Richard Jewell’s Duct Tape, Hillary’s Pneumonia, and Biden’s Corvette

In this, my first post on Substack, you’ll get to know some of my criticisms of news broadcasting today. Buckle up—I’m not gentle!

In 1968, CBS Producer Don Hewitt had an insight: People viewers were less likely to change the channel if the news was as enjoyable as Kojack and other prime time dramas. The strategy, as media historian Stephen Stark puts it, was to “package reality as well as Hollywood packages fiction.” Hewitt created 60 Minutes with this goal in mind, and broadcast news has never been the same since.

Liberal media mavens like to blame Fox for supplanting fact-based reporting with “alternative realities.” But the ascendancy of the compelling “story” over factually established evidence had been the trajectory of much broadcast (and print) journalism before Roger Ailes instituted “tactical programming” at TVN (the forerunner to Fox News), recommending the highlighting and repetition of “catch phrases…which seem factual although they are, in fact, editorializations.”

Fox has clearly been the abuser-in-chief of this strategy. But a more mainstream danger was lurking the moment Hewitt decided the news needed to compete with Hollywood’s fictions. To compete, 60 Minutes and other “magazine” shows had to “package” their stories to be highly entertaining as well as informative. To achieve that, a little creativity—sometimes more than a little creativity—was useful. And “breaking news”—even if not yet verified—was a great protection against things drying up. The result, according to Stark, was a “thinner line between fact and rumor.”

Actually, when “the story” is your standard, it’s not just that fact becomes compromised. New realities also become created, as those stories that are headlined, dramatized, and repeated (as they tend to be, given the challenge of filling up the 24-hour news cycle) slyly segue into the category of fact, while those that are deemed less gripping slip into the purgatory of inattention. If the Big Story is ultimately proved groundless (as frequently happens) retractions may be necessary. But it’s easy to bury them on page 10 and television reporters often just ignore them. After all, they are in the business of “breaking news,” not correcting the record—and loathe to own their own mistakes.

A classic example is the Richard Jewell case. Jewell was the security guard who found three pipe bombs in a backpack planted July 27 at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. Jewel alerted the police and the park was evacuated. Early news reports celebrated Jewell as a hero, but within three days the media had begun portraying him as a possible suspect, for no apparent reason other than their own “theory” that Jewell had planted the bomb in order to find it and become a hero. The FBI searched his home, maintained 24-hour surveillance on him, and investigated his background. Although he passed a polygraph, Jewell was now headlined as “The Hero Turned Suspect” who fit the “criminal profile” of a “lone bomber,” a frustrated police “wannabe,” and—the coup de grace—with duct tape under his bed and curtains drawn in his house.

“The Hero Turned Suspect” was all we read about, all we heard about for weeks. And even respected journalists like Tom Brokaw declared Jewell to be very likely guilty: “The [FBI] probably ha[s] enough to arrest him right now, probably enough to prosecute him, but you always want to have enough to convict him as well. There are still some holes in the case.” “Holes” was an understatement, as no real evidence against Jewel existed, and the bomber was ultimately found to be Eric Robert Rudolph, who would later bomb a lesbian nightclub and two abortion clinics. Jewel was formally cleared in October, but by then the media story—so coherent and convincing (the darkened house! The duct tape!)—had become the more dominant reality than the facts. Many people today still think Jewell was the bomber.

Arguably the most famous victim of runaway media storytelling is Hillary Clinton. Consider, for example, what frequently got billed as “Hillary’s Health Scare.” In September 2016, the then Democratic candidate for the presidency had pneumonia and, like many women, had carried on despite her doctor’s advice. She insisted on attending a 9/11 commemorative ceremony, and nearly fainted — something that has happened to others standing in the sun at long political events. Then, she committed the unpardonable sin of disappearing from the media’s sight for ninety minutes, while she sought calm and cool — and water — in her daughter Chelsea’s apartment.

