The Silencing Read online

  Yale criminal law school professor Jed Rubenfeld wrote a New York Times op-ed questioning the ability of university administrators to adjudicate rape. He also noted the obvious fact that false rape accusations are a serious problem that can destroy people’s lives.96 Gloria Steinem protégé Jessica Valenti attacked Rubenfield as a rape apologist and victim-blamer in the Guardian. Blasting Valenti for her unhinged smear campaign, Reason’s Robby Soave wrote that Valenti “established that critics of her liberal feminist view are not opponents in a public policy debate—they are the enemies of rape victims. This is totally unjustified demagoguery. She might as well be saying, ‘You’re with me or you’re with the terrorists.’”97

  If the illiberal left has such an airtight case regarding their claims about campus rape, then they should make them without trying to delegitimize people who make reasonable, thoughtful arguments against their narrative. Instead, they seek to silence anyone who points out flaws in their claims. They know from experience that they can shut down debate with smear campaigns, so they do.

  Rather than apologizing, Emily Yoffe responded to her critics. “As I was working on this story, several of my friends counseled me not do [sic] it,” she said. “Talking about things women can do to protect themselves from rape is the third rail, they said. But why be a journalist unless you’re willing to dig into difficult subjects and report your findings?”98 Yoffe is one of the few brave journalists willing to face the inevitable illiberal onslaught in her quest to report the truth. But there are far more journalists like those who counseled Yoffe to not go off script. The silencing campaign is effective.

  CLOSET CONSERVATIVE

  One of the favored silencing tactics is to accuse those who refuse to sing from the illiberal song sheet of being secret conservatives. We saw this with lifelong Democrat Michelle Rhee and the self-identified independent Campbell Brown. This tactic is most often used on journalists who investigate Democratic politicians or express views at odds with liberal orthodoxy. The uber-bully in this regard is Media Matters, a non-profit organization funded by some of the Democratic Party’s most influential donors. Its mission has been explained variously as an attempt to root out conservative misinformation in the media and to wage “guerrilla warfare and sabotage”99 against Fox News. Media Matters works in tandem with other illiberal left media outlets, which treat their propaganda as actual news. One of their favorite tactics is to “out” mainstream journalists as conservatives when they start down the wrong trail of reporting. It’s done to delegitimize journalists who file stories that could damage the Democratic Party or the left’s collective credibility.

  The treatment of Sharyl Attkisson’s resignation and book, Stonewalled: My Fight for Truth Against the Forces of Obstruction, Intimidation, and Harassment in Obama’s Washington is Exhibit A of this tactic. Attkisson is an award-winning journalist who worked as an anchor for CNN from 1990 to 1993 and as an investigative reporter at CBS from 1993 to 2014. She won a prestigious Edward R. Murrow award and five Emmy awards for her investigative work and was one of the first journalists to fly with combat missions over Kosovo. She became a target of the illiberal left due to her investigative efforts into the Obama administration, from the Fast and Furious gun scandal to the controversy over the Benghazi attack that killed an American ambassador to the administration’s failed green-energy investments.

  Suddenly, a tough reporter who had exposed fraud and corruption on both sides of the aisle was transformed by the illiberal left into a secret conservative who couldn’t be trusted.

  In a piece headlined “Was Reporter Sharyl Attkisson Too Right-Wing for CBS?” Lloyd Grove quoted a former CBS News colleague making the anonymous accusation, “‘She is definitely not being truthful about being non-partisan. She has an agenda and a political bent.’”100 This is eerily familiar to the claims the teachers unions made about Campbell Brown—all of which turned out to be false. A gigantic fly in the ointment for the illiberal left is Attkisson’s history of investigating both Democrats and Republicans. If she had a conservative agenda it’s hard to explain her investigative work on Republican fundraising and uncovering fraud around Halliburton’s contracts in Iraq. One of Attkisson’s Emmys was awarded for an investigative series titled, “Bush Administration’s Bait and Switch on TARP and the Bank Bailout.” These inconvenient facts are deliberately ignored because they would undermine the campaign to delegitimize Attkisson, who was simply doing the job that other reporters neglected to do in holding the Obama administration accountable for its actions.

