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Never Imagined I’d Trigger a Twitter Meltdown by Geraldo Rivera

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Last Saturday afternoon I was working in my home office, waiting for the NFL playoff games to get started for the day, when I tuned in C-Span’s Book TV, which I often do on weekends. I was pleased to find they were airing an interview with NPR media reporter David Folkenflik discussing his current book, Murdoch’s World, which I first covered on this blog during BEA last June.Murdoch's World

Folkenflik told a story, new to me, involving Geraldo Rivera, FOX News, that prompted the above tweet, with the vulgar epithet from Roger Ailes. To be accurate, Folkenflik never accused Rivera of lying, that’s the conclusion I drew in my tweet while watching the Book TV segment. About an hour after I sent out my tweet, Rivera, whose Twitter handle I had used in the message as a matter of record not to provoke him, saw my message and quickly chose to renew a feud with Folkenflik that he’s nurtured since 2001. You could say Rivera took bait I put out there, though I hadn’t imagined he would chomp on it, or quite so hard. The whole thing happened more than twelve years ago, but for Rivera, whose reporting and honesty were to many observers convincingly questioned by Folkenflik’s reporting, it must be fresh as yesterday. As noticed widely on Twitter, and even yesterday by Politico, in a mounting series of  rage-filled tweets, Rivera has directed ad hominem venom at Folkenflik. Here’s an as-concise-as-I-can-make it rendition of the story Folkenflik told, quoting a modest chunk of his book to amplify what he said on TV.

It begins in 2001, when Folkenflik was the Baltimore Sun‘s media reporter, before he moved to NPR. On Book TV he explained that after 9/11, Rivera “bristled at the idea of staying behind a desk while a war raged elsewhere,” so he left a hosting job at CNBC and went to FOX, to become the network’s chief correspondent in Afghanistan, which the US had invaded a few weeks after the terrorist attacks in NYC and DC. The book picks up the story:

“He was, Rivera announced, on a quest to track down ‘the dastardly one’ (his personal term for Osama Bin Laden). On an early December day, he showed footage from Afghanistan, twice in a twenty-four hour period, in which he prayed over the site where he said three American soldiers and numerous allied Afghan fighters had been killed by a US bombing raid in what was euphemistically called a ‘friendly fire’ incident. He said he had seen their tattered uniforms and showed himself, on video, reciting the Lord’s Prayer.”

A day later he filed his broadcast story from Tora Bora. Thing is, the only incident of friendly fire suffered by American troops that occurred in the same time frame was in Kandahar, 300 miles from Tora Bora. Folkenflik continues in his book, “I talked to reporters in Afghanistan, people who handled logistics at rival networks, senior staffers with international relief agencies and human rights groups active there, and US military officials. None of them thought the journey from Tora Bora to Kandahar and back was feasible by road in less than twenty-four hours, while an official at the Pentagon said Rivera certainly had not hitched a ride with US forces or aircraft. When I asked [FOX] how he could have made this round trip down and back in a single day…a FOX News spokeswoman angrily asked whether I was saying he made it up.”

No information that FOX or Rivera subsequently produced, nor anything he told Folkenflik in a “vivid and livid interview by satellite phone” from Afghanistan convinced him that Rivera was telling the truth, either at the outset of his reporting on TV, or later, amid excuses he offered for what he finally attributed to “the fog of war.” For their part, FOX, not wanting to push their own guy too far under the bus, gamely said he had made “an honest mistake.” That would be nice, were it true. I believe that FOX and Rivera–who always casts himself at the center of his reporting, a De Mille of the small screen–had wanted a great ‘get’ for his broadcast, and claimed to be at the burial site of US troops. This was an early example of politicizing US troops and losses of life, in a way that the Bush administration, and right-wing media with FOX leading the way, became very practiced at over the next several years, a veritable dark art of the Bush years.

