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Contributors
Cliff Kincaid- Contributor
Cliff Kincaid, serves as editor of the Accuracy
in Media (AIM)
Report. A veteran journalist and media critic, Cliff has
appeared on the Fox News programs Hannity & Colmes and
The O'Reilly Factor, where he debated O'Reilly on global
warming, the death penalty,
and the homosexual agenda. He was a guest co-host on CNN's Crossfire
(filling in for Pat Buchanan) in the 1980s, where he confronted
the then-Libyan Ambassador to the U.N. with evidence of Libyan
involvement in international terrorism. Through his America's
Survival, Inc., organization (www.usasurvival.org), he has been
an advocate on behalf of the families of victims of terrorism
and has published reports and held conferences critical of the
United Nations. His articles have appeared in the Washington
Post, Washington Times, Chronicles, Human Events, Insight, and
other publications. He served on the staff of Human Events for
several years and was an editorial writer and newsletter editor
for former National Security Council staffer Oliver North at
his Freedom Alliance educational foundation. He has written or
co-authored nine books on media and cultural affairs and foreign
policy issues. Cliff is married and has three sons.[go to
Kincaid index]
 More
On Memogate II
Making it up as they go along…
[Cliff Kincaid] 4/13/05
The Washington
Post believes it has been vindicated by the revelation that
a Republican congressional staffer really did write the
controversial Republican memo on the political ramifications
of the Terri Schiavo case. But this fact is almost beside the
point. The memo was never an official Republican document and
there’s no evidence that any Republican Senator ever read
it. The latest revelation adds to the perception that liberal
Democrats play the media like a violin.
The news
is that, after weeks of suspense about the authorship and origin
of
the memo, Brian Darling of the office of Republican
Senator Mel Martinez has admitted writing it and has resigned.
But the real story is that liberal Democratic Senator Tom Harkin
has been confirmed as the source of the document for the media.
How did Harkin get the memo? It was a mistake. Martinez was not
aware that he had turned the document over to Harkin, nor was
he aware of what was in the document. Harkin finally informed
Martinez on April 6 that he had in fact received the memo from
Martinez himself. That’s when Martinez launched his own
inquiry and discovered that Darling had written it.
This strange
story gets even stranger as you learn more about it. What’s clear, now more than ever, is that the Post and other media exploited this document for anti-Republican purposes
and exaggerated its importance. It will be interesting to see
how Post top brass defend their coverage of this memo at the
company’s May 12 annual meeting.
It turns
out, according to the Post account of Brian Darling’s
role, that Martinez never read the memo and “distributed” it
inadvertently to Harkin, a perceived ally in the Schiavo case.
The evidence is now clear that it was Harkin and/or his aides
who distributed the memo on a massive scale to other Democrats
and the press, including Mike Allen of the Post, in order to
make Republicans look bad.
Allen took
the bait, falsely reporting that “Republican
officials” were the authors, that the memo had been “distributed
to Republican senators” and by Republican “party
leaders.” Allen also reported that the memo had been distributed “only
to Republican Senators.” None of this was or is true. The
Post still has some explaining—and apologizing—to
do.
The continuing
controversy serves as a window into the political reporting
of the Post and its use of anonymous sources. The reference
to the memo being distributed “only to Republican Senators” was
an obvious ruse designed to conceal the Democratic source.
Even before
this new disclosure, one of Allen’s stories
had been partially corrected by the Washington Post wire service,
which declared that, “The version of the article published
later by the paper did not specify authorship and noted that
the memo was unsigned. The authorship remains unknown.” The
original story claimed that the memo was “distributed to
Republican senators by party leaders.” This is false. There’s
no evidence that Martinez, a Senator for only three months, got
the document from party leaders or that he distributed it to
them or other Republican Senators. The version of the memo that
was eventually released by the Martinez office in the form of
a press release did not include any of the political references.
It now seems clear that the Brian Darling memo seized upon by
the media was an early draft that was not officially authorized
or sanctioned.
Now I understand why Allen refused to respond to my early series
of questions about his coverage of the case. These questions
included:
- If
the memo is unsigned, as you reported, how do you know
it is authentic?
- Which
Republican Senator authorized or assigned the writing
of the memo?
- How do
you know it was distributed “only” to
Republican Senators?
Allen didn’t answer these questions because the answers
would have demonstrated how flimsy and partisan his story really
was. He had to know that the document had been obtained by
Senator Harkin or another Democratic Party source and that
this fact alone would cast doubt on its importance or validity.
So Harkin’s role was carefully concealed.
Allen falsely inflated the importance of
the memo by claiming
that it had
been distributed by or to Republican Senators.
Back-pedaling from his initial accusations,
Allen resorted to telling
Howard Kurtz, media reporter for the Post,
that the memo was just a “sheet of paper.” That’s exactly what it
was, but that’s not the way the Post initially
reported it.