  Media Matters posted a piece about Attkisson that claimed she might be promoting a political (read: conservative) agenda because Republican Congressman Darrell Issa of California toasted her at a party for her book. Case closed. “She left CBS amid claims from colleagues that her work, which often focused on trumped-up claims of Obama administration misdeeds, had a ‘political agenda,’” Media Matters’ Matt Gertz wrote, “‘leading network executives to doubt the impartiality of her reporting.’” Gertz based his accusations on quotes from anonymous sources cited in a post by another news outlet.101 The claims were directly at odds with everything Attkisson had said publicly about her departure.

  MSNBC’s Chris Hayes recorded an interview with Attkisson ostensibly to discuss her book. When the segment aired, he introduced it by portraying his guest—who could not respond to his allegations since she was not there—as a suspicious character. He intoned, “Attkisson departed CBS News amid criticism over her reporting on Benghazi, Fast and Furious and other alleged scandals being pursued by conservatives and Republicans.” Who criticized her? What appeared on the screen as Hayes made this claim was a screenshot of the same piece that Media Matters cited. Never mind that all the sources were anonymous. Hayes continued, “While CBS executives reportedly came to doubt the impartiality of her reporting, conservative groups honored Attkisson as a mainstream media ally.” Translation: if conservatives applaud your reporting and think you are “mainstream” then you must be a right-wing mole. When liberals think a reporter does good work, that’s “mainstream.”

  The interview had Hayes asking Attkisson, “People are watching you like, ‘Are we going to see you as a Fox News contributor or writing for a conservative outlet next’; can you tell me right here that this is not the way this is going?”102 When journalists work for media networks known to be liberal it proves absolutely nothing. But if you go to Fox News, which Attkisson did not, then in Hayes’s book you are not legitimate. (He learned this from the Obama White House.) Hayes later sneered, “You’re like the toast of the town over at Fox News.”

  If Attkisson needed someone to commiserate with, she could always talk with Peter Boyer. During his career, he has worked for many of the most respected names in journalism—including eighteen years as a staff writer for the New Yorker. Boyer’s resume also includes such names as PBS, NPR, Vanity Fair, the New York Times, and a stint as senior correspondent for the merged Newsweek and the Daily Beast. He now serves as editor-at-large for Fox News, an unpardonable sin to many liberals.

  But long before he landed at Fox News, illiberal left busybodies were busy smearing a great journalist for being too fair-minded. Matt Yglesias at the American Prospect wrote that “Boyer appears to have made something of a career for himself as a conservative interloper at otherwise liberal media outlets.”103 His proof? Boyer’s Vanity Fair profile of Rush Limbaugh “drew praise from the conservative Media Research Center as being ‘fair.’”104 His complaint speaks volumes. Yglesias believes that treating conservatives fairly is proof that you are not a real journalist, when the opposite should be true. The notion of a “fair” journalist doesn’t belong in the illiberal left lexicon; a journalist is either with them or he or she is a secret conservative, by which they mean traitor to the properly left-wing media. Yglesias also complained about Boyer’s numerous investigative segments on the Clinton administration scandals as a PBS Frontline correspondent. He took particular issue with the fact that a few of t
he segments focused on scandals where the accused was exonerated.

  So, a reporter doing an investigative piece into accusations makes him a bad journalist and undercover ideologue if the subject is later exonerated. What does that mean then for the armies of journalists who were the judge, jury, and executioner for Scooter Libby who they “knew” leaked Valerie Plame’s name? The illiberal left didn’t investigate Scooter Libby, they obsessively harassed and accused a person who ended up not being the leaker. Anyone who questioned their attack was smeared as well. When it was revealed that Colin Powell’s chief of staff leaked Plame’s name, nobody in the media stepped up to take responsibility or apologize. Yglesias has no problem with that, but smears a journalist for doing investigations into the Clinton administration, as if investigating presidential administrations isn’t the job of a reporter.

