RW attacks on "climategate" and "pedophile gays"

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FRI__3:06 PM 12/11/2009
Media Matters: With "Climategate" and Jennings smears, the right goes guerilla
The conservative reaction to President Obama's election is turning
downright Faustian.
As the rhetoric on the right has grown increasingly shrill, a few
conservatives have raised their voices in alarm, counseling their
ideological kin to step back from the abyss. Former Bush speechwriter David
Frum wrote in August that "the increasingly angry tone of incitement being
heard from right-of-center broadcasters" is likely to lead to politically
motivated violence. Not two weeks ago, conservative blogger Charles Johnson
articulated the reasons behind his departure from the right, citing
conservative support for "anti-science bad craziness" and "[h]atred for
President Obama that goes far beyond simply criticizing his policies."
If the past week is any indication, those warnings have been roundly
ignored. The conservative media, in their quest to derail the president's
progressive agenda, have thrown their lot in with the grisly underbelly of
political activism -- dumpster-diving thieves, extremist hate groups, and
scam-artist videographers who sacrifice credibility for sensationalism and
value Web traffic over truth.
Take, for example, the hackers who illegally accessed email servers at the
University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit and stole thousands of
emails. From Fox News on down to the conservative blogs, right-wingers have
seized on the stolen documents as "proof" that climate change science is a
"hoax" and attacked the global scientific consensus on climate change as a
"cult." As Media Matters explained last week, the emails show nothing of the
sort, and they are being wildly distorted. But the right not only
wholeheartedly embraced these illegally obtained documents, it actively took
steps to hide the fact that they were obtained by theft. Fox News spent an
entire week describing the emails as "leaked," "revealed," and "uncovered."
The conservative media critics at NewsBusters chastised the media for
"paint[ing] the 'stolen' e-mails not as laudatory whistle-blowing, but as an
unwanted impediment to the left's global warming agenda."
There were also new developments this week in another bogus "controversy"
being stoked by right-wingers: the ongoing homophobic smear campaign against
Department of Education official Kevin Jennings. Led by Andrew Breitbart and
The Washington Times, conservatives falsely accused Jennings' organization
of handing out explicit sexual materials to children, and smeared Jennings,
who is gay, as a "deviant," a "pedophile," the "buggery czar," and a
"mega-pervert." It was later revealed that the falsehoods upon which these
smears are based originated with a group called MassResistance, a
Massachusetts-based anti-gay hate group that purports to chronicle the
"brutal fascist tactics" of the "homosexual movement," and whose leader
compared the gay rights movement to Nazism.
Speaking of Andrew Breitbart, the Drudge-protégé and Twitter fiend received
some bad news this week. An investigation by former Massachusetts Attorney
General Scott Harshbarger into Breitbart's much-publicized videos purporting
to show ACORN aiding an undercover pimp and prostitute in tax evasion
determined that the videos contained no evidence that the organization acted
illegally. The report also found that the videos, shot by conservative
activists James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles, "appear to have been edited, in
some cases substantially, including the insertion of a substitute voiceover
for significant portions of Mr. O'Keefe's and Ms. Giles' comments, which
makes it difficult to determine the questions to which ACORN employees are
responding." Perhaps he'll have better luck with his next project -- rooting
through ACORN's trash to find incriminating documents.
The newest right-wing smear centers on a deceptively cropped undercover
video shot by an anti-abortion activist at a Planned Parenthood office in
Wisconsin. The Fox Nation and other right-wingers claimed the video shows
Planned Parenthood trying to force women to have abortions. In reality, the
video is so heavily edited it's impossible to determine the context of any
of the Planned Parenthood staffer's supposedly damning statements.
These are the big stories for conservatives right now, and they're all based
on thievery, the smears of an extremist fringe group, and disreputable
hucksters with video cameras.
Now, it's probably not completely accurate to say that the right's embrace
of these types of people is a Faustian bargain -- after all, such an
arrangement typically involves the good being corrupted or seduced by the
evil. When it comes to the conservative media, which are already notorious
for slander and falsehood, it's more like the next step of a natural
progression. The real danger is that they are helping to mainstream these
fringe characters. The Washington Post published an op-ed by Sarah Palin who
used the -- ahem -- "publication of damaging e-mails from a climate research
center" as a pretext to lie and mislead on climate science. The Post
defended publishing Palin's op-ed by claiming that it didn't have time to
fact-check it and that Palin "is someone who stirs discussion."
And that's exactly the mindset these conservatives are preying upon: Forget
the facts; we just want eyeballs on the screens.
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