MediaWatch: March 1998
Table of Contents:
Turn Against the Right
Journalist David Brock learned the secret of how to get on television. Blast away at your former allies in the conservative movement as a Clinton-hating "neo-Stalinist thought police," and the invitations will come.
The networks did not bite in 1992 when Brock first exposed Anita Hill’s weak case against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas in The American Spectator. When Brock transformed that article into the book The Real Anita Hill in 1993, the networks balked again, except for NBC. On May 3, the Today show paired Brock with Hill defender Charles Ogletree, who charged him with "countless errors of fact" and "outright lies." NBC didn’t allow conservatives to debate pro-Hill authors.
Co-host Katie Couric asked Brock: "The American Spectator is an ultraconservative magazine, and it seems as if you are an advocate for Justice Thomas in the book. Is it really fair to call yourself an objective journalist?" Pro-Hill journalists were not asked that question. Later that year, none of the networks interviewed Brock when his Troopergate expose in the Spectator rocked the White House.
But when liberal journalists Jill Abramson and Jane Mayer came out with their anti-Thomas book Strange Justice in 1994, all the networks interviewed them and ABC devoted a 60-minute Turning Point special and a Nightline to their charges. Abramson and Mayer appeared on nearly every interview show on TV, and demanded at every one that Brock not be admitted to debate them. Despite a tough point-by-point refutation of their book in the Spectator, Brock was shut out.
All that changed in June 1997. Brock wrote an article for Esquire magazine titled "Confessions of a Right-Wing Hit Man" charging "neo-Stalinist" conservatives cared more about destroying Clinton than the truth. NBC’s Today interviewed Brock again — but without any conservative to attack him. He also appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press.
On March 10, after Esquire publicists flacked his latest article, a gimmicky open letter to Bill Clinton apologizing for focusing on his sex life, he basically spent entire days in front of television cameras. He appeared (unopposed) on all three morning shows, as well as shots on NBC’s Meet the Press, CBS’s Face the Nation, CNN’s Crossfire, two CNBC shows, and MSNBC.
