It's Worse Than Spin

...It worked even when the story wasn't "tabloid trash...

...Not to put too fine a point on it, but Kurtz's own reporting suggests that none of this is true...

...Indeed: It was also true...

...Does the fact that McCurry's statement, made in the course of his professional duties, is not true—that it is, as it were, a baldfaced, brazen, breathtaking lie—does this fact make Mike McCurry (a) a professional liar...

...The press has an acute sense of its own virtue, its pious adherence to standards, so McCurry's tactic of bullying invariably worked...

...What truly endears him to the press, though, is the slight signals he gives off that he is not really taking himself, his job, or, more importantly, his boss completely seriously...

...The scandal has not kept the president from any official role as Drawer-in-Chief...

...The Boston Globe is just wrong," McCurry said in the daily briefing, and then he took to the phones privately to tell other reporters that the story was "outrageous...

...Spin Cycle's most sensational anecdote has to do with a remark McCurry made after President Clinton's famous yummy-mummy comment...

...And it is the straightforward reporting that makes Spin Cycle the best book in many years on the Washington media...

...If McCurry finds a question inconvenient, he tells a reporter that it should be directed to somebody's counsel—John Huang's, Mark Middleton's, the president's, and now Betty Currie's or Vernon Jordan's...

...Humor, says Kurtz, "was his saving grace...

...He is by most accounts a charming fellow...

...When it was revealed that Dick Morris had an illegitimate daughter, reporters asked McCurry whether Clinton had known about it, and McCurry said no...

...McCurry had planted it in the newspaper to keep it off the more damaging medium of television...

...The campaign-finance scandals blossomed spectacularly, while the Paula Jones lawsuit grew more menacing...

...Fine...

...Press secretaries have always tried to keep some information from the press, of course: sensitive diplomatic efforts, matters of national security, the intimate details of presidential deliberations...

...The manipulation also took subtler forms...

...Your choice...

...It's not the correct answer, of course, but in choosing it you have shown that you have a subtle and nuanced understanding of the "information flows" within the political culture and thereby share the sentiments of a large majority of the Washington press corps...

...Subordinates like George Stephanopoulos, on the other hand, who were as loyal off the record as on, become widely disliked by the press...

...It would be nice to give a group of ordinary Americans their own copies of Spin Cycle, to read the sorry story for themselves, and then ask them to take the quiz at the beginning of this review...

...It seems to reinforce the idea that the press secretary just can't force himself to tell a lie, and makes it easier to ignore the fact that he has, and does, almost daily...

...McCurry told the president the remark was ill advised, and they had a spat...

...He once opened a briefing wearing a paper bag over his head, identifying himself as an anonymous source, and his reputation as a fun-lover was secure ever after...

...But the bullying did the trick...

...But of course Clinton had known, as McCurry eventually conceded after most reporters had lost interest...

...More specifically, you agree with Wolf Blitzer, who is on record saying the same thing...

...This technique was perfected in the fund-raising scandals, and it is invaluable today, in the Lewinsky affair...

...There is a final weapon in McCurry's arsenal of spin: voluntary ignorance...

...This was perfectly predictable...

...b) a fine man trapped in a difficult situation...

...The next morning the Middleton story appeared in the Wall Street Journal, with White House confirmation...

...Reporters who cover the Clinton White House have become inured to an intensity of deceit that would appall anyone else, in any other walk of life...

...Congratulations: For being as sophisticated as a Washington journalist, you win a year-long internship on Inside Politics and a date with either Wolf or Bobbie Batista...

...Even more than most people, journalists will tend to mistake mere flattery for soulful discernment...

...His recent admission that he will not ask Clinton the truth about Monica Lewinsky is only the latest example...

...By the look of it, Kurtz enjoyed generous access both to reporters and their opposite numbers in the White House press office, and he is careful to preserve his future access by casting just about everyone in the best possible light...

...Wouldn't they...

...One typical example: When White House flacks told the Post's John Harris that Clinton would use his second term to be a national unifier, Harris's Pavlovian response was a front-pager titled: "Clinton to Push Role as National Unifier...

