Off with Their Heads

Dick Morris

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061750991
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política mundial

What happened to the unity that so blessed America after 9/11? Where did our sense of determination go?

Our political, journalistic, and cultural leaders have mounted a campaign to oppose and impede the war on terror that seemed so vital in that rare moment of clarity. This book is my personal cri du coeur about deception in politics, journalism, and business—especially when it stops us from following through on the work 9/11 has left for us all to do.

This book takes on some pretty sacred cows, but it's about time they became fair game.

—from the Introduction

Are you appalled by the antiwar tone the news media has taken since the war on terror began—especially "objective" news outlets like the New York Times and the network news?

Are you wondering when liberal celebrities like Barbara Streisand, Sean Penn, and Susan Sarandon suddenly became geopolitical oracles whose advice we're supposed to value above the wisdom of tenured experts?

Are you at a loss to decide who has betrayed us more outrageously: the French who abandoned us in our time of need, or our own elected officials, who tapped our 401(k) savings and the tobacco-settlement windfall with equal abandon?

In Off with Their Heads, syndicated columnist and Fox News Cannel political analyst Dick Morris points an accusing finger at the many ways the public has been lied to and misled, pickpocketed and endangered. Whether it's Bill Clinton, who ignored mounting evidence of impending terrorist catastrophe throughout the 1990s, or the members of Congress, who quietly sold our democracy down the river in exchange for lifetime incumbency, Morris rips the cover off the cowardly and duplicitous figures who have sacrificed America's interests for their own.

From private corruption to public treachery, even longtime political buffs will marvel at the astonishing behavior Morris reveals at every level of society—and at how it threatens to compromise the American way of life.

Part I

The Obstructionists

As the United States goes to battle against terrorism, there are many among our countrymen and our traditional allies whose efforts are threatening to drain our spirit and determination, attacking our actions as we wage this war.

Some have attacked their motives, or denied their right to dissent. Not me. My problem with them has nothing to do with their right to dissent, which is beyond question. The real problem is simpler, and far more dangerous: their premises are misjudged, their comments based on ignorance, their arguments simply wrong.

Sometimes, as with the New York Times, their obstructionism comes veiled behind a facade of objectivity. Bill Clinton’s obstructionism was not an overt act, but a failure to act when the power, the opportunity, and the necessity for action pressed upon him. The apologists who denounce America as we seek to rid the world of the scourge of terrorism are overt and active in their opposition. They just don’t know what they’re talking about. France, our traditional ally, has turned into our overt adversary, blocking, inhibiting, and countering our efforts to stop Saddam Hussein from terrorizing the world.

But all four—the Times, Bill Clinton, the apologists, and the French—have this in common: They have put our nation at jeopardy.

One

The New New York Times:

All the News That Fits, They Print

There is a new New York Times. Howell Raines’s New York Times. No longer content to report the news, he admits to “flooding the zone”—and floods it with stories that carry forward his personal crusades and the paper’s editorial views.

And the Times doesn’t stop at slanting the news; it also weights its polls. The surveys the newspaper takes regularly are biased to give more strength to Democratic and liberal opinions and less to those of the rest of us.

The newspaper has become like a political consulting firm for the Democratic Party. Under Raines, it is squandering the unparalleled credibility it has amassed over the past century in order to articulate and advance its own political and ideological agenda.

For decades, the Times was the one newspaper so respected for its integrity and so widely read that it had influence well beyond its circulation. Now it has stooped to the role of partisan cheerleader, sending messages of dissent, and fanning the flames of disagreement on the left. Each month brings a new left party line from the paper, setting the tone for the government’s loyal opposition.

Reading the New York Times these days is like listening to Radio Moscow. Not that it’s communist, of course, but it has become almost as biased as the former Soviet news organ that religiously spewed the party line. Just as Russians did under Soviet rule, you now need to read “between the lines” to distinguish what’s really happening from what is just New York Times propaganda.

I have read the New York Times for forty-four years. When I was growing up, my parents read it every morning and the New York Post every afternoon. I still read them both every day. The Times is a New York institution to me, as much a symbol of my hometown as the Yankees, the subway, Central Park, and, yes, the World Trade Center. I think many Americans must share my feelings today: To see it fall into the hands of propagandists, after so many years of dignity and balance, is like watching your father get drunk.

Like every newspaper, the Times rightfully uses its editorial and op-ed pages to articulate its ideas and opinions. But, since the ascension of Howell Raines to the post of managing editor, the newspaper has gone much, much further to push its political perspective. As journalist Ken Auletta pointed out in a masterful profile in The New Yorker, Raines is overt about his desire that “the masthead” (the managing editor, his deputy, and the assistant managing editors) “be more engaged in shaping stories and coordinating news coverage.”