That pretty much brings us to last Saturday, when Rivera went ballistic over my tweet that showed Folkenflik was discussing the long-ago incident in his book interviews, including Ailes’ colorful gloss on the matter, uttered some years later when Folkenflik and Ailes met for the first time. In social media since last Saturday, Rivera has called Folkenflik a “punk,” “a lying leech,” “a rat,” “a skunk,” and an ass-kisser.” His Twitter handle is @GeraldoRivera, if you want to see his tweets for yourself. For the record, yesterday, in Day Four of this story, he also posted a lengthy self-defense on his Facebook page. I have been amused and somewhat amazed to see how my tweet lit up things over the past several days. I’ll continue to live tweet Book TV in weeks to come, though I don’t expect to have quite so dramatic an impact next time.Folkenflik on Book TV

Meantime, I’ll be continuing to read Murdoch’s World, and enjoying Folkenflik’s keen reporting on NPR. I recommend his whole book–for the record the 2001 story on Geraldo Rivera is on pages 61-65. I look forward to hearing Folkenflik, with Gabriel Sherman–author of the new book, The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News–and Divided a Country–at the New America Foundation’s New York space on January 27, when the two will talk about Murdoch, Ailes, and maybe even Geraldo Rivera.

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A Republican in Exile–Why FOX News Doesn’t Book Bruce Bartlett Anymore

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Bruce Bartlett is a longtime economic conservative who worked for Republican officeholders going back to the first Reagan administration. He even worked in the company of Jude Wanniski, basically the originator of supply-side economics. He was, as is said, “present at the creation”–in this case of modern conservatism.

Beginning soon after George W. Bush’s re-election it became apparent if you knew Bartlett from earlier in his career that he was increasingly uncomfortable with Republican orthodoxy. For Bartlett, it arose specifically over Bush policies, especially the reckless spending he committed the country to, as in the 2006 Medicare drug bill. Bartlett voiced his opposition prominently in conservative media, and as he tells it in an important chronicle published Tuesday in the American Conservative, it got him called on the carpet at think tanks he’d written for and worked at, and dismissed more than once over the past several years. The ire directed toward him by true believers made things more difficult for him financially.

One nugget that’s gotten play in the media today is Bartlett’s contention that when he published the book, Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy (2006), bigwigs at FOX let it be known inside the network that he was not to be booked on any of their programs. Greg Sargent reported on this today in Plum Line.  Sargent spoke with Bartlett’s then-publicist at Doubleday, Nicole Dewey, who explained that

“She . . . tried extensively to get him booked on FOX to discuss the book — to no avail. ‘It was surprising to me that no one would book him,’ Dewey told [Sargent]. ‘He had been a regular on Fox News prior to that. He had been interviewed on any number of Fox News shows before that.’ Once Bartlett published the book, Dewey confirms, ‘I was pitching him directly to probably most of the shows that were on Fox at that point. No one would book him.’ A Fox spokesperson didn’t immediately return an email for comment. Asked directly about Bartlett’s claim that she’d been told that ‘orders had come down from on high’ that the book was to receive ‘no publicity whatsoever,’ Dewey said she didn’t remember precisely what reason she was given by Fox for not booking Bartlett for any appearances—it was six years ago. But she said Bartlett’s description of events ‘rings true to me. My general sense was that they didn’t like the message of the book,’ Dewey said. ‘Bruce’s recollection of events sounds exactly like what happened.’”

In the hours since Sargent posted his interview with Nicole Dewey, there’s been a little pushback from FOX and the Wall St. Journal (updates that Sargent has appended to his blog post) where Bartlett thought he had also been shut out. However, an editor there, Gerald Seib, denied this after seeing Bartlett’s article. Bartlett concedes in an update to his piece that he may have been wrong about the Journal, but contends his main point about FOX remains true.*

I love that Sargent sought out the publicist, Dewey (who now works at Little, Brown), and am glad for my industry that one of our professionals had first-hand knowledge and was available to be consulted about a matter where current events and publishing coincide so intimately in an important news item.

The title of Bartlett’s article “Revenge of the Reality-Based Community–My life on the Republican right—and how I saw it all go wrong“, is a nod to Ron Suskind’s pivotal 2004 NY Times Magazine story, “Faith, Certainty, and the Presidency of George W. Bush.” Bartlett was quoted in Suskind’s story, after which he was “chewed out” by his boss. As important as Suskind’s article became in understanding the Bush administration’s divorce from reality, I think Bartlett’s will be judged equally important in understanding how life for many longtime Republicans has become untenable for them within their own party. Bartlett’s is piece is also a helluva read, kind of suspenseful and dramatic, with a lot of the author’s own self in it. I think this piece should be in all the round-ups of longform stories this week–even for the year 2012–whether longreads.com, longform.org, or the Daily Beast’s weekly round-up of imperative reads in narrative journalism. In fact, I think I’ll share this post with Lucas Wittmann, Books Editor at the Beast, and recommend Bartlett’s piece to him.

