The other day I read through what Alexanda had to say. (She was the woman who was supposed to have been John Kerry's "intern problem.")
It was an alternatingly frustrating and fun read. It was fun to see the slimeball press types get called out by name. It was even kinda fun to be introduced to Alex's own spoiled version of reality. She really does live in a different universe from the one I grew up in, not that that is good or bad, just very different. Verrrrry different -- ka-ching $$$.
It was frustrating to read first hand what a seemingly self-absorbed dolt Alex seems to be. I mean, she is at the center of an attempt to destroy the political career of what is likely the next president of the United States, and all she can keep coming back to is "how did they choose me?" What was it that Rick guy said in Casablanca? What, you don't remember Alex?
"...it doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world."
Or in this case, the problems of a former Columbia School of Journalism student who worked briefly for AP. Alex never seems to get it through her pretty little head that she didn't matter, it was the smear that mattered, and if she fit the bill, then fine.
Another, perhaps even more frustrating aspect of the piece is the fact that Alex does manage to track down the apparent source of the smear -- with connections to Tom DeLay's office no less -- but fails to connect that stunning fact to the rest of the narrative and indeed to the rest of the political thuggery of which she was a peripheral victim.
<The more people I talked to, the more one supposed source kept coming up, a woman whom Drudge had called my “close friend.” I won’t mention her name here, but she had worked for a Republican lobbyist—Bill Jarrell, who runs a firm called Washington Strategies, gives money to Bush, and had been a top aide to Tom DeLay. I called her immediately to ask her if she had been telling people I’d had an affair with Kerry. “I may have said you knew him,” she said, sounding as if she were choosing her words with great care. “I may have said you had dinner with him. But I never said you had an affair!”
Then another reporter also said she’d told him I had slept with Kerry. I couldn’t believe one of my closest friends would tell such a thing—we went all the way back to tenth grade. I had even asked her to be a bridesmaid. She denied it again, then softened her position. “I may have told Bill that you knew Kerry. Look, I was once with you when you phoned Kerry’s office and then he called you right back. And I thought, How amazing, and I got excited and I told friends about it.” She started to cry. “I’m very, very sorry,” she sobbed. “If all this leads back to me, it wasn’t intentional.”
I called Jarrell and asked him what he thought. “Come on Alex,” he said. “Who else could it be?”>
Somehow the DeLay connection seems to get washed out of all the discussions of this matter... and who knows, maybe the wingnut right is so incestuous that they all know/work/screw each other anyway? But I would think an intrepid young student fresh from journalism school would want to unravel this as far as it goes, not wallow in the self-pity of having lost a "good [sic] friend."
Finally, it was a bit frustrating to listen to Alex beat up on the Internet as if the ability to post articles on line rather than in print made the damndest bit of difference in the quality of the people behind the words. Because that is where the blame lies -- with the people, hot for a buck, celebrity or simply beholden to the "means justifies the end" GOP/bolshevik ideology -- not with a new technological means of disseminating information. This is the oldest dodge in the journalistic book -- "we are reporting on the media coverage of the story, not the original, tainted tawdry tidbit itself -- <wink wink, nod nod>."
Didn't Alex live through the Lewinsky scandal? And didn't she learn anything other than "I'm prettier than Lewinsky"? Didn't it strike Alex as a bit odd that during an unravelling war in Iraq that the press is crawling all over Nairobi looking for a chippy? If so, she din't mention it. But, yes, Alex, the press is happy, indeed eager to report trumped up sex charges as long as it's not their ass hanging out in the breeze... so they resort to the Internet to break the tawdriest of smear jobs. (And when they can't do that then they resort to the Judy Miller defense: "I jus' repor' what the growed ups wan's me to repor', I ain't no truth detectah").
This smear would have been launched one way or another, If not the Internet, then through a tabloid, and if not a tabloid then through the radio. The problem is not the medium, the problem is people without integrity, and others equally lacking (but more socially "acceptable") who are willing to pile on. Do you think, Alex, that it just so happens that Drudge (a willing tool of the GOP) broke the story, and coincidence that the story gets amplified by Rush, where it is picked up by Fox.... starting to get the picture?
I think what we are talking about is called the "mighty Wurlitzer." The lesson to draw is not the danger inherent in the Internet, which after is just another key on the media Wurlitzer, but the social networks inside the Wurlitzer that makes the sound resonate. And despite the best efforts of sleeze like Chris Vlasto this time the Wurlitzer didn't get full wind up, but it did become a campaign issue and a undoubtedly will survive as part of the right-wing mythology along with Vince Foster's murder and Al Gore's "invention" of the Internet.
Alex deserves credit for stepping forward, despite her awkwardness, and seeking to rebut the Wurlitzer, even if in so doing she has proven herself naive of the depravity of journalism today.
10:26:28 PM 
|