Acting like the chief campaign strategist for the left, the Times generally conducts six to eight public opinion polls each year. But lately the Times seems to me to be deliberately misinterpreting and weighting its data to suggest that its liberal ideas have a popularity they don’t actually enjoy. The polling seems to have one major purpose—to help the Democratic Party set its agenda, encouraging it to embrace the Times’s own liberalism on a host of issues. Then, from editorials to op-ed articles and a blizzard of front-page stories, the newspaper relentlessly expounds its views, doing its best to create a national firestorm on the issues it chooses to push.

Jack Shafer, the media critic for the on-line magazine Slate, described the new policy to Newsweek on December 9, 2002: “The Times has assumed the journalistic role as the party of opposition” to the current Bush administration. According to Newsweek, “many people around the country are noticing a change in the way the Old Gray Lady [the Times’s pet name] covers any number of issues….” The magazine pointed out how Raines believes in “flooding the zone—using all the paper’s formidable resources to pound away on a story.”

Other newspapers often try to do the same thing. What is unique about the Times’s approach is the sharp departure it represents from the paper’s past. Long priding itself on objectivity, political neutrality, and even reserve in reporting news, the Times is renowned as our nation’s primary voice of objective authority. As such, it occupies a unique place in our national iconography. But Alex Jones, author of The Trust, a book about the Times, describes the Times’s latter-day style of news coverage as “certainly a shift from the New York Times as the ‘paper of record.’ ”

And yet millions of us still rely on the New York Times. It is still the most comprehensive source of news and information about what is going on in the world. It is precisely because it is so important that the bias that increasingly dominates its coverage of news is so disturbing. It’s a little like finding propaganda in the World Almanac—the place you want to go to get the facts and only the facts. If we cannot depend on the Times to tell us fairly, accurately, and dispassionately what is going on, where are we supposed to turn? Will news reading become a task in which we must read four or five partisan sources and average them to get the truth? Is it really worth subverting an institution like the New York Times just to score political points?

Every day’s front page is such a mix of hype, hyperbole, and, often, hypocrisy that it takes an expert to sort it out.

While most nations have their national newspapers, American newspapers, with the exception of USA Today and the Wall Street Journal, are all local in orientation. The New York Times, however, leads a double life—as the most widely read newspaper in the nation’s largest city and the most authoritative voice on national news. Seen as a national tower of rectitude, the Times has always enjoyed universal respect for its even-handed impartiality.

So it’s not surprising that the impact of this Times propaganda offensive was far more widespread than its daily circulation of 1.1 million would suggest. Not only do most opinion leaders in America read the newspaper itself, but the New York Times News Service—the paper’s equivalent of the Associated Press—sends stories to scores of other daily papers around the country. In addition, its stories are reprinted in the International Herald Tribune and disseminated in every major city in the world, and, of course, are available on the Internet.

Beyond the nominal reach of the paper and its wire service, however, the themes set in the New York Times are crucial in shaping trends in journalism throughout almost every paper in the nation. During my time in the Clinton White House, I tracked carefully the themes that were covered on the front pages of twenty newspapers in swing states throughout the nation. Each week my staff detailed the topics covered in such diverse dailies as the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Chicago Tribune, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, San Francisco Examiner, Miami Herald, and other pivotal papers in key states. In addition, we evaluated the number of minutes each of the three networks devoted to each news topic.

That ongoing survey revealed just how closely the themes covered in print and on TV tracked those first articulated on the front page of the New York Times. When the Times spoke, ripples seemed to flow out from the initial news splash it made, touching scores of other, more local, news organs.

I once asked George Stephanopoulos why he thought so many other venues tracked the Times so closely. “The New York Times still rules,” he replied.

No longer content simply to report the news, the Times now seems to want to make and shape it, focusing attention on issues and topics that advance its liberal views. In the period since 9/11, the Times has been particularly active, grappling with the conundrum that had liberals flummoxed all year—how to respond to the growing national conservatism in the face of the al Qaeda attack.

Facing a Republican president with record-high approval ratings, determined to bring terrorism to heel, the Times puts its polls, its editorials, and its front page to work, marshaling one strategy after another to regain the momentum the left lost after September 11.

Using polling to feel its way—just as a candidate for president might—the newspaper seems to consciously choose a particular political strategy and then uses all its resources to beat the drum persistently—manipulating its story placement, choice of photos, headlines, article topics and language, editorials, and op-eds to push its point of view. If the specific issue chosen by the Times isn’t at the top of the public’s mind, the newspaper resolves to put it there, by running daily front-page articles with bold headlines, slanted “push polling,” and urgent editorials. And when that doesn’t work, it simply gives up and chooses new targets.

