Howard Kurtz: Downplaying Durbin, Jumping on Rove
Howard Kurtz, in Washington Post (6-27-05)
When Senate Democratic whip Dick Durbin used a Nazi analogy to describe incidents of prisoner abuse at Guantanamo Bay, it wasn't much of a story at first.
Even when White House spokesman Scott McClellan called Durbin's remarks "reprehensible," "NBC Nightly News" gave the matter three sentences and the other network newscasts ignored it. The NBC and ABC newscasts covered Durbin's tearful apology last week, but the "CBS Evening News" took a pass.
"I just don't think it's that big a deal," says CBS anchor Bob Schieffer, adding that the Illinois senator's apology got squeezed out on a heavy news day. "He said he went too far and I take him at his word. We don't cover every apology by a politician who says he didn't mean things quite that way."
The Durbin controversy has been fueled by a chorus of outrage from conservative columnists, bloggers and radio hosts, turning widely overlooked remarks into a full-scale furor for a lawmaker who initially refused to apologize. In that sense, it is the mirror image of the Downing Street Memo, the British document questioning the Bush administration's march to war in Iraq, which drew even less media attention until liberal advocacy groups and bloggers spent six weeks berating journalists for burying the story.
For decades, the establishment media were like a walled village, largely insulated from the outside world. But technology has produced so many cracks in the wall that previously ignored stories can seep in -- sometimes in a trickle, sometimes a flood -- when partisans and pressure groups make enough waves.
In the old days, writes New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen, "if the press ruled against you, you just weren't news." Now, he says, aggrieved parties "go into Supreme News Court and say: 'The press denied us, but we have a case.' "
Bloggers first made their influence felt in 2002 when the media downplayed Trent Lott's praise of Strom Thurmond's segregationist presidential campaign. The fierce debates over CBS's Dan Rather, CNN's Eason Jordan and right-wing blogger Jeff Gannon were fueled by ideological critics.
Durbin made his remarks on the evening of June 14 to a virtually empty Senate chamber. Citing an FBI account of how prisoners at Guantanamo Bay had been chained in extreme temperatures and deprived of food and water, Durbin said such tactics were reminiscent of the Nazis, Soviet gulags and Cambodian despot Pol Pot.
Conservative radio host Laura Ingraham denounced Durbin after her producer Lee Habeeb saw the remarks on C-SPAN, the Chicago Tribune noted. Rush Limbaugh accused the media of circling the wagons around Durbin because "they share his contempt for George W. Bush."
The next day, June 16, the Washington Times splashed the story on its front page and McClellan ripped Durbin at the White House. Sean Hannity said on his Fox News program that the senator's remarks were "insidious" and "repugnant." MSNBC's new conservative host, Tucker Carlson, called the comments "outrageous" and "factually wrong." On CNN, National Review's Kate O'Beirne accused Durbin of "a stunning premeditated slander of American troops."
On June 17, however, the New York Times ran a three-paragraph story. The Washington Post carried a seven-paragraph account. The Orlando Sentinel ran a two-sentence wire. USA Today and the Los Angeles Times published nothing. The Tribune put its home-state senator on the front page, while an editorial called him "desperate for attention."
In the next few days, as Republicans rejected Durbin's tepid statement of regret, conservative bloggers ripped Durbin, and Fox debated the issue on one show after another. "The question for us is not whether we overplayed it," says Fox News Senior Vice President John Moody. "The question for everyone else is, did you underplay it?"