The Right Whines

What's up with conservative journalists lately? Why are they offering such easy targets?

Take Jeff Jacoby, a pundit currently under suspension at the Boston Globe for passing off the nonsensical musings of an anonymous e-mail about alleged heroes of the American Revolution as his own research. The right is up in arms over this example of so-called leftist McCarthyism on the part of the "radical" Globe editors who suspended him. The cause was Jacoby's borrowing without attribution--none dare call it "plagiarism." Amid the ruckus over ideology, hardly anyone seemed to notice that Jacoby was damn lucky he wasn't fired for incompetence. After all, he used the Globe Op-Ed page as a conduit for information he had no reason to believe was true. For all he knew, the schoolboy tales of bravery and sacrifice he shared with his readers originally appeared in a Marvel comic book (or perhaps The Protocols of the Elders of Zion).

"As a columnist, I don't undertake original historical research, but I care greatly about accuracy," Jacoby pretends. Yet even according to his own account, Jacoby could not be bothered to walk over to the library to check out the e-mail he received. Nor did he bother to lift his phone to call a colonial historian (this is Boston, remember). And yet this pathetic poseur is now a full-fledged martyr on right-wing Op-Ed pages across the land, with tearful tributes and angry threats from the National Review, the Wall Street Journal and David Horowitz's generously funded web page, FrontPage Magazine. Actually, one wonders whether Horowitz even read the piece, as he seemed to think it was about the Constitution, not the Revolution. Perhaps he should offer Jacoby a job.

Another poster boy for "liberalmedia" persecution is ABC News's John Stossel, a right-wing huckster the network inexplicably allows to play a journalist on TV. For years Stossel has, with impunity, consistently misrepresented academic research, offered false statistical claims and quoted his sources out of context to support one crackpot right-wing theory after another. (He has even had producers resign over those practices.) With those actions he has unfairly denigrated the work of dedicated schoolteachers, OSHA officials and healthcare workers, to name just a few.

Stossel has his own set of rules at ABC, including his own production unit and the right, denied to other correspondents, to give lectures to conservative groups. ABC also benefits financially from his standing as a right-wing hero. Stossel is not only popular in the ratings--expensive videos of his reports are marketed to educators by a conservative outfit called the Palmer R. Chitester Fund. ABC News makes a profit on these from licensing fees, but refuses to divulge just how much. (A spokesman for the network calls it "minuscule.")

Despite those extra few pennies, Stossel turns out to be a costly employee for a network that doesn't need more trouble when it's already suffering from negative fallout over its dealings with Leo DiCaprio, Monica Lewinsky, Elián González and others. Eager to mock organic foods, in a February 4 20/20 broadcast titled "The Food You Eat," Stossel informed 12 million ABC viewers that scientific tests ordered by the network had found no pesticide residue on either organic or conventional produce. He ignored tests that discovered such residue on nonorganic chicken. To make his point that the organic food industry is largely a hoax, he relied on the expertise of one Dennis Avery, whom he identified as "a former research analyst for the Agriculture Department." Stossel did not see fit to mention the more relevant fact that Avery is now the director of the Center for Global Food Issues at the Hudson Institute, whose funders have included such chemical industry stalwarts as Du Pont, Monsanto, Procter & Gamble and ConAgra.

Despite numerous complaints from public interest groups about the show's shoddy science, the network brushed off all criticism, even allowing Stossel to repeat his misinformation on the air in July. But this time his zealotry caught up with him. Researchers for the Environmental Working Group discovered that tests to which Stossel repeatedly referred during both broadcasts never took place. He'd somehow made them up. Caught red-handed, Stossel was reprimanded and forced to apologize on the air, but there is no indication that ABC is reconsidering its commitment to him. As with CNN and Tailwind, it is the producer, not the talent, who is asked to take the hit. (David Fitzpatrick was suspended by ABC for a month, without pay.)

When I called ABC to ask for comment from news president David Westin, along with Peter Jennings and Ted Koppel, I was directed back to the vice president for media relations, Jeffrey Schneider. He says ABC has no plans to look into previous Stossel broadcasts, despite the many questions raised about them, and per company policy, he refused to discuss why Stossel was not seriously sanctioned.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Bob Zelnick, formerly ABC News in-house conservative and now Boston University professor of journalism, argues that Stossel's most lasting contribution to network television news lies in his demonstration that a mass viewing audience is thirsting for more right-wing propagandists. The success of Rupert Murdoch's conservative enterprises, like Fox News Channel, demonstrates that "the networks would be richer" for more Stossel-like fare, says Zelnick. In fact, Murdoch's political projects--FNC, the New York Post, The Weekly Standard and Newt Gingrich's memoirs--are all money pits. Good capitalist that he is, Murdoch makes his money from titty photos and tabloid TV, not politics.

Stossel's genuine contributions to the media business are two: He has further called into question the credibility of ABC as a news organization, tarnishing by association the reputations of the likes of Jennings and Koppel. And together with the hapless Jacoby, he has once again exposed the pathetic paranoia that underpins the right's obsession with an imaginary "liberalmedia."

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