Caveat lector

SPINNING BUSH AT WAR (PART 3)! Robinson wrote about Bush, then Gore. But the press only ran with one story:

WEDNESDAY, MAY 7, 2003

A TALE OF TWO STORIES: It wasn’t hard to summarize Walter Robinson’s “great report.” Robinson, a reporter for the Boston Globe, reviewed “160 pages of [Bush’s] records, assembled by the Globe from a variety of sources and supplemented by interviews with former Guard officials.” In his May 23, 2000 report, the scribe explained what he had found: From May 1972 through May 1973, Bush had apparently been absent from his National Guard duties. His commander in Alabama, General William Turnipseed, said that Bush had failed to report for duty in the fall of 1972. And in May 1973, Bush’s officers at Ellington Air Force Base (Houston) couldn’t perform his annual evaluation. “Lt. Bush has not been observed at this unit during the period of this report,” they wrote.

Should the “great report” have laid Bush low? That, of course, is a matter of judgment; it never much flipped us out here. But by normal journalistic standards, Robinson’s report was real news. The Globesman presented new information about a basic part of Bush’s life. And biography has long been a standard way our White House hopefuls are covered. By normal standards, the information in this report should have been reviewed by the rest of the press.

But news orgs fled from the story (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 5/6/03). In particular, it’s amazing to see the way Inside Politics ducked the “great report.” Every day, for sixty long minutes, the CNN program limned the Bush-Gore campaign. But Inside Politics went to great lengths to bury the info in Robinson’s report. The program struggled to keep its viewers from hearing that “missing year” chatter.

And make no mistake—Inside Politics had to work extra-hard to avoid the National Guard story. In a classic case of bad timing, Robinson’s report appeared on May 23, shortly before Memorial Day. Six days later, Bush and Gore were honoring fallen soldiers. At Inside Politics, Bernie Shaw performed nobly:

SHAW (5/29/00): Vice President Gore marked Memorial Day in western Pennsylvania with a wreath and a speech honoring those who gave their lives while touching lightly on his own Vietnam record.

GORE (videotape): And today, we particularly honor those who made the ultimate sacrifice. I know that my service doesn’t in any way match that of the heroes that we honor on this day. I was a reporter, and when I went into the field, I carried a pencil and an M-16.

SHAW: Gore spent six months in Vietnam as an Army journalist…At a similar ceremony near Fort Hood Army Base in Texas, governor George W. Bush paid his tribute to the fallen.

BUSH (videotape): We dedicate ourselves to the memory of the bravest of the brave to remember them in our time for all time.

SHAW: Bush did not once mention his own service as a pilot with the Texas Air National Guard. Instead he focused on the future…

SHAW (8/1/00): After Yale, he was eligible for the military draft.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (videotape): George W. said years ago, “I wasn’t going to Canada, and I wasn’t going to shoot a gun off next to my ear.” He was going to perform some form of military service.

SHAW: His father was a war hero, flew planes and was shot down in World War II. During Vietnam, George W. flew Air National Guard jets back home.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (videotape): He was a good pilot. He was a rapidly promoted pilot. Examining his military records, it’s pretty clear that he got a lot of high grades.

SHAW: After the University of Texas Law School rejected his application, he returned to his New England roots and headed for Harvard Business School.

One final point about that “great report.” If the corps had responded to all of Robinson’s stories the way it did to this one report, there’s every chance that Candidate Gore would have found his way to the White House. During Campaign 2000, no one trashed Gore the way Robinson did. On January 26, 2000, he penned a lengthy, page-one report about what a big crook Gore was (headline: GORE’S LOBBYIST CONTRIBUTORS REAP ACCESS). Two days later, he wrote a detailed, front-page report about what a big liar Gore was (headline: GORE RECORD SCRUTINIZED FOR VERACITY). The timing of these tendentious pieces was striking; the crucial New Hampshire primary was just days away, but Gore was slammed twice on the Globe’s front page (the paper is a major force in New Hampshire). Despite the pounding, Gore survived the Granite State race, and on April 11, Robinson struck again, with a 3000-word front-page story (headline: RECORD SHOWS GORE LONG EMBELLISHING TRUTH). This may have been the most disingenuous article of the entire campaign. How extreme was Robinson’s fakery? He even pretended, three separate times, that he didn’t understand why Gore had claimed “seven years of journalistic experience.” (Duh. Gore had spent two years as an army scribe, then five years at the Nashville Tennessean.) “Journalism” rarely gets this phony.