The media immediately issued a missing persons alert. Where was she? Where did she go? When a video surfaced showing her unsteadily entering her van, supported by the Secret Service and the news of her pneumonia was released, reporters were convinced she had been deliberately concealing her illness, revealing it only when she was "caught in the act" of fainting. And was it really pneumonia? If so, why hadn’t she told the press about it? Hillary’s explanation was that she didn’t announce her illness because she thought she could just push on through, no big deal. And as it turned out, John Kerry and others had also suffered pneumonia without announcing it to the world. But that wouldn’t have made much of a story, and “Secretive Hillary,” “Untrustworthy Hillary” had already proven themselves winners, among both the right and the left. The mainstream media played and replayed the visual of her knees buckling, and adored posing the “lingering questions” that remained concerning Hillary’s “health scare” and how “tight-lipped” her campaign was being:

“She received her pneumonia diagnosis on Friday, but the public was not told about it until hours after the incident at the memorial, raising questions about whether Clinton had any plans to ever inform the public... . . . Opponents are already seeing the incident as proof of their claims that Clinton has been hiding health issues. And others may now be more incredulous of the campaign's statements on her health . . .…” (NBC News)

The notion that Clinton was “covering up” more serious health issues was a favorite among more right-wing sources. Parkinson’s disease was just one of many disorders Clinton was suspected of hiding. It had been going on for weeks, even before the fainting episode: Descriptions of her as “exhausted” (or without “stamina,” as Trump was fond of putting it) and unable to stand up on her own, suggestions of “traumatic brain injury” and talk of “seizures” and “dysphasia.” Throughout the media, there were demands for fuller health records from Clinton (while Trump produced a laughable doctor’s letter describing his health in such rigorous medical language as “astonishingly excellent” and declaring that he would be ‘“the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.”)

Hillary’s “ health scare ” amounted to nothing. It acquired its outsize importance not because it was accurate, but because the media repeated it, exaggerated it, visually re-played it, made an indelible mantra of it. In the process, like a piece of trashy gossip that has made the rounds of the high school cafeteria became stamped in viewers’ minds as true.

The most famous of the stories told about Hillary was, of course, the email “scandal.” (a word used promiscuously about the Clintons.) Even after Comey’s exoneration (more about which later) polling showed that 56 percent of Americans believed Clinton had indeed broken the law by sometimes relying on a personal email address. That number is ghastly, considering that she had in fact broken no laws, but they are unsurprising, given the overwhelming negative attention that network and cable news paid to the emails. Thus, as Mathew Yglesias commented, “a story that was at best of modest significance came to dominate the US presidential election,” creating a misleading impression of Clinton’s character and competence and vastly overshadowing coverage of both her accomplishments and her policy proposals. Between Bernie Sanders’s labeling of Clinton as a Wall Street lackey and the GOP obsession with her emails — both of which were lavishly covered by the mass media — the Clinton campaign was defined by negative sound- bites.

Did journalists learn anything from this? It seems not. While pundits, once they got tired of blaming Hillary herself for her 2016 loss, have been eager to finger Russia, bots, fake internet pages, and occasionally James Comey, they fiercely (if unconsciously) resist acknowledging, let alone analyzing, their own complicity in promoting the narratives that sunk Hillary.

And so, we come to President Biden’s Corvette.

It started with the discovery of a “batch” (newscasters’ favored term for any group of items more than 3) of classified documents in a closet in the office that Biden used, after he left the Vice-Presidency and was conducting a think-tank at the Penn-Biden Center. By now, everyone reading this will have been inundated with stories about this discovery and what followed—which I won’t recount. But I do recall how I first heard about it, on MSNBC, after the news was “leaked” by CBS.

Katy Tur: “It doesn’t look good, does it?”

Member of Washington Press Corps whose name I don’t remember: “No, it doesn’t.”

That reporter then noted that the documents were found by Biden’s lawyers a few days before the mid-terms, yet—gasp! --they didn’t inform “the public.”

