwash and dominate America...
...The Wall Street Journal engages in a "war on journalism...
...Indeed, Brock's obsession with sliming anyone with an alternative viewpoint borders on what some might call McCarthyism...
...There he goes again...
...Like Joe Conason's Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth and Eric Alterman's What Liberal Media...
...His stories on Anita Hill and Bill Clinton and Troopergate made him a Beltway boy wonder...
...After a rambling, self-absorbed introduction, Brock offers a sustained tutorial in histrionics...
...From claiming that CNN is biased to the right, to insinuating that Ronald Reagan would have lost New York State in 1980 if it hadn't been for the New York Post's endorsement, Brock's book is transparently partisan, intellectually unserious, and boring¡ªeven laughable...
...Money from wealthy benefactors has and is being used to influence the press and consciously Adam Daifallah is a member of the editorial board at Canada's National Post...
...For example, Brock writes that Richard Perle called muckraking reporter Seymour Hersh a "terrorist," whereas the actual quote was, "Hersh is the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist, frankly...
...The mainstream media are a front group for the Republican Party...
...These are all important and reasonable conceptions...
...In order to underline that conception Odom would take the DNI right out of Langley, so that he can look, as well as be, independent of any one component and instead preside over the whole...
Vol. 37 • July 2004 • No. 6
