The Begetting
Martha Stewart, book burning, Howell Raines, and Michael Powell: hate begetting hate, lies begetting lies, fear begetting fear
By Jeff Koopersmith

June 6, 2003 -- I am not clear where the America I once knew has gone.

Am I the only one?

Yesterday I received a note from an old friend who has married and lived in Paris for the past decade with her wonderful husband, who had also become a close friend during my time in 1980s New York City.

We had lost touch, and I was surprised to learn that both of them were considering leaving their much-loved City of Lights because of pervasive and widespread anti-Semitism -- a tragedy about which I have heard whispers, but never realized had metastasized to such extent that it might force a French citizen and his Francophile American wife to consider leaving France for good.

I wrote back, warning them that they might not find America the gentle place it too once was. Instead of finding compassion and a dedication to fundamental fairness, my two old friends might notice a new breed of antagonism, spurred by the "mainstream" media and aimed at anything and anyone who does not conform to the White Christian Neoconservative mold.

As many of you may realize, after thinking it through, this nation has been on a headstrong plunge into unforgiving notions for longer than I have been angry about it.

Most recently I have written about this new American atmosphere: book burning, figurative cross burning, and a kind of religious persecution now seeping, ever so slowly, from the right.

The latest victim is Hillary Clinton, who has written an insightful and much-awaited history of her life in Arkansas and Washington and, in return, has become the focus of ridicule for offering that she did not know "at the appropriate time" about Bill Clinton's problem with Monica Lewinsky. The news media is in essence calling her a liar and burning her and her book -- because she forgave her husband Bill.

Are we all so dimwitted that we should allow the mainstream media to treat us as unthinking androids interested only in the private grief of husband and wife?

Shouldn't we also learn about the academic and political Hillary Clinton? The mother Hillary Clinton? The friend and now US Senator Hillary Clinton?

For those of you who cannot take the time, or do not have the money, to purchase this history, I think it important that FOX News, CNN, MSNBC and CNBC consider spending more time looking at the substance of her work rather than the scandal.

Are we all somehow at fault -- coconspirators of a sort?

Newspapers, television broadcasters, and talk radio producers tell me we must be. They tell me that we Americans subsist on scandal and that this is why they offer it -- in such sumptuous quantity.

Yesterday, the 5th of June 2003, the news media was focused on several stories pitched as follows that prove my point:

1. Martha Stewart's indictment for lying to federal prosecutors (where was the word "alleged"?)
2. When Hillary Clinton knew that Bill was "cheating"
3. The resignation of New York Times editor Howell Raines as a "victim" of Jayson Blair (when in fact he was his own worst enemy)
4. The ruling by the FCC that the few corporations that control everything we read, hear, or see can now become fewer.

So what about Martha Stewart?

I can tell you this much: she is in blistering hot water.

The prosecutor heading this case is tough and very successful, and incredibly involved also in prosecuting those thugs who are caught up in terrorizing our country. He is hard-boiled-good at his job. What Mr. Comey's personal interest in the case if any are, other than justice, I do not know. But there is a nagging feeling, even among the New Yorkers I know who intensely dislike her, that Ms. Stewart is being held up as a dreadful example. I can also tell you that early on, colleagues and I approached Ms. Stewart's staff warning her that her opening legal advice and machinations were ill-advised. They may still well be.

Certainly Ms. Stewart could have settled this matter easily and comfortably at the start. Whether she was or was not involved in a so-called cover-up is unimportant now. She has been indicted for same -- and in today's America that is nearly tantamount to trial and conviction by the news media -- a fresh and vicious news media progeny of Clinton scandals and journalistic zeal to please power brokers and the power itself.

I see Ms. Stewart has begun to fight back -- in a most ill-advised manner. She has published a new web site -- a cheap and silly try to make us believe she is innocent.

She should fire whoever came up with this idea -- and quick.

Instead, she should be litigating -- viciously -- against those that have lynched her all along and would lynch her down the road. This does not include the prosecutors. After all, they are merely doing their jobs as they view them. However, one must consider what they might have done had people come to her defense, rather than to cut her throat.

And so must she consider this.