  In a post that would have made Joe McCarthy proud, a Media Matters headline blared “Who Is Fox News’ Peter Boyer?” Like Yglesias, Media Matters found Boyer very suspicious because there are conservatives who don’t hate him. Media Matters breathlessly recounted that Rush Limbaugh once called Peter Boyer a “great, great guy,” and Sean Hannity thought that Boyer’s Newsweek profile of Sarah Palin was “actually somewhat favorable.”105 Media Matters acknowledged that Boyer had an “impressive resume” but insinuated he was hired by Fox News because he wrote a 2011 New Yorker profile of Roger Ailes that didn’t depict the Fox News CEO as Satan (Media Matters’ preferred storyline). Their cherry-picked facts from a nearly forty-year career in journalism were presented as an open-and-shut case against Boyer.106

  Ron Fournier, editorial director of the National Journal, previously worked at the Associated Press for two decades and won the White House Correspondents’ Association Merriam Smith Award four times. His credentials suddenly meant nothing when he dared to write pieces about liberals and Democrats that were less than glowing. During the 2008 election when he was AP’s Washington bureau chief, Fournier wrote that then-Senator Barack Obama was “bordering on arrogance.” He quoted several of the candidate’s statements, such as Obama’s belief that he would overtake Senator Hillary Clinton’s lead in the polls because, as the Illinois senator said, “to know me is to love me.”107

  “You’d think that writing a content-free hit piece like that would mean that the writer is a friend of the Clinton campaign. Not so much,” read a post at the progressive news site Firedoglake. “This guy has an agenda in play, and he is not on our side. He wasn’t on our side when he took a bat to Edwards’ kneecaps, he wasn’t on our side when he went after Hillary, and it’s not on our behalf that he’s concerned about Obama’s character.”108 Why would a journalist at the Associated Press be presumed to be on the “liberal side”? Probably because most journalists are liberals and many aren’t great at hiding their bias. But there are a handful of journalists who aren’t partisan or ideologically aligned with either side. There are also reporters who do have a bias, but are diligent about checking that bias in their effort to provide fair-minded reporting. It would be more accurate to say that fair-minded reporting is what Fournier produces.

  Still, Media Matters’ Eric Boehlert accused Fournier’s reporting of aiding Senator John McCain’s presidential campaign in 2008.109 A Daily Kos diarist called Fournier an “AP Conservative shill”110 who needed to be “stopped” in a piece called “No Excuses: Ron Fournier Needs to Be Recused or Fired.”111

  MoveOn.org mobilized an e-mail campaign for people to contact AP to “stop the anti-Democrat, pro-McCain bias,”112 while Firedoglake’s similar campaign113 to e-mail Fournier’s then-boss, Kathleen Carroll, simply said “Remove Ron Fournier.”114

  Most recently, Fournier has outraged the left by writing in the National Journal about Obama’s failure to break Washington gridlock (“What If Obama Can’t Lead?”)115 and for a piece titled “Why I’m Getting Sick of Defending Obamacare.”116 The impact of the illiberal left’s desire to delegitimize him and smear his reputation is most clearly illustrated in a hit piece by Tom Kludt at the liberal website Talking Points Memo. Kludt insinuated that Fournier was a conservative because the National Journal editor critiques Obama’s leadership, his columns are regularly aggregated by Matt Drudge, he’s admired by conservative MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, and as a reporter for the Associated Press, he “had an email correspondence with Karl Rove that was a bit too friendly.”117

  Reporters, commentators, and fair-minded liberals beware: if you relay facts that the illiberal left doesn’t like, you’ll be labeled a biased, bitter, agenda-driven conservative who should be ignored if not outright shunned or fired from your job.

  THREE

  ILLIBERAL INTOLERANCE AND INTIMIDATION

  We had other freedoms, the really important ones, that are denied the youth of today. We could say what we liked; they can’t. . . . We could, and did, differ from fashionable opinion with impunity, and would have laughed [political correctness] to scorn, had our society been weak and stupid enough to let it exist.

