Author: Ellen

To his fans, David Brock, the writer who ruined the Clintons’ Christmas, is a hard-hitting investigative reporter. To everyone else, he is a smear artist with a right-wing agenda. But a reading of Mr. Brock’s oeuvre in the conservative journal The American Spectator suggests that his motives are at least as twisted as his facts. It’s women, not liberals, who really get him going. The slightest sighting of female sexuality whips him into a frenzy of misogynist zeal.

All women are the same to Mr. Brock: terrifying, gutter-tongued sexual omnivores. Such caricatures are a staple of his latest expose and its predecessors, including the article that spawned his book “The Real Anita Hill.”

Hillary Clinton, even more than her husband, is the real obsession in the writer’s notorious 11,000-word treatise on Fornigate (as the alleged scandalous doings in Little Rock are now concisely labeled on the Don Imus radio show). With dour hyperventilation, Mr. Brock charges Mrs. Clinton with such non-crimes as using “language that makes the Watergate tapes sound like a Sunday school lesson” and referring to state troopers’ guns as “phallic symbols.” The prim Mr. Brock also alleges that the ubiquitous Little Rock Peeping Toms overheard Mrs. Clinton expressing aloud a desire to have more frequent sex with her husband. How shocking!

In a similar vein, Mr. Brock wrote that the real Anita Hill was “a bit nutty and a bit slutty.” He described her as having an “obsessive, even perverse, desire for male attention.” (Perverse?) He quoted an unnamed source on Ms. Hill’s “flirtatiousness” and “provocative manner of dress” — “not sweet or sexy [ but ] sort of angry, almost a weapon.”

When Mr. Brock went after Angela Wright, another potential witness against Clarence Thomas, he tracked down one source who accused her of having “a foul mouth” and another who said she “told male co-workers she liked to walk around her house in the nude.” What most of America regards as PG-13, Mr. Brock, a tender 30-ish, rates triple-X.

His rage at women, meanwhile, invariably colors his view of men who commit what he calls “hanky-panky” with them. On “Crossfire,” a smirking Mr. Brock called Bill Clinton “a bizarre guy,” not recognizing that the Fornigate charges, if true, would make the President seem all too pathetically ordinary, not bizarre. Mr. Brock’s idea of a non-bizarre man is one of the troopers, Larry Patterson, whom he idolizes as a macho image of abstinence: “tall and trim, with the upright demeanor and closely cropped hair of a military officer.”

Whom does this skewed perspective serve? Surely not either legitimate journalists or Mr. Clinton’s adversaries. The out-of-control American Spectator piece had the effect of trivializing the professional efforts of The Los Angeles Times and CNN to investigate the troopers’ graver allegations of jobs-for-silence. Mr. Brock also temporarily drowned out the more serious conflict-of-interest allegations against the Clintons in Whitewatergate, which went undetected in his article because they would require a meticulous reportorial effort (the pursuit of a money trail) beyond his abilities.

Mr. Brock’s sins do not, of course, absolve Bill Clinton of all charges, any more than they convict him. Nor, as The American Spectator would be the first to point out, do Mr. Brock’s transgressions absolve liberal journalists of their own. The New Year’s specter of reporters sucking up to the President during an off-the-record Renaissance Weekend in Hilton Head, S.C., is embarrassing.

But Mr. Brock’s misogyny injects a poison more lethal than political partisanship into the national discourse. Among his charges against Mrs. Clinton is this irrational passage: “She would phone the mansion from her law office and order troopers to fetch feminine napkins from her bedroom and deliver them to her at her firm.”

Even if this story were true — even if a high-powered lawyer would really send state troopers on an errand that a clerk could accomplish at the nearest drugstore — who cares? To put a finer point on it, why does Mr. Brock care? Would he have told this story if Mrs. Clinton were fetching aspirin?

Of course not. His animus is so transparent that there will be no need for anyone to write a book in search of the real David Brock.

http://www.nytimes.com/1994/01/06/opinion/journal-david-brock-s-women.html

In a major power play that aligns liberal muscle more fully behind the Democratic Party — and Hillary Clinton — the self-described right-wing hitman-turned-Clinton enforcer David Brock is taking over a leading watchdog group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

Brock was elected chairman of the group’s board last week after laying out a multifaceted expansion intended to turn the group into a more muscular — and likely partisan — attack dog, according to sources familiar with the move.

