Choose Your Martyrs Well
FRUM, DAVID
Choose Your Martyrs Well by David Frum Bill Clinton won't be around forever. But the misbegotten arguments that conservatives muster against him may do lasting damage to important principles. It...
...He didn't just report the first couple's version of reality...
...Drudge's champions are in fact going one step beyond even Justice Brennan...
...To exculpate himself, Drudge now claims to see in the Blumenthal lawsuit a Clinton White House plot to shut down its critics...
...The American press of the early 21st century is likely to be vastly more scurrilous and slovenly than the press of the late 20th century at its worst...
...Aficionados of the Blumenthal auvre will remember the scurrilous piece he wrote during the 1992 campaign charging that George Bush's heroic war record was a sham: that when his aircraft was hit by Japanese fire, young Lt...
...Drudge is the editor of an Internet bulletin called the "Drudge Report," a compendium of syndicated columns, newspaper front pages, wire-service news, and Drudge's own reportage that conservatives and media junkies across the country turn to every morning...
...Despite the permission of Sullivan to malign anybody it liked, the American press has over the past 30 years been considerably more accurate and responsible than, say, the British press, which enjoys nothing like the same immunity from libel lawsuits...
...And so, Blumenthal is now suing Drudge (and America Online, which carries the Drudge Report) for $30 million...
...Indeed, Blumenthal pioneered a new journalistic role: the reporter as con-sigliere...
...They are implicitly arguing that even when a public figure has a strong claim that he has been libeled in a press account of his private conduct, he should still be constrained from bringing a lawsuit...
...Bush bailed out with cowardly haste, unnecessarily dooming one of the airmen in his crew...
...This is an especially dangerous standard to set in the Internet age...
...Liberals have tended to equate libel actions by individuals seeking to protect their reputations with government censorship...
...Two months ago, Drudge e-mailed a dispatch to his subscribers predicting that the Clinton White House would imminently be rocked by a scandalous "revelation" about White House aide Sidney Blumen-thal...
...Blumenthal was equally unscrupulous in his journalistic handling of the Clintons' opponents, willingly reporting the wildest accusations against anyone who stood in his patrons' way...
...One reason that Sidney Blumenthal has been so disliked is that he is seen as a journalist who subordinates principle to the partisan need of the moment...
...It would be an ironic victory for him if he managed to drag his critics down to his own low standard...
...Conservatives have replied that individuals have just as much right to be compensated if they are injured by a negligent journalist's faulty reporting as they do if they are injured by a negligent journalist's faulty driving...
...The item must have delighted many readers...
...That flow of intelligence deserves full First Amendment protection...
...Criticism and assessment of the performance of public officials and of government in general are not subject to penalties imposed by law...
...All in all, a nasty character...
...But look: Conservatives have for years argued that the lenient American law of libel gives too much leeway to a lazy and biased press...
...The law of libel will then be the only check upon it...
...Before joining the White House staff this year, Blumenthal proved himself— first at the New Republic and then at the New Yorker— to be one of the most ardent, indeed sycophantic, Clinton apologists in the national press...
...Since Drudge has cheerfully conceded that he did not check the accuracy of the rumors he disseminated in his report, Blumenthal actually stands quite a good chance of meeting the law's exacting standard for the libel of a public figure: "reckless disregard of truth...
...He would, as has been widely reported, privately meet with them to help devise it...
...As Justice Byron White wrote in 1985, "I have become convinced that the Court struck an improvident balance [in Sullivan...
...In the 1964 case of Sullivan v. New York Times, Justice Brennan laid down rules that make it virtually impossible for a public figure—not just a politician, but even, as Larry Flynt taught us, a prominent preacher like Jerry Falwell—to protect himself from outrageous and untrue remarks...
...If this opinion prevailed, public officials would be left entirely without recourse when subjected to the vilest and most unjust forms of abuse...
...But these First Amendment values are not served at all by circulating false statements of fact about public officials...
...Now hatred for Clinton is driving some conservatives to embrace an equally radical theory of libel, in order to defend Internet gadfly Matt Drudge...
...It is bad enough that Paula Jones has some conservatives sounding like Catherine MacKinnon on the subject of sexual harassment...
...David Horowitz, never one to shrink from the good fight, has led the attempt to drum up a storm of political protest that will pressure the White House to order Blumenthal to drop the suit...
...Much of the credit for this must go to a code of conduct—informal but nevertheless real—that inhibits the editors of powerful newspapers and the producers of the network news programs from using their power to the fullest...
...But in the age of the Internet, everyone is his own publisher, and thanks to cable, almost everyone will soon be his own television producer...
...Some agitated conservatives have adopted his spin...
...But whatever his vices, the one bruited about by Drudge is not among them...
...In a country like ours, [adequate] information about their government is of transcendent importance [to the people...
...David Frum is a contributing editor of The Weekly Standard...
...Whatever wrongdoing the Clintons were caught in, from cattle futures to Gennifer Flowers, Blumenthal was ready with an unblushing excuse...
...Blu-menthal, a former journalist, is a particularly unattractive Washington personality...
Vol. 3 • November 1997 • No. 8