“Why wasn’t it reported then?” he asked.

Clearly something suspicious was going on….

The question about timing of the disclosure has since been asked over and over by investigative reporters, press corps, and anchors of news shows. Even Ari Melber, so fond of advertising his commitment to facts, couldn’t resist speculating as to whether Biden was hiding information in order to “put his finger on the scale for the Democrats” in the mid-terms. In those first couple of days, neither Melber or anyone else deemed it important to mention two highly salient facts: (1) At the time the documents were discovered, there was no investigation underway to announce; (2) If there had been, it would have been grossly inappropriate to make it public so close to the election, as James Comey had done eleven days before the 2016 election, when a “batch” of Hillary’s emails was founds on Anthony Weiner’s laptop. The highly irregular televised announcement arguably cost Hillary the presidency—and since then, the Department of Justice has been careful to withhold any information about ongoing investigations that might influence the outcome of impending elections. They did so in 2018 with respect to investigations into Trump, even though Trump himself wasn’t on the ballot. And had there been an investigation into Biden the week before the 2022 midterms, they would presumably have exercised the same caution.

Journalists like to talk about the people’s “right to know.” But headlining and sensationalizing “breaking news” before the facts of a case are established is not the same as conveying information—and, as the Jewell and Clinton examples demonstrate, can be misleading and profoundly destructive, especially when the rhetoric is amped up to create drama and suspicion, as in this article:

“Joe Biden is facing the worst political crisis of his presidency after a failed attempt at damage control over his classified documents controversy landed him with what all White Houses dread – the naming of a special counsel.

Biden was doomed to face a political furor the moment his lawyers found the first secret vice presidential file in his former Washington office last fall. But by swiftly cooperating with the National Archives, his legal team may have spared him criminal exposure from the discovery – like that potentially facing ex-President Donald Trump over his document haul in Florida.

But then the botched messaging strategy became more clear – when Americans learned that a second batch of classified material, also dating to Biden’s time as vice president, had been found in a search of his home in Delaware. This detail was communicated to the Justice Department on December 20. And yet the White House didn’t disclose that this week when it spoke about the initial documents found last year in an office Biden previously used at the Penn-Biden center in Washington. This made it look like it was willing to come clean to the DOJ but not the public.

Not only did this make it look like Biden had something to hide, it set up the kind of drip, drip of disclosures guaranteed to supercharge a Washington scandal. And Biden’s bid Thursday to minimize the discovery of secret material in his garage – by saying it was locked to protect his beloved Corvette – didn’t exactly back up his earlier claim that Americans know he takes classified documents seriously.” (Emphases mine)

This is from an article billed as “analysis” and written by a CNN staff reporter—Stephen Collinson. It’s not an Opinion piece. Yet it’s far from analytical in its rhetoric. Note the hyperboles (“worst political crisis,” “doomed,”), the attributions of disaster and blame (“failed attempt,” “botched messaging”) and the positing of Biden’s actions as deliberately obfuscating and suspect (not “willing to come clean,” “something to hide,” “bid to minimize the discovery”) and description of the documents as “secret material” (as though they’d been deliberately hidden away by Biden himself.) And then, too, there’s the snarky and unwarranted suggestion that Joe cares more about his “beloved” jazzy car than protecting government documents.

Biden’s Corvette came up when FNC's Peter Doocy and other reporters, in their usual frenzy for fresh cuts of bloody meat, aggressively called out questions to the president about a new batch of classified documents discovered in his Delaware garage.

Doocy: "Classified materials next to your Corvette? What were you thinking?

Biden: "My corvette is in a locked garage, OK? It's not like they are sitting in the street."

Doocy: "So the material was in a locked garage?"

Biden: "Yes -- as well as my Corvette."

Doocy: “What were you thinking?”