The ambitious plans, which began being implemented this week, also seem to cement Brock’s role as among the leading big money operatives in all of American politics.

Brock confirmed the basics of the shakeup in an interview. The reconfigured CREW, which is searching for a new executive director, will add a more politically oriented arm, expand its focus into state politics and donor targeting and will operate in close coordination with Brock’s growing fleet of aggressive Democrat-backing nonprofits and super PACs — Media Matters, American Bridge and the American Independent Institute.

“CREW gives us some potentially powerful tools in the tool box,” said Brock, who founded his flagship organization Media Matters in 2004. “We have been in the accountability for 10 years very successfully. It is kind of a one-stop-shop now.”

And Brock’s army will be supplemented still further by the formation of a new overtly partisan watchdog group called The American Democracy Legal Fund, which is already preparing complaints against high-profile Republicans, including Michigan GOP Senate candidate Terry Lynn Land. That group will be run by Brad Woodhouse, the president of American Bridge, and will be registered under section 527 of the Tax Code — allowing it to engage in more political activity than CREW’s traditional portfolio. CREW has operated as a nonprofit registered under a section of the Tax Code — 501(c)3 — that prohibits partisan activity; under Brock’s leadership it will add a new more politically oriented arm registered under section 501(c)4.

CREW was founded in 2003 by former federal prosecutor Melanie Sloan and white-collar lawyer Norm Eisen, who went on to serve as President Barack Obama’s chief ethics lawyer and is now his ambassador to the Czech Republic. It carved out a reputation as a leading watchdog by relentlessly pursuing litigation and ethics complaints against primarily — though not exclusively — Republican public officials. It had its heyday during the Bush administration, when its complaints and investigations played major roles in the Jack Abramoff scandal and the downfalls of powerful GOP Reps. Tom Delay and Bob Ney.

But under the stewardship of Sloan, who serves as CREW’s executive director, the group went out of its way to demonstrate that it would not pull punches when it came to Democratic corruption. It boasts in a mission statement on its website, “we work to ensure government officials — regardless of party affiliation — act with honesty and integrity and merit the public trust,” and it also pursued broader good-government initiatives.

CREW wins media attention each year with its annual “Most Corrupt Members of Congress” report, which it started in 2005 and which has included 25 Democrats among its 88 featured members. It called for the resignations of embattled New York Democratic Reps. Anthony Weiner and Charlie Rangel, and has pending requests for investigations into the Obama administration, including its use of private emails to conduct government affairs.

Its unwillingness to toe the party line miffed some Democrats, including, sources say, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, whose members occasionally found themselves in CREW’s cross hairs.

That bipartisan focus gave CREW credibility in the watchdog community and made Sloan a go-to quote for reporters, leading Ms. Magazine to ask in 2007 whether she was “The Most Feared Woman on Capitol Hill.” But the take-no-prisoners approach may have complicated efforts to raise money from wealthy Democratic donors. And, in February 2012, the group was demoted from the top tier of recipient organizations recommended by the Democracy Alliance rich liberal donor club during a reshuffling seen as boosting super PACs and other groups closely aligned with Democrats. On the other hand, Brock seems to have a golden touch with rich Democrats, including billionaire financier George Soros.

Brock’s personal evolution is a compelling selling point with the monied class. He began his career as a leading conservative attack journalist in the 1990s, penning stories and books strafing Anita Hill and the Clintons, among other conservative targets, before publicly renouncing the conservative movement and embracing the left. His groups now are at the leading edge of several Democratic causes celebre — declaring war on Fox News and the conservative billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch, while defending Hillary Clinton against mounting Republican attacks as she prepares for a possible 2016 presidential run.

Brock’s groups have the cash to support such a wide portfolio. They have a combined budget of about $25 million a year and 170 employees, compared with CREW’s $2.7 million 2014 budget and 15 staffers, almost all of whom will be able to stay on, Brock suggested.

Neither CREW nor most of Brock’s groups disclose their donors — something that led to charges of hypocrisy against CREW and other liberal-leaning watchdogs. But anecdotal evidence suggests that there’s a bit of overlap between the donor pools, since Brock’s groups have found great success raising money from Democracy Alliance members. In the CREW shakeup, two donors close to Brock — San Francisco investor Wayne Jordan and Washington-based consultant David Mercer — also joined CREW’s board.