But it was Robinson’s final shot at Gore that may have decided the race. On September 18, he penned the ludicrous “doggy-pill” story, one of the silliest efforts of the campaign. Gore had been seizing control of the race when this story appeared in the Globe; his lead in the polls had begun to hit double figures. But campaign coverage turned on a dime in the wake of the dog-pill report. Two days later, Walter Shapiro penned an even more ludicrous piece, igniting the “union lullaby” flap. The press returned to its Gore-bashing ways, and the hopeful’s numbers began to drop. This led directly to the trashing Gore took after the October 3 debate.

And there you had the campaign in a nutshell. On May 23, Robinson presented a detailed, well-researched piece about Bush. The press corps buried the story cold. Four months later, he penned his foolish “doggy-pill” piece. It produced a press corps sensation. You could almost say that Campaign 2000 became, that day, A Tale of Two Stories. Robinson’s report on Bush had been deep-sixed. His foofaw on Gore turned the fall.

By the way—do you see how phony Chris Matthews was, implying that Robinson just hated poor Bush (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 5/5/03)? But then, your “press corps” is now just a form of pro wrestling. Before Keith Olbermann asks Matthews more questions, will somebody please let him know?

THURSDAY OR FRIDAY: Bill Bennett’s real vice.

BARTLETT’S INFESTATIONS: By the way, with whom did Robinson work on his doggy-pill story? According to Evan Thomas’ lengthy, post-election report in Newsweek, Robinson worked with the Bush campaign as he developed his arthritis-pill bombshell. Robinson “called a Bush operative named Dan Bartlett” when he began work on the story, Thomas said. According to Thomas, Robinson and Bartlett worked together for weeks, even after the September 18 report appeared in the Globe.

Is there something wrong with this sort of collaboration? Not necessarily, no. If a campaign has valid information to give, there’s no reason why reporters shouldn’t take it. But there is something wrong in cases like this, where campaigns are pushing absurd pseudo-stories. Indeed, how mindless can the modern press be? Here is Thomas’ embarrassing account of Robinson’s ongoing efforts:

EVAN THOMAS: Two weeks [after the September 18 report] Bartlett was still helping the Globe’s Robinson comb through Gore’s “bio spots,” his paid ads extolling his family background. Robinson had a hunch that Shiloh [the Gores’ dog] had been digitally removed from the ads that were still running on TV. “They rubbed out the dog,” Bartlett drawled with a mild giggle. “See if we can’t revive the story one more time.”

Thomas’ short, 539-word piece was, in fact, quite sketchy. Even she found a “seven-month gap” (April 1972 to November 1972) in which Bush performed no service. In some ways, Thomas even seemed a bit slick. For example, she quoted General Turnipseed in such a way as to suggest that Bush had served in Alabama (see Sullivan’s item today). But she failed to mention Turnipseed’s repeated statements that Bush had not served there. In fact, Thomas seemed to refer to only one document which allegedly contradicted what Robinson had said. Here is the passage in question:

JO THOMAS (11/3/00): [Bush spokesman Dan] Bartlett pointed to a document in Mr. Bush’s military records that showed credit for four days of duty ending Nov. 29 and for eight days ending Dec. 14, 1972, and, after he moved back to Houston, on dates in January, April and May.

ROBINSON (10/31/00): Dan Bartlett, a Bush campaign spokesman, pointed to incomplete records—one a torn page without Bush’s name or any discernible dates—as evidence that he did enough drills in Houston in the closing months of his service to satisfy military obligations.

In short, Robinson and Thomas penned reports within four days of each other. Each cited Bartlett as their source—but their information seemed to stand in stark contrast. And we think you know what happened next. No one made the slightest effort to sort out the matters in question. The press let the story drop; as far as we know, no one has ever tried to sort out the contradictory Globe/Times reporting. Obvious question: Was Thomas referring to the “document” which was in fact “a torn page without Bush’s name?” This document had been described before—and its value, of course, was enormously shaky. Is that the document on which Thomas relied? From her report, there is no way to tell—and the corps didn’t try to find out.

By the way, do you see why that C-SPAN caller asked his apt question: “Why is it we cannot find out about George Bush’s military record?”

At any rate, none of this speaks to the question we raised—the corps’ avoidance of Robinson’s “great report” when it appeared back in May. Whatever document Thomas was citing, it’s clear that the Bush campaign didn’t bring it forward back in the spring of the year. Here at THE HOWLER, we never much cared about the Bush-in-the-National-Guard “missing year” story. But Robinson’s May 23 report was real news—and the corps struggled hard to ignore it. Last week, a group of scribes seemed to be spinning the story down still.