Now, we don’t know how the documents got to Biden’s garage. So Doocy’s “What were you thinking?” was premised on a completely imagined scenario in which Biden carelessly stuck documents he knew to be classified in of all places, a garage! You know, where we keep old toys and garden tools. And next to a grown-up toy of privilege—Biden’s “beloved” Corvette. Could anything be more reckless, more indicative of misplaced priorities, more trivializing of the importance of the documents? But Doocy was salivating over his own rotten meat. Biden’s mention of the Corvette, as should be apparent to any careful reader of the transcript, was not to “privilege” the car over the documents, but to illustrate that the garage was not just full of junk, and therefore was kept locked. And unless Biden is lying outright, he didn’t even know the documents were there.

Sure, Doocy is from Fox. But neither Doocy nor Collinson are exceptional. Since the discovery was “leaked” (a phrase that itself suggests something was being held back from the public for unsavory reasons) it’s virtually impossible to turn on cable news without being subjected to an extended discussions of the emerging Biden “scandal” (a word tossed around like popcorn.) And sure, many journalists have warned us to be leery of false equivalences between Trump and Biden’s handling of documents. Some have offered useful charts outlining the crucial differences. Yet at the same time they have undercut the importance of that sober (yet key) deconstruction of the facts with “lingering” suspicions and comments about the explosive “optics,” as headline after headline has declared the situation a “disaster” for Joe, some even going to far as to suggest it may scuttle a 2024 run for the presidency.

It's not just Fox. MSNBC’s Zeeshan Aleem tells us that Biden “inappropriately hung onto” the documents (when in fact he was surprised to be informed of them by his lawyers); latter on in the piece, although he had just recounted the crucial differences between Trump’s obstructive behavior and Biden’s swift handing over of all discovered documents, Aleem offers the judgement that “it appears to be, at the very least, sloppy and reckless behavior by a powerful politician.” But “whatever the facts turn out to be, Biden has a political disaster on his hands,” The dreaded “optics” take over once again.

Let’s turn away from those “optics” to look at some actual facts: To begin with, there’s no evidence whatsoever that Biden himself is responsible for any “sloppy” or “reckless” handling of documents, as mostly lower-level staffers had done the packing, trying their best to be careful during a particular chaotic and disjointed time. Biden himself was often away during the final five days (in Kyiv with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and in Switzerland with Chinese President Xi Jinping) and when in Washington, according to an unusually even-handed and fact-filled piece:

“[Biden]was busy keeping busy…as his office was shutting down. Aides scrambled to pack up his workspaces in the West Wing, the Eisenhower Executive Office Building and at his official residence, the Naval Observatory. Those competing objectives – to use his office until the final minutes even as it was obliged to shut down – made for a muddled and hurried process that left aides packing boxes of documents and papers late into the night, even as more material kept arriving…As his team worked in Washington to ensure all the classified material in his offices were properly packed and submitted to the government, more classified documents continued to arrive…’it didn’t slow down, even when the boxes were being packed,’ a person familiar with the process said.”

Aleem’s unwarranted description of Biden as “sloppy and reckless” also immediately brings to mind—unpleasantly, as you’d think Aleem would recognize-- how James Comey, having exonerated Clinton of criminality in his first televised announcement, went on to gratuitously accuse her of having been “extremely careless.” That phrase made all the headlines and chyrons, and thus became, for many people, the main take-away from Comey’s investigation. Yet when later, under careful questioning by Matt Cartwright and Elijah Cummings in a congressional hearing, Comey admitted that Hillary had in fact done everything by the books (the emails in question hadn’t been marked properly), his retraction got virtually no exposure by the mainstream media. When I was on book tour for The Destruction of Hillary Clinton I often played a video clip of the moment when Cummings and Cartwright exposed Comey’s public assassination of Hillary’s character (and indeed, the whole email “scandal”) as based on groundless accusations. My audiences were always gob-smacked. “What? I never saw that!” “I didn’t know that happened!” That such a crucial event had not been widely televised, that it hadn’t been presented as “breaking news” of the greatest importance is among the worst bits of media malpractice in coverage (read: promulgation) of the “scandal.”