The Huffington Post in its Wednesday afternoon newsletter reported that Media Matters was “acquiring” CREW and quipped “Will It Survive DOJ Antitrust?” but didn’t offer any details on the moves.

Brock deflected when asked if CREW, under his leadership, would continue pursuing complaints against Democrats.

“No party has a monopoly on corruption and at this early juncture, we are not making categorical statements about anything that we will and won’t do,” he said. “Having said that, our experience has been that the vast amount of violations of the public trust can be found on the conservative side of the aisle.”

Brock also had high praise for Sloan, who resigned from CREW’s board and announced her intention to step down as executive director when Brock names a replacement.

“Under Melanie’s leadership, CREW emerged as an effective voice for the kind of honesty and integrity we deserve in our public officials,” he said, promising to “build on her record of success, expanding the portfolio to scrutinize more activity in states, and political organizations that wield just as much influence over our policies as our politicians do, if not more.”

Sloan, who aborted plans to leave CREW in 2011, declined to discuss why she was leaving, but predicted that CREW would fit well into Brock World.

“Given David’s track record of building high-impact sustainable institutions, I am confident that CREW will continue to thrive under this new governance,” she said in a statement released by CREW.

http://www.politico.com/story/2014/08/david-brock-citizens-for-responsibility-and-ethics-in-washington-110003.html

These days we look back at the projectile name-calling and nonstop sexual revelations that defined Washington’s all-consuming culture war of the 1990’s and ask: What in hell was that all about? Like the reigning sitcom of the time, ”Seinfeld,” it may have been about nothing, or at least very little — and with a Lilliputian cast of characters to match. In retrospect, the archetypal figure of 90’s Washington may not have been one of its many aspiring Woodwards and Bernsteins or a great man or woman of state (were there any?) who will some day get the David McCullough treatment, but a gossip-mongering schlemiel who is already halfway to being an answer on ”Jeopardy.”

David Brock, you may recall, was the bullying reporter for the late, not-so-great American Spectator who labeled Anita Hill “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty” and later broke Troopergate, the pioneering expose (much of it culled from clandestinely paid “sources”) into Bill Clinton’s Arkansas Kama Sutra. In his latest incarnation, Brock is turning expiation for these and other past sins into a second career that has played out like a striptease over the past few years. He set out on this path in 1997 by writing an article for Esquire, “Confessions of a Right-Wing Hit Man,” in which he started to recant “The Real Anita Hill,” his best-selling and often fictionalized hatchet job that duped many reviewers (including one at The New York Times) with its lavishly footnoted gossip, half-truths and slander. Next up is a new book, a memoir titled “Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative,” that goes further still by serving as a mea culpa for an entire era, not just himself. In it, he not only takes back the falsifications in his reportage on Hill, Clarence Thomas and the Clintons (among others) but even offers an apologia for the over-the-top excesses of his Esquire apologia, which was accompanied by a photo of Brock in full martyr monty, lashed to a tree, his chest bared, eager to be burned at a stake.

Though I’ve had my own journalistic battles with Brock, I’ve never met him. He may be best observed at a distance. He calls his new memoir a ”terrible book” in its very first sentence, but he’s wrong about that as he has been about so much else during his bizarre, chameleonlike career. His book is terrible only in the sense that it takes us back to a poisonous time. Whatever critics may make of it when it’s published next month, it may be a key document for historians seeking to understand the ethos of the incoherent 90’s. It is also easier to warm up to than the rest of the Brock canon, much of which was written in spittle-spewing blind rage.

The Brock of ”Blinded by the Right” is instead humorously circumspect. There’s an Albert Brooks-in-Broadcast News” moment when he describes how he tried, as a rising young conservative talking head, to imitate the ”magnificent half-recline” of William F. Buckley’s television posture only to ”nearly fall off my chair.” To ingratiate himself with a conservative elite presided over by the likes of Arnaud de Borchgrave, a self-styled journalistic grandee in the toadying employ of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon at The Washington Times, Brock writes of endeavoring ”to look like an old fogy in training, donning a bow tie and horn-rimmed glasses and, ludicrously, puffing on a pipe and occasionally even carrying a walking stick.” A Commentary action figure, in other words.