Disclosure: I am a Facebook friend of Bruce Bartlett (he’s got about 3,500 friends). We’ve never met or spoken.

*Update: David Frum, also the target of right-wing ostracism, vouches for publicist Nicole Dewey in a brief Daily Beast piece:
“I know Nicole Dewey, the source quoted by Greg Sargent in the piece linked, and she is indeed one of the best of the best in the business.”

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Election Night on FOX, Rove Ranted & the Network Pimped Megyn Kelly

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As if more proof were needed, this Gabriel Sherman report in NY magazine, tipped to me by TPM, shows how intertwined FOX News continues to be with the Repub establishment. On Tuesday night, after FOX, following the same decision by other networks, called Ohio for President Obama, there was a meltdown on the right, culminating in Karl Rove’s rant on camera, when he sounded like a spoiled child who wanted his toys back:

“Instantly, FOX phones lit up with angry phone calls and e-mails from the Romney campaign, who believed that the call was premature, since tallies in several Republican-leaning Southern counties hadn’t been been fully tabulated. ‘The Romney people were totally screaming that we’re totally wrong,’ one FOX source said. ‘To various people, they were saying, ‘your decision team is wrong.’ According to a FOX insider, Rove had been in contact with the Romney people all night. After the Ohio call, Rove—whose super-PAC had spent as much as $300 million on the election, to little avail—took their complaints public, conducting an on-air primer on Ohio’s electoral math in disputing the call.

I guess phone numbers of FOX senior producers is something Repub operatives are given when they get hired.

Sherman’s story also makes clear how willing FOX is to dangle and pimp their on-air female talent before male viewers.  In an impromptu episode that followed Rove’s refusal to accept the Ohio call for Obama, FOX producers sent host Megyn Kelly on a bizarre expedition down the hall to conduct an interview with the experts staffing the network’s election decision desk. Sherman reports that,

“One idea was for two members of the decision team, Mishkin and Fox’s digital politics editor Chris Stirewalt, to go on camera with Megyn Kelly and Bret Baier to squelch the doubts over the call. But then it was decided that Kelly would walk through the office and interview the decision team in the conference room. ‘This is Fox News,’ an insider said, ‘so anytime there’s a chance to show off Megyn Kelly’s legs they’ll go for it.’ The decision desk were given a three-minute warning that Kelly would be showing up.”

This isn’t a network, it’s a burlesque show.

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Sally Kohn, FOX News Contributor, Dismantles Paul Ryan’s Lies/w/ NYT Update

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Saturday Update: I shared Sally Kohn’s FOXNews.com scathing demolition of Paul Ryan on Thursday, and am glad to see that her column is continuing to be widely read and shared. Late Thursday, on Facebook Sally wrote that her piece had by then already had 46,000 shares/reads. Today, Charles M. Blow of the NY Times mentioned it up high in his column recapping the RNC. Blow quotes my fave sentence from her piece, the one I also excerpted below: 

Sally Kohn, a contributor to Fox News, said:
“Ryan’s speech was an apparent attempt to set the world record for the greatest number of blatant lies and misrepresentations slipped into a single political speech. On this measure, while it was Romney who ran the Olympics, Ryan earned the gold.”
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Evening Update: Along with the critiques of Ryan’s speech that I cited below, Daily Kos has come up with an even more list, readable here. H/t friend and colleague Phil Gaskill.
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A number of excellent critiques of Paul Ryan’s acceptance speech have appeared since he gave it last night, such as this one by Jonathan Cohn on the New Republic website and Jonathan Bernstein’s takedown at the Plum Line, and Adele Stan’s at AlterNet.

My fave so far is this excellent column by FOX News contributor and Facebook friend Sally Kohn, itemizing all the lies and self-serving statements in Ryan’s speech. With Sally publishing the piece at FoxNews.com, it’s great to imagine many FOX readers being shocked at their conservative hero being knocked down several pegs. Among Sally’s best lines is this one:

“Ryan’s speech was an apparent attempt to set the world record for the greatest number of blatant lies and misrepresentations slipped into a single political speech. On this measure, while it was  Romney who ran the Olympics, Ryan earned the gold.”

I recommend you read the whole column and share it among your contacts. It’s an excellent rebuttal to the lying Romney/Ryan ticket.

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