In his story
about Darling’s role, Allen now tries to
shift the burden to those who had questioned the document. He
reports that “The mystery of the memo’s origin had
roiled the Capitol. Republicans accused Democrats of concocting
the document as a dirty trick; Democrats accused Republicans
of trying to duck responsibility for exploiting the dying days
of an incapacitated woman. Conservative Web logs have challenged
the authenticity of the unsigned memo that includes eight talking
points in support of the bill and calls the controversy ‘a
great political issue.’” Yes, the authenticity of
the memo had been challenged because it had no author or letterhead,
and the Washington Times couldn’t find one Republican Senator
who had read it.
The stories about the memo carried by ABC News, the Washington
Post, CBS News and other media are still questionable, even after
the author has been identified as a Republican. And the use of
this memo in a spate of anti-Republican stories on the Schiavo
case still looks like a Democratic Party dirty trick. Indeed,
the evidence on this score is stronger than ever. The only difference
between two weeks ago and now is that the hand of the Democratic
Party has been completely exposed.
Look at what
the Post is itself reporting. According to Allen’s
story, Martinez said that “he had not read the one-page
memo. He said he inadvertently passed it to Sen. Tom Harkin,
D-Iowa, who had worked with him on the issue. After that, officials
gave the memo to reporters for ABC News and the Washington
Post.”
Who were those officials? Obviously aides to Harkin and other
Democrats. The media were given a memo with no identified author
and no Senate letterhead. Recognizing this could make Republicans
look bad, reporters ran with the story, refusing of course to
disclose where they obtained the document.
So let’s understand what happened here. Martinez has the
controversial memo written by his own staffer, and he turns it
over to Harkin because he thinks they supposedly see eye-to-eye
about Schiavo’s right to life. This fact alone would seem
to confirm that Martinez had never read the memo. If he had read
it, why on earth would he turn something so potentially controversial
over to Harkin? After all, the memo said the issue was possibly
useful against Democratic Senators. But Harkin, rather than return
the document to Martinez because he had been given it improperly
and accidentally, leaks it to the media and his fellow Democratic
Senators. Harkin demonstrated in this conduct that he was more
concerned in making political points against the Republicans
than in helping Schiavo stay alive.
Harkin could
have returned the document to Martinez, noting that it was
a piece
of crude work product and that he was sure
it didn’t reflect the views of Martinez or other Republican
Senators. But that’s not what Harkin did. Instead, he passed
the memo on to other Democrats and the press, knowing that it
would be transformed into another “scandal” for the
GOP.
The New
York Times had confirmed early on that the memo had been “distributed
to news organizations by Democratic aides.”
Now we understand
why the Mike Allen story carried by the Post Wire Service had
said that the memo was “intended to be
seen” only by Republican Senators. This was another way
of saying that it had been obtained by Democrats, who leaked
it to the media. Now we know how Senator Harkin and his aides
got it. Martinez had ineptly turned it over to them.
The Post’s Mike Allen now reports, “Harkin said
in an interview that Martinez handed him the memo on the Senate
floor, in hopes of gaining his support for the bill giving federal
courts jurisdiction in the Florida right-to-die case.” Harkin
said Martinez had told him that “these were talking points—something
that we’re working on here.” This explains why ABC
News called it the “GOP Talking Points” memo and
suggested that it was an official Republican position. Linda
Douglass of ABC News, like the others, obviously got the story
from Harkin or his aides. They simply regurgitated what the liberals
gave them.
Associated
Press reports that “Martinez said that he pulled
the document from his coat pocket and recently handed it to Iowa
Democratic Senator Tom Harkin, thinking it was background information
on a bill ordering a review of the Schiavo case.”
It seems
that Martinez, rather than his aide Brian Darling, has more
to answer for
in this case. He should read his documents
before he turns them over to an ultra-liberal like Harkin. But
in the congressional world the staff aide takes the rap for the
mistakes of his boss. Darling’s “crime,” in
the final analysis, was that he wrote a memo that included a
few political observations about a case before Congress.
It was only
through the work of those questioning the memo that the truth
has now
belatedly been disclosed. Because of the
stonewalling by the media and the precedent of Dan Rather’s
Memogate scandal, there was every reason to suspect the memo
was a fake. Now it turns out that the memo was real but of no
consequence. It was one of thousands of memos that never get
officially released or distributed. The fact remains that the
media coverage was atrocious and biased because it was based
on a partisan source with an axe to grind.
Ironically, it turns out that the Democrats and their media
allies exploited a Republican memo for partisan political purposes.
But it was their story line that the Republicans were guilty
of such behavior. That, of course, is the line that media went
with.
In the Dan Rather Memogate case, his defense was that the memo
was fake but the story was real. That was ridiculous. In this
version of Memogate, however, it looks like the memo was real
but the stories were mostly fake or inaccurate. Both cases demonstrate
the liberal partisan bias of the media. We must not lose sight
of this critical fact. tRO
copyright
2005 Accuracy in Media
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