Brock’s publisher has billed Brock’s confession as a memoir ”in the tradition of Arthur Koestler’s ‘God That Failed,”’ but what makes the book an apt postscript to the dim decade it describes is how little it has in common with Koestler’s disavowal of Communism, or Whittaker Chambers’s ”Witness,” or the rest of the vast modern literature of ideological about-face. Ideology, like goodness, had little to do with the politics of the 1990’s. The cold war was over, Clinton embraced a centrism that was echt Rockefeller Republican, prosperity was on the march and nothing serious seemed at stake (or so we thought at the time). Brock’s book can’t recount an ideological journey because there’s little evidence he was a committed conservative in the first place — or that many of his ambitious allies were, either — any more than he (or the Clintonistas he now aligns himself with) is a committed liberal now. And that’s the point.

His story exemplifies a decade of post-ideological drift and spitball politics in Washington: a cynical, highly pragmatic struggle over power more than ideas that opened with the Thomas-Hill confrontation of 1991, reached its climax with the impeachment drive and now seems to have been interred with so much else in the rubble of Sept. 11. It was a time of take-no-prisoners mudslinging, in which the Republican right, with no Communists to unmask, found a new kind of enemy within that it tried to bring down by means of a disingenuously holier-than-thou moral crusade fueled by a gossip machine of which Brock was an early and influential cog. The hottest partisan battles revolved around Long Dong Silver and Paula Jones, not Stalin.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: November 8, 2008
An article last Saturday about Media Matters for America, a left-leaning research group that seeks to combat what it calls “conservative misinformation,” provided insufficient context for a quotation from Julie Millican, who oversees the transcription and analysis of radio programs for the group. When Ms. Millican said that local hosts are “harder to listen to” because they might “spend 20 minutes talking about a pothole” and then use a vulgarity to describe Hillary Rodham Clinton, she was speaking generally. She was not referring specifically to either Chris Baker of Minneapolis or Dan Caplis of Denver.

When Bill O’Reilly’s camera crew ambushed Mike Hoyt at a bus stop in Teaneck, N.J., a few months ago, the on-camera confrontation and the microphone in his face reminded him, oddly enough, of the “60 Minutes” interviewer Mike Wallace.

Mr. Hoyt, executive editor of The Columbia Journalism Review, was well-versed in the venerable art of the on-camera, on-the-street confrontation, perfected by Mr. Wallace and other hard-charging television journalists in decades past. Now, in an appropriation of Mr. Wallace’s techniques, ambush interviews have become a distinguishing feature of Mr. O’Reilly’s program on the Fox News Channel.

Mr. Hoyt, one of more than 50 people that Mr. O’Reilly’s young producers have confronted in the past three years, said the interviews were “really just an attempt to make you look bad.” In almost every case Mr. O’Reilly uses the aggressive interviews to campaign for his point of view.

Mr. O’Reilly, the right-leaning commentator who has had the highest-rated cable show for about eight years, has called the interviews a way to hold people accountable for their actions. “When the bad guys won’t comment, when they run and hide, we will find them,” he said on “The O’Reilly Factor” recently.

In recent months the ambushes have come under increased scrutiny, partly because the targets have changed. While most of the initial subjects were judges and lawyers whom Mr. O’Reilly perceived to be soft on crime, many of the past year’s subjects have been political and personal opponents of the host. Mr. Hoyt, for instance, was criticized for assigning an essay about right-wing media to a writer with a liberal background. Hendrik Hertzberg, a senior editor for The New Yorker, was confronted for what Mr. O’Reilly described as taking a “Factor” segment out of context. And Amanda Terkel, a managing editor at the liberal Web site ThinkProgress.org, was interviewed about a protest she helped organize against Mr. O’Reilly.

Ms. Terkel’s case generated immense attention on the Internet last month partly because she called it an incident of stalking and harassment. ThinkProgress discussed taking legal action but instead decided to lead a mostly unsuccessful effort asking advertisers to boycott Mr. O’Reilly’s program.