Journalists sometimes rationalize their various forms of over-eagerness and aggression with talk of “the public’s right to know.” They may insist that it’s their “job” to poke and prod, as Ed O’Keefe, the correspondent from CBS, self-righteously told White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre:

“You’re not going to answer the questions, but we’re going to ask them because that’s our job.”

I don’t agree, Ed. Asking questions that you know won’t be answered has no point except to throw shade and suspicion. It’s a performative “gotcha” which has a more useful place in a Perry Mason episode than a press conference that is supposed to help us get at the facts. That requires knowledge of context, usually takes time and patience, and is rarely achievable through bits and hits, particularly when your goal is to shame and “scoop” rather than inform. And moment-to-moment headlines, dramatic chyrons, over-bloated rhetoric, and press conference harassment do not yield or promote knowledge—they give people talking points to hang their biases on, and through the endless repetition of those points, solidify “stories” that are not easily displaced when the full picture emerges.

To end, let me propose some other answers to the question “Why didn’t Biden’s lawyers release information about the discovered documents on November 3?”

Maybe because Biden’s advisors knew that minimally informed “breaking news” would enter the bloodstream of the media’s “story” and clog all arteries to the emerging facts. Maybe because they knew that the endless talk that was sure to follow about “optics” and “damage control” would never stay in the realm of “looks bad for Biden” but would create bad news for Biden. Maybe they rightly judged that it was better to leave still-unfolding facts in the hands of the Justice Department than to offer a juicy slice of headline to a hungry press that in turn would feed the “disasters” it tells itself it merely reports.

Portions of the sections on Richard Jewell and Hillary Clinton are based on chapters from Susan Bordo, TV (Bloomsbury, 2022)

See Susan Bordo, The Destruction of Hillary Clinton: Untangling the Political Forces, Media Culture, and Assault on Fact that Decided the 2016 Election (New York: Melville House, 2017) for full coverage and analysis of the various representations and scandals that plagued Clinton’s candidacy.

Sources:

Steven Stark, Glued to the Set (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997)

Marie Brenner, “American Nightmare: The Ballad of Richard Jewell,” Vanity Fair, February 1997, https://archive.vanityfair.com/article/share/1fd2d7ae-10d8-474b-9bf1-d1558af697be/.

Ronald J. Ostrow, “Richard Jewell Case Study,” Columbia University, June 2000, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Jewell.

“Eric Rudolph,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Rudolph.

Mary Elizabeth Williams, “Hillary powers through pneumonia, Salon, September 12, 2016.

Alex Seitz-Wald, Monica Alba, Andrea Mitchell, Kristen Welker, Kasie Hunt, “Clinton’s Health Scare: Nine Unanswered Questions,” NBC News,September 12, 2016, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/hillary-clinton-s-health-scare-9-unanswered-questions-n646551.

Jen Gunter, “I’m a doctor and these are the things I find concerning with Trump’s medical letter,” August 16, 2016, www.drjengunter.wordpress.com/2016/08/16.

Matthew Yglesias, “The real Clinton email scandal is that a bullshit story has dominated the campaign,” Vox, November 4, 2016, http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/11/4/13500018/clinton-email-scandal-bullshit.

Stephen Collinson, “How White House missteps exacerbated Biden’s classified documents headache,” CNN Analysis, Friday January 13, 2023

Sarah Ellison and Elahe Izadi, “Biden’s classified documents are a media test and opportunity,” The Washington Post, January 13, 2013

Zeesham Aleem, “Trump’s and Biden’s documents scandals are different. That may not matter.” MSNBC Daily, Jan. 13, 2023.

Kevin Liptak, Phil Mattingly, Jeff Zeleny and Arlette Saenz, “Biden’s whirlwind final days as vice president had aides scrambling to close his White House Office”, CNN

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