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The Conservative Media Meltdown
by David Cole [TakiMag] However the Trump War resolves itself, we’ve already seen at least one casualty—conservative media cohesion. Sides are being drawn, and blood feuds have been declared. As The New York Times recently pointed out, Trump-inspired divisions and conflicts among normally allied conservative media personalities are growing at an alarming rate, and staying neutral is practically impossible. A recent Guardian piece (for which I was interviewed) about the Hollywood conservative “oasis” Friends of Abe paints a portrait of a “slow-motion civil war” in which members are at each other’s throats over Trump. Friends of Abe used to be a place where everyone could hang out and get along: the Breitbart people, the National Review people, the RedState folks, the Horowitz clan. At any given past event, you might have seen Ben Shapiro doffing his yarmulke to Ann Coulter, Roger Simon clinking glasses with S.E. Cupp, and Bill Whittle and David Horowitz passed out together in a corner after forgetting to breathe while monologuing at each other. Such unity! What the hell went wrong? Is it just Trump? Well, yes, in that the Trump candidacy put the hot needle to the zit. But the puss had been building up for some time, and there are many reasons why. Look at the Lewandowski/Fields affair and the ensuing Breitbart.com crack-up. Everyone involved is unlikable. There are absolutely no heroes in that debacle. Michelle Fields is a whining millennial drama queen who claimed—with a straight face—that Lewandowski’s arm tug was the worst thing that happened to her since her father’s death. This is why the “old media,” corrupt and biased as it is, still commands respect. When old-school reporters like Sam Donaldson were arm-touched, they responded by simply telling the unwanted toucher, “Get your hands off me.” They understood that the occasional arm touch was a hazard that comes with the job. They didn’t respond to unwanted contact by calling a press conference and going on an “I’ve been victimized” media junket.
Shapiro was editor at large of Breitbart.com at the time Yiannopoulos made that statement in a piece posted on the site, and he was totally cool with it. No angry pressers, no job-quitting hissy fit. Tugging a female reporter’s arm is an unpardonable sin, but cheering the ruthless beating of a female reporter is fine. That’s some nice Old Testament ethics there, Benny. How very Deuteronomous of you. But if Fields and Shapiro are bad actors in this freak show, what can be said of Patrick Howley, the Breitbart.com reporter who initially doubted Fields’ story? Howley, it turns out, is also a master at faking events and making himself the center of a story. Frankly, his record puts Fields’ to shame. In October 2011, Howley “infiltrated” a Washington, D.C., Occupy group in order to provoke a clash with security guards by gate-crashing the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum while pretending to be one of the Occupy protesters. I had the honor of witnessing firsthand Howley’s unethical behavior when he contacted me in late 2014 regarding a “scoop” he thought he had about Bill Clinton and me. Howley, then at the Daily Caller, had previously misattributed a quote in an earlier piece involving a Democrat congresswoman who’d written me a fan letter (such is the surreal nature of my life that fan letters I receive become headline news). After refusing to correct the quote, he got in touch with me about the Clinton story, which (purportedly) involved me, the former president, and country-rock singer Julia Garlington, who used to open for Blake Shelton before, shall we say, “falling on hard times.” Even in the face of my warning that the Cole/Clinton story was bogus (which it was), Howley went ahead with it anyway. To be fair, I let it happen, because these days I have zero tolerance for two things: misattributed or fake quotes, and death threats. Howley, having perpetrated the former, was solidly on my “do not resuscitate” list when I saw him hanging himself with his own rope. The result was much hilarity in the form of a public pantsing of Howley (by sites like AlterNet, TPM, and Media Matters) that I hope hastened his departure from the DC (although, amazingly, the discredited Clinton/Cole story is still up, with no update or correction). Howley is no better than Fields and Shapiro. More at the link Posted by: badanov 2016-04-22 |
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