The Fox News producer responsible for most of the ambush interviews, Jesse Watters, refused repeated interview requests. But the network did make David Tabacoff, the program’s senior executive producer, available to comment. Mr. Tabacoff — who started a telephone interview by asking, “This is going to be a fair piece, correct?” — said the interviews are “part of the journalistic mission” of “The O’Reilly Factor.” He called the program an “opinion-driven show that has a journalistic basis.”

“We’re trying to get answers from people,” he said. “Sometimes the only way to get them is via these methods.”

The attitude, as summarized by Mr. Watters in a BillOReilly.com blog post: “If they don’t come to us, we’ll go to them.”

A Fox spokeswoman said the interview approach was first used in 2002. It became a staple of “The O’Reilly Factor” in 2006. Since then Mr. Watters, a 30-year-old who worked for a Republican candidate for New York attorney general, Dora Irizarry, before joining Fox in 2003, has approached high school principals, lawmakers, journalists and celebrities whom Mr. O’Reilly has accused of being dishonest. He conducts background checks, uses Google Earth’s mapping software to scout the locations and tries to identify a public place where he can surprise the person. Some interviews require days of waiting in trucks and hotels.

When the subjects don’t answer — at least not to the satisfaction of Mr. Watters — the questions become more provocative and emotional. Last summer Mr. Watters asked Gov. Jim Douglas of Vermont about that state’s criminal statutes and asked, “About how many dead girls are we going to tolerate here?”

Sometimes the questions are statements. While trying to provoke a Florida judge last month Mr. Watters seemed to speak on behalf of the victims of a sexual molester, saying, “You owe that family an apology.”

While Mr. Watters has never been injured on the job, there have been some close calls. In Virginia Beach, while confronting Meyera Oberndorf, the city’s mayor, about its laws toward illegal immigrants that Mr. O’Reilly calls too lenient, Mr. Watters said the mayor’s husband tried, unsuccessfully, to seize the microphone. “This will be great TV,” Mr. Watters recalled remarking to the camera operator and sound technician in a blog post.

Rather than “60 Minutes,” the confrontations may bring to mind the liberal filmmaker Michael Moore, who documented his attempts to ambush the chairman of General Motors in his 1989 film “Roger & Me” and later asked members of Congress to enlist their children to serve in Iraq in 2004’s “Fahrenheit 9/11.”

Mr. O’Reilly has rejected the comparison, saying on Fox in 2006 that Mr. Moore is “doing it to put it in his movie and exploit it,” while “I’m doing it because there’s no other way to hold these villains accountable.”

Some subjects of the interviews strongly disagree. “They weren’t interested in my views,” Mr. Hoyt said of the January incident. “They just wanted to have me looking surprised or irked or whatever.” After several minutes at the bus stop, the camera crew tried to board the bus with Mr. Hoyt, disembarking only after the driver demanded that they leave.

In some cases the subjects of the interviews seek help from the police. Matthew Dowd, who has since retired as a Kansas judge, said Mr. Watters “kind of jumped me” outside a restaurant two years ago, prompting his wife to call 911. In at least three other instances, subjects called the police.

For some journalism practitioners Mr. O’Reilly’s tactics are unsettling. “Nobody should hijack the power of journalism or use the public airwaves (or cable signals) simply to settle personal scores,” Al Tompkins of the Poynter Institute, a nonprofit that supports journalism education, said in an e-mail message.

Ten of the last 12 people confronted by Mr. O’Reilly’s crews were either outwardly liberal or had criticized Republicans. Fox staffers insist, however, that Mr. O’Reilly is not partisan, and Ron Mitchell, an “O’Reilly Factor” producer, said that “if you go over the dozens and dozens of these, the primary balance is not about left or right.” (In October, for instance, Mr. Watters approached the ousted Merrill Lynch chief executive, E. Stanley O’Neal, outside his apartment.)

Regardless, some people criticized by Mr. O’Reilly have learned how to avoid added embarrassment when it is their turn in front of Mr. Watters’s microphone. When he confronted Rosie O’Donnell at a book signing to ask about her views of 9/11 conspiracy theories — she had said on “The View” that it was impossible that World Trade Center 7 could have fallen the way it did “without explosives being involved” — a member of her entourage placed his hand over the camera lens. Ms. O’Donnell told her employee to stop, adding, “That’s what they want you to do.” Mr. O’Reilly played the tape the next weeknight.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/16/arts/television/16ambush.html