Ms. Stewart's case is particularly poignant. I listened to Don Imus speaking with Anna Quindlen about it yesterday. Imus -- no stranger to scandal and scandalmongering -- seemed not-so-surprised that Quindlen first skewered Stewart and then backed away, saying that she had begun "to feel sorry for her" only yesterday afternoon. (I must say, though, that at least Ms. Quindlen -- unlike most of her associates -- stuck to her guns in her admiration of Mrs. Clinton no matter the pressure from Imus and his colleagues and imitators to "give her up.")

Ms. Stewart should look to Leona Helmsley for advice. Perhaps she should have looked to her long ago, before the fables about her meanness and voraciousness unfairly took hold. She could have done something about it. This is what happened to Mrs. Helmsley as well. She set her own stage for public destruction. It seems Ms. Stewart has done the same.

Yet, in those famous words, have WE no sense of decency?

Already the tabloid press -- and I include the New York Times, for the moment at least, and other newspapers of record -- have begun to try and convict Ms. Stewart. This follows the earlier trying and convicting, by media, of O.J. Simpson, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Gary Condit, Eric Alterman, Sidney Blumenthal for his work "The Clinton Wars", and now Hillary Clinton again.

And who are the hangmen? The usual suspects -- none of them free from their own transgressions: Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Michael Isikoff, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Howell Raines, Chris Matthews, Chris Hitchens, Michael Savage, John Broder, Dennis Prager, Neal Boortz, Dr. Laura Schlessinger, Michael Reagan, the entire "cast" on the FOX News Channel, half the writers on the Washington Post, Mancow, and the latest disgrace, former losing congressman and House Manager wannabe Joe Scarborough -- a veritable font of right-wing hate-peddling whom Don Imus seems to have adopted over the past week.

Let us also turn to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Michael Powell, the Bush-grimacing little-boy pouter and spawn of Secretary of State Colin Powell, who yesterday, delivered -- straight-faced -- a series of fabrications so extraordinary about his decision to give the few companies owning 80% of everything in the media even further control, and so blatantly that Senator Barbara Boxer herself seemed briefly stunned mute.

You will not see the media hang Michael Powell. After all, he is their personal point man in Washington. If he were anyone else, he would have been thrown out long ago for being such an obvious instrument of the powerful.

Lastly, there comes Howell Raines.

Many of you know that I have been after Arthur Sulzberger and his son for more than five years to dispose of Raines. My anger with Howell Raines had nothing, of course, to do with Jayson Blair. It had to do with far worse: Raines' one-man necktie party aimed at Bill and Hillary Clinton. It had to do with his "Alabammie" roots and the fact that despite his protestations to the contrary Raines couldn't extricate himself from a cracker society that produced and still produces some of the most irresponsible people in history: the remnants of the racist, chauvinist Deep South.

My anger had to do with allowing publication of lies by shallowly prepared writers like Jeff Gerth, and the windbag Pulitzer Committee member William Safire -- both of whom lied over and over again knowingly about the Clintons.

It had to do with David Broder, his son John, and other zealous members of the Times' "Get Clinton Gang" who helped destroy that newspaper over the past near-decade. Read what I wrote, in 1998, about Raines, Gerth and Broder.

Raines also presided over misreporting the biggest fraud in the nation's history: the unprecedented theft of small investors' and senior citizens' lifetime savings in the stock markets -- particularly the NASDAQ. His stewardship, or lack thereof, allowed the Times to join the rest in "missing" every sign that the system was gamed and that the country was being hoodwinked in the hundreds of billions -- until it was far too late. All one need do is search the archives of the Times business section to recognize this.

What Raines never understood was the true foundation of liberal and progressive thought -- and that the New York Times, whose foundation rested there, was being smashed by his tenancy. The description, the very definition, of "liberal" always parenthetically contains the adjectives "thoughtful" and "compassionate," "wise," and "forward-thinking."

Somehow, Raines and the Times lost this for fear or being labeled just for what it was.

Hopefully, the return of Mr. Joseph Lelyveld, the Times' former editor, will right some wrongs.

We can always pray.

What are we to do?

Shall we hide quivering in our liberal closets all the longer? Or shall we get out pens and paper and begin to write -- to editors, to sponsors, to Congress and to George W. Bush. Shall we tell them we are tired of character assassination and lies? Shall we tell them, with all due respect, to stop -- and damn the ratings and circulation?

If they do, we'll get used to it.

True?

JEFF KOOPERSMITH is a political consultant, opinion research authority, policy analyst, and self-described "renegade lobbyist."