Wag the Press Dog

By: Larry Beinhart Some things can be better said, and better seen, in fiction than in faction.

The following is a piece from my new novel, "The Librarian," a political thriller about an election very much like this one. The differences are that the sitting Republican president seeking re-election is Augustus ?Gus? Winthrop Scott and the Democratic challenger is a woman, Anne Lynn Murphy. I created the character Ms. Murphy over a year ago. I made her a Vietnam vet ? she?d been a nurse who became a doctor after the war, thena TV personality and then a Senator ? and reality has caught up with me at least as far as that went.

Her political consultant is an ex-reality TV show producer named Calvin Hagopian.

In the excerpt below we see the media being spun. The august New York Times, to be specific. If I had written the things that I say about the Times as faction, and if anyone had the taken me seriously, then it would all get bogged down in accounting details: How often is the Times really spun, not spun, how much spun and is it ever unspun?

But in fiction we are allowed to use one emotional example that demonstrates the essence of the situation.

Of course in reality, all our more successful politicians do the same. They find or create some story, either a specific anecdote like Ronald Reagan?s welfare queen with her Cadillacs or a narrative like George
Bush?s WMDs, and they tell it to the media which repeats it, and if it is repeating without debunking, the fiction becomes fact and that becomes reality.

So, from "The Librarian," chapter 47:

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At forty-seven minutes after nine on the Sunday night before Election Day, there was a knock on the door and one of Hagopian's assistants came in with Monday morning's New York Times.

An unnamed source from an unnamed national security agency had heard rumors that a major terrorist group had plans to launch attacks on the United States if Anne Lynn Murphy was elected president. The unnamed terrorists believed, the unsourced report stated, that a country run by a woman would be "weak" and unwilling to defend itself.

The headline could have been, "Desperate Scott Administration Leaks Fake Security Document to Scare Voters."

But it wasn't. The headline was "Terrorists Plan Attack If Woman Leads Nation." And it was on the front page.

Meanwhile, Anne Lynn's husband, Mike, the Idaho television producer, and the first person who had a real sense of her talent and who had put her on the air, felt despair. His instincts told him that this "leaked" report about terrorists attacking if a woman was president was going to tip the balance back to her opponent Gus Scott. And Scott's people had chosen well, using The New York Times to stick the knife in her back.

Mike had become radicalized during the course of the campaign. Which was odd because the campaign itself was always striving to move toward the center. Positions were not necessarily changed, but they were continually being rephrased to find that place where they achieved maximum market share, bringing ? or keeping ? potential voters in, yet not driving any voters away. It was an arduous process and it was one in which it was difficult to stay true to any vision. He gave his wife high marks for negotiating the process and yet retaining her integrity.

It was also odd that having been a TV producer had kept him na?ve for a long time. He knew hundreds of news professionals personally and every single one of them thought of themselves as good people, honest, fair, objective and idealistic. Sensibly idealistic, not
self-destructively idealistic to be sure, call it realistically
idealistic.

Now he thought of them all, including the self that he had been, as deluded. Self-deluded. Indeed, the capacity to survive and the ability to thrive in one of the big corporations that served up news as infotainment was in direct proportion to a journalist's capacity for
self-delusion.

The Right had spent so many years castigating The New York Times as the flagship of the liberal media that everyone believed it, including the Left, including the people at the Times themselves. But the truth
was that the Times was the house organ of the Establishment. It was committed, both editorially and in its presentation of the news, to the interests of an Establishment: continuity, security and legitimacy.

Therefore it generally supported business and finance, the American version of empire, the government and the president, until, and unless, some excess was so egregious that it posed a threat to continuity, security or legitimacy. Then the Times would turn on the destabilizers, as they did, at last, on the Vietnam War, on Nixon and on Enron, in the interests of restoring continuity, security and legitimacy.

In its Establishment heart, The New York Times had decided for Scott and they had, therefore, given him a great gift, they had dressed an underhanded campaign stratagem in the cloak of objectivity and bestowed upon it the authority of the newspaper of record and it would now play out through the whole media world as a real revelation to be taken at face value.

Mike looked at Hagopian, and he saw that Hagopian was tired, that he was ill, that he perhaps did not, probably did not, have the one last shot of genius that was needed to spin this one back and make it turn in upon itself. The campaign was coming to an end with terrifying suddenness.