Mickey Kaus of Slate has accused the Times of moving away from its classical mandate to “follow the news” to a “mandated-from-above-throw-the-whole-staff-into-the-story news campaign.”

Kaus attributes much of this development to the rise of Howell Raines to the position of managing editor at the Times—on September 5, 2001, just six days before disaster struck. Kaus asserts that Raines has injected his “slightly intemperate, self-righteous populism” into both the Editorial Page and the paper’s news coverage.

Raines, fifty-nine, is a self-styled southern populist, who, according to Newsweek, “cut his teeth at a time when the Southern papers were still charging the barricades of segregation.” His early career was marked by an assault on the racist values that dominated his hometown of Birmingham, Alabama. (Bill Clinton, chafing under the Times’s editorials attacking him, told me that Raines has it “in for me because I’m a Southerner who didn’t have to leave to make good.”)

A confident, unapologetic liberal, Raines sees journalism as an opportunity to crusade by capturing a story and pushing it into the public consciousness—again and again and again. Strutting around Manhattan, ostentatiously clad, as Auletta describes it, in the “white panama hat of a plantation owner,” he insists on putting his own imprint not just on his newspaper but on the minds of its readers.

As Raines told Auletta, “Target selection is key. And then you have to concentrate your resources at the point of attack. [John] Geddes [the Times’s deputy managing editor] has another term for my style, which is ‘flood the zone.’ I’ve been in journalistic contests where I was up against real formidable opposition…. If I’m in a gunfight, I don’t want to die with any bullets in my pistol. I want to shoot every one.”

At the root of the Times’s “flood the zone” strategy is an adroit use of opinion polling to develop a national strategy and to convince politicans—particularly those on the left—to embrace it as their own. Borrowing heavily from the techniques of Clinton’s permanent campaigns of the 1990s, the newspaper used survey research to identify the hot-button news issues and then developed them into stories, features, and editorials.

But a close analysis of the New York Times’s polling reveals that the data itself was far from unbiased; indeed, it was often weighted, twisted, and slanted to advance the newspaper’s liberal point of view. Raines’s Times used techniques reminiscent of “push polling”—where consultants stack the questions in surveys to give the impression of more public support than they, in fact, can muster—to get the results it wanted.

OFF WITH HIS HEAD!

Push Polling at the Times

As Mark Twain once wrote, there are three kinds of lies: “Lies, damn lies, and statistics.” It’s a sentiment that cannot have gone unnoticed at Howell Raines’s New York Times.

Going beyond simple news coverage, the Times joins with the equally liberal CBS television network’s news department to commission periodic surveys of public opinion. These polls, conducted by telephone, are typically reported in front-page stories, and they tend to shape the political debate for weeks afterward.

Most senators and congressmen take polls only during election campaigns. Even then, their surveys tend to focus on their personal approval ratings rather than on broad issues of public policy. And, of course, the surveys are conducted only in their particular states and districts; they don’t involve national samples.

While today’s White House probably polls frequently—I polled every week for Clinton—it generally doesn’t share its findings broadly within its own party and obviously never gives data to the other side. The Democratic and Republican National Committees poll from time to time, but the average member of Congress has little access to national polling, except for what he or she reads in the newspapers. As the most prestigious of all news organs, when the New York Times announces a poll, politicians everywhere sit up and listen.

Knowing its power, the Times has lately begun using polling techniques pioneered by partisan political survey research firms, testing themes for liberal candidates and probing for weak spots in conservative positions and the Bush administration’s image.

There’s only one problem: The Times’s polls are slanted!

A close evaluation of the newspaper’s polls between 9/11 and Election Day 2002 reveals that the Times weights its data artificially, tilting its numbers to the left.

Here’s how it works: The newspaper’s pollsters interview Democrats, Republicans, and Independents to conduct the survey. Then they weight up the Democratic responses and weight down the Republicans’, pushing the numbers to the left by between one and five points in each survey.

Weighting isn’t always wrong. It’s often a valid way to correct for errors in the sampling. Surveys are conducted by telephoning a random sample of voters. Generally, those conducting the survey don’t know if the people they are calling are Democrats, Republicans, or Independents, young or old, rich or poor, black or white. When the results of the survey come back, the pollster often finds that he or she has too many of one group and not enough of another. So the practice of weighting was developed to rebalance raw data to reflect more accurately proportions of gender, race, ...