...It was perfected in the Reagan years, when staffers like David Gergen and James Baker would stand by their boss in public and then, off the record, let it be known that they knew, just as the reporters knew, that the old fellow was really rather dotty (and so right-wing...

...Often the lie is buttressed by bullying...

...He makes fun of his boss's wife—calls her a mummy—says f— a lot—What a guy...

...He has compartmentalized his job and tells reporters that certain questions are beyond his range...

...His earlier books, Hot Air and Media Circus, were full of Fred Friendly-like tut-tuttery about the erosion of standards in the tabloid culture and whatnot...

...Clinton himself would occasionally get involved—at great psychic sacrifice, apparently, for his hatred of the press approaches clinical paranoia...

...His efforts to charm reporters in off-the-record meetings proved successful, particularly with such grinning shoeshine boys as Jonathan Alter and Thomas Friedman...

...If there's justice in the world, this will endure as one of the essential documents of the Clinton era...

...Good...

...But the spokesman-as-prevaricator is an innovation of the Clinton era, and for an obvious reason: There's more to hide...

...When lying and bullying won't kill a story, McCurry deflects it...

...Other than a CNN segment and a couple of wire-service reports," Kurtz writes, "the story didn't exist...

...Now first, a show of hands...

...What about education and the environment and the issues that the American people . . . et cetera...

...No one...

...Why don't you just go ask the president...

...He had a way of making each reporter think they had a special relationship," Kurtz writes...

...Someone other than McCurry gets to answer "No comment," and the question withers...

...He would lower his voice and impart sensitive information...

...The word "distract" comes to us from the Latin distrahere, meaning to draw apart, itself a combination of the prefix dis- and the verb trahere, which in turn means "to draw...

...As a media reporter, though, Kurtz is invaluable: brave and resourceful and lavishly productive...

...They had killed it...

...But let's stick for the moment to ordinary understandings—to the language as ordinary people grasp it...

...This dodge offers multiple benefits...

...For their part, the press spokes-men—particularly McCurry and White House deputy counsel Lanny Davis—come off as honorable men constantly pressing their superiors for full disclosure of the truth...

...This is not, as some cynics might suggest, the normal role of a presidential press secretary...

...But McCurry's ingenious innovation is to keep himself in the dark—and to boast that there are subjects about which he will remain stubbornly ignorant...

...Kurtz is the Washington Posfs media critic, and is thus himself an important conduit of those fabled Beltway information flows...

...As a critic, Kurtz is thoroughly conventional...

...Kurtz tagged along as the Clinton propaganda machine rumbled and smoked its way through the year 1997...

...Michael Kranish of the Boston Globe published the first documented evidence that John Huang had demanded changes in administration policy in return for his munificent fund-raising efforts...

...And the lawyers won't answer the question either, as McCurry knows...

...Now to the tricky part...

...For presidential staff, the wink-and-a-nod strategy is wildly effective...

...Blitzer's opinion of McCurry is to be found in the new book by Howard Kurtz, Spin Cycle: Inside the Clinton Propaganda Machine...

...I want to put news organizations in the position of having to exercise careful editorial judgment," he said...

...The campaign-finance scandals offered McCurry ample opportunity to do his job, and Kurtz shows us the spokesman's techniques in full throttle...

...How many of you actually believe Mike McCurry when he says this...

...The president does not, as part of his official duties, draw, or sketch with charcoals, or, for that matter, paint with watercolors...

...He wakes up every morning and goes to work doing the job the American people sent him here to do, and if you think for one minute that he's going to be diverted by drawing pictures, for God's sake, then you simply don't understand this president...

...He was injecting his verbiage directly into the wire story," Kurtz writes, "the one that would set the tone for much of the day's coverage...

...Mike McCurry, the president's press secretary, was asked to comment on the claim, made by Senate majority leader Trent Lott, that the Monica Lewinsky scandal has "distracted" President Clinton from his official responsibilities...

...This is undoubtedly true, and nothing illustrates the detachment more than the sad manipulation of the press that Kurtz recounts...

...Yes, yes, yes, I know all the possible caveats and qualifiers and objections...