  —GEORGE MACDONALD FRASER

  In the summer of 2012, Chick-fil-A president Dan Cathy told an interviewer for a religious magazine that he supported the traditional family. The illiberal left swiftly launched a vicious smear campaign against Cathy and the popular fifty-five-year-old fast food restaurant.1 Protesters descended on Chick-fil-A restaurants across the country to condemn the chain’s alleged “bigotry” and “intolerance.” To the illiberal left, any opposition to same-sex marriage translates into hatred of gay people. At Salon.com, Cathy was called an “unapologetic homophobe”2 and the Village Voice deemed him a “homophobic chicken peddler.”3 At the feminist website Jezebel, readers were warned, “Don’t eat at Chick-fil-A. Not only are the owners bigoted jerks, if you get sexually assaulted in the parking lot, you’ll have to marry the guy. It’s the biblical way.”4 At Slate Cathy’s position opposing same-sex marriage was characterized as the equivalent of racism: “Racism persists, but at least racists have been formally politically defanged. Homophobes, meanwhile, have not,” complained the writer.5

  One protestor, Adam Smith—a senior executive at a medical supplies manufacturing company—set out to do some defanging. Video recording himself as he waited in a Tucson, Arizona, Chick-fil-A drive-through, Smith explained that he was there for a free water and to “say a few things.” As he waited, Smith noted that the people in cars ahead of him, “have to have their Chick-fil-A anti-gay breakfast sandwich. It always tastes better when it’s full of hate.” When Smith finally reached the drive-through window he began berating a young woman named Rachel as though she was employed by the Ku Klux Klan. He accused her of working for a “hateful corporation” and said, “I don’t know how you live with yourself and work here. I don’t understand it. This is a horrible corporation with horrible values.” Throughout the abuse, the fast food worker calmly murmured, “I disagree,” and assured him, “We don’t treat any of our customers differently.” She tried to deflect his attempts to start an argument and explained she preferred to keep her personal views out of the workplace.

  As Smith nastily condescended to Rachel, she was kind. “It’s my pleasure to serve you always,” she said. Rachel told Smith she was uncomfortable with being taped, but he didn’t stop. Despite his disrespect, she remained respectful, saying “It’s my pleasure to serve you always.” As Smith departed she said, “I hope you have a really nice day.” Mr. Tolerance was so pleased with himself that he posted a video of a woman saying she didn’t want to be recorded on YouTube.6 In this story, we are expected to believe the woman working the drive-through is the intolerant one.

  After Smith’s company fired him from his CFO position for verbally accosting a young woman, he posted a YouTube apology.7 In an interview, Rachel said she forgave him and felt it was unfair for him to be dragged through the mud any more. “I’m Christian and God tells us to love thy neighbor,” she said.8

  Chick-fil-A was considered so evil that college students started petitions to have the restauran
t kicked off their campuses.9 Emory University ejected the restaurant from its on-campus food court10 after the administration felt it necessary to release a public statement censuring the company,11 and Davidson College announced it would no longer serve the chain’s food at student activities.12 Duke University announced that Chick-fil-A was not going to be readmitted to their student union when they finished renovations. Larry Moneta, Duke’s vice president of Student Affairs said, in explanation, “Duke University seeks to eliminate discrimination and promote equality for the LGBT and all our communities in all our endeavors.”13

  To be clear, Chick-fil-A had not been accused of discriminating against gay customers or employees. The company was targeted because its Christian owner reiterated an orthodox, and until recently unremarkable, Christian belief in an interview. It’s the same view held by Pope Francis.14 Think about that for a minute, and think about what it says for the tolerance of the illiberal left and its commitment to freedom of thought and speech.

  Debate and persuasion should be the default response when someone encounters a person who does not share their view, not demands that the other person change their position or be pushed to the margins of polite society. Still, illiberal left mayors across the country threatened to discriminate against a company for not sharing their beliefs about marriage. Boston mayor Tom Menino said of Chick-fil-A, “If they need licenses in the city, it will be very difficult.”15 In other words, cities have a right to discriminate against Christian-owned businesses if their owners have opinions that don’t jibe with the illiberal left. Chicago mayor and former White House chief-of-staff Rahm Emanuel joined the crusade, discouraging any expansion by the restaurant in Chicago because, “Chick-fil-A values are not Chicago values.”16