...Riding home on the press plane that evening, McCur-ry told reporters, off the record: "Probably she does look good compared to the mummy he's been f...

...What a president...

...If you said (c), you win...

...Why were reporters descending to the level of the tabloids...

...So, etymologically, Mc-Curry's statement is quite accurate...

...Surely they would know that the correct answer is (a...

...John Kennedy didn't tell Pierre Salinger about the Bay of Pigs in order to protect his spokesman's credibility: Salinger wouldn't have to lie about what he didn't know...

...What a press secretary...

...Kurtz's most harrowing anecdote shows Lanny Davis, in a room outside the Thompson campaign-finance hearings, dictating quotes to the Associated Press reporter Larry Mar-gasak...

...Gosh: Mike loves the truth so much, he doesn't even want to know what it is...

...Who actually believes that the Lewinsky scandal has not distracted the president...

...It was a busy year for the spin-masters (but then aren't they all...

...But that's a big "if...

...Most of the reporters come off as rigorous, non-ideological bird dogs— tough but fair, as they like to say— who grow increasingly frustrated with the White House's lack of candor...

...If you're a reporter, there are many ways to respond to McCur-ry's highly sophisticated obfuscation...

...But surely the most bizarre reaction is to confess your undying admiration and affection for him, as so many White House reporters do...

...Kurtz, and the White House, dwell on the subject of how detached Washington journalists are from ordinary Americans...

...Kurtz would never call his colleagues credulous wimps, of course —he'd never work in this town again—but he does show them to be, at a minimum, SNAGGs, or Sensitive New Age Guys and Gals...

...McCurry's techniques, masterfully deployed though they are, couldn't be sustained without the tacit compliance of the reporters themselves...

...No one...

...McCurry said he couldn't confirm Braver's report, so she didn't broadcast it...

...In his early 40s, he is a contemporary of most White House reporters—he once had ambitions to be a reporter himself—and cut from the same demographic cloth: upper middle class, well schooled, vaguely liberal but not overtly ideological...

...Why are we talking about drawing, anyway...

...To take one example among many: Rita Braver of CBS once discovered that Mark Middleton, a key player in the scandals and one of their many Fifth Amendment adepts, had been treating clients to meals in the White House mess after he'd left the administration—a highly unusual privilege, to say the least...

...Clinton, you'll recall, once interrupted a dinner speech to note, bizarrely, that he would like to date a mummy recently discovered in Peru...

...And Mike McCurry said, "It hasn't distracted the president...

...But powerful people are always charming when they flatter you, and of Clinton's many gifts his greatest is for flattery...

...What does drawing have to do with it...

...When reporters pressed him, he badgered back...

...Kurtz, following McCurry, attributes the success to Clinton's "charm...

...Lying works only on the credulous, and bullying works only on wimps...

...McCurry is widely liked...

...Because I don't want to," McCurry snapped...

...We all remember the fund-raising coffees that McCurry said weren't fund-raisers, but his lies could be applied to the most trivial items as well...

...a reporter once asked McCurry, about some detail of one scandal or another...

...And they are a manipulable bunch...

...It shuts up reporters, closes off entire avenues of inquiry, and can eventually kill a story...

...or (c) the best press secretary ever...

...Floating on this deep reservoir of goodwill, McCurry can then get down to his real job, which is to ensure that reporters discover as little as possible about what's really going on...

...Let's be clear: The president has no such official role...

...The star of the book is McCurry...

...It is upon just such comments that a relationship of trust and affection is established in contemporary Washington...

...There is, first of all, the outright lie...

...Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor of The Weekly Standard...

...Other press secretaries have been kept in the dark—poor Ron Ziegler, most notably...

...And when David Watkins, a former presidential confidant, told a reporter that Clinton was having an affair with a woman on the White House payroll, McCurry refused to answer the allegations, choosing to shame his reporters instead...

...He doesn't use the specific term...

...And in a strange inversion, it even makes McCurry seem somehow . . . principled...

...On another occasion, the New York Times went after Bruce Lindsey for some bit of chicanery, and the White House called in the ever-reliable Margaret Carlson, who wrote dismis-sively in Time that the Times was in a "lather...