Blunt's Eckersley Scandal, Day Twenty-One
Let me begin by saying that Tony Messenger has done a tremendous job reporting on Matt Blunt's Scott Eckersley scandal. He's been there from the beginning, and has written refreshingly with an appetite for real truth rather than just the ordinary he-said-she-said horserace blather (which we get more than enough of at Jo Mannies' blog).
And that's what makes Messenger's reversion to the norm in Sunday's column so disappointing.
We find in Messenger's Sunday offering a classic example of media behavior that has become known in the progressive blogosphere as High Broderism. Blogger Atrios has offered a succinct explanation of High Broderism, which is named for the behavior's most prominent practitioner:
We normally think of "High Broderism" as the worship of bipartisanship
for its own sake, combined with a fake "pox on both their houses"
attitude.
Implicit in the concept is that the press is so deathly afraid of taking a beating from rightwingers who incessantly and without merit toss around charges of liberal media bias that wherever they have the opportunity they will write stories that falsely attribute any political bad acts equally to both political parties regardless of where real responsibility lies.
ÂAnd where for three weeks Messenger has done so well to keep the focus of reporting about the Eckersley scandal on the Governor's office where it belongs, he today seemingly can no longer resist the siren song of High Broderism. In the column he makes an illusionist's bid at braiding Democrats like Jay Nixon into the web that Matt Blunt's team has woven.
It's that old "fake pox on both their houses attitude" that Atrios told us about.
The High Broderist impulse peeks its head out about halfway through Messenger's piece when he writes:
For perhaps the first time in state history, the state's top two elected officials are both talking about the Sunshine Law.
They're not just talking about the Sunshine Law, they're using it as a hammer against each other.
For this, taxpayers and voters should rejoice.
These three simple sentences are so larded down with misplaced, destructive High Broderism that it is difficult to begin unpacking them.
Let us begin by considering how ridiculous it is to suggest that a stretch of fairly uninhibited lawbreaking and government opacity perpetrated by the Blunt regime --and it is those things which undoubtedly started this "discussion"-- is held up as something over which we should "rejoice." The logical yet absurd conclusion of Messenger's reasoning, should we follow where it inevitably leads, is that Matt Blunt deserves a great deal of thanks for ignoring the law so that we could open up this wonderful dialogue. This is like thanking Slobodan Milosevic for opening a door to a conversation about ethnic cleansing.
Almost as bizarre is the contention that Blunt and Nixon are using the Sunshine Law "as a hammer against each other." Here there is a strange and inaccurate suggestion of agency. I'll agree that Matt Blunt has attempted, albeit clumsily, to use the Sunshine Law as "a hammer" against Jay Nixon and Democrats writ large. But save for the desire to paint both sides as equally culpable, is there any reason whatsoever to claim, as Messenger does, that Nixon has tried to "hammer" Blunt with the Sunshine Law? Of course not. On the contrary, Nixon's entry into the entire affair has been grudging, stepping in to appoint an independent commission only when the clamor from the editorial pages for him to act became impossible to ignore.
If the Sunshine Law was used as a hammer against Matt Blunt it was wielded by Scott Eckersley, not Jay Nixon. As Messenger is well aware, the most damning claims about the Blunt administration's misdeeds regarding the Sunshine Law came not from Nixon or any other Democrat, but from a Republican who worked in Matt Blunt's office.
Yet that history seems destined for burial by Messenger in his column today. The work that he'd done and done so well, reporting piece by piece on the inexcusable acts by the Blunt administration, is today brushed largely aside in favor of the idea that the entire Sunshine Law conversation and Eckersley affair can be chalked comfortably up to the routine political battle between partisan opponents.
Messenger's High Broderism becomes even more apparent as the column marches on. In the column's most logically corrupt and factually compromised graf, he writes:
The fact is that Missouri's Sunshine Law is weak. It has no teeth, and
that's one of the reasons that Nixon's record of enforcing it has been
so woefully inadequate over the years. So here we have an attorney
general who's paid lip service to the law and a governor who hasn't
followed it, and now they both want to make it the central issue of the
2008 campaign for governor.
Before we approach the silly repetition of worthless GOP message points in this section, let's first tease out the logical impossibilities. Messenger contends that our Sunshine Law is "weak" and has "no teeth." In the next breath he claims that Attorney General's record of enforcing the law is "woefully inadequate." It is truly puzzling that Messenger can in consecutive sentences suggest that a law has "no teeth" and chastise a law enforcement figure for his or her "record" on upholding that law.
How Messenger can be critical of Nixon's enforcement of a law that, in his own view, has "no teeth" is beyond comprehension.
Messenger knows that there is both nothing wrong with Missouri's Sunshine Law or with Attorney General Nixon's record of enforcement. But he also knows that the rules of High Broderism require reporters and columnists to assess blame equally for any flaws or wrongdoing in government, even if --as usual-- it's GOPers who are leaping over the line then pointing accusingly at Democrats.
In the above graf, Messenger goes on to make the stunningly context-free claim that Nixon has "paid lip-service to the law." Messenger has the right to write, as he does, that Matt Blunt "hasn't followed" the law because a significant trail of his own reporting has laid out the evidence on that point comprehensively. But to suggest at the same time that Nixon has "paid lip-service" to the Sunshine Law --without a factual basis in either this column or in his recent reporting-- is little more than a weak-hearted effort to follow the prescriptions of the High Broderist witch-doctors, which direct reporters never to criticize one party without also suggesting that the other is equally to blame.
And as we unwrap that contention further, we discover the very disturbing moral equivalency argument lurking within the graf. By tying together Blunt and Nixon in the same bundle of blame ("we have an attorney
general who's paid lip service to the law and a governor who hasn't
followed it") Messenger effectively equalizes the actions of both men. There is Blunt --who has refused to follow the records retention or Sunshine Laws, fired an attorney who pointed out the law-breaking, broken into the attorney's private email in an effort to smear him, and lied repeatedly to the press about all of this-- and Nixon --who Messenger accuses, without example, of "paying lip-service" to the Sunshine Law-- wrapped together in one package in Messenger's column, held up symbolically as party leaders engaged in equally reprehensible acts.
This false equivalence that Messenger attributes to the acts of Blunt and Nixon is morally perverse in the extreme. It is as though there is a murderer on the loose who has killed half a dozen innocent victims and the newspaper contends that the murderer and the marshal are equally to blame for the deaths because the marshal hasn't yet corralled the perpetrator. There is no Newtonian law of political physics that requires there to be a partisan Democratic bad actor every time there is a partisan Republican bad actor, yet Messenger's column seemingly assumes that law's operation is as valid as gravity's.
Beyond the perversity of Messenger's moral equivalency argument there is the additional problem of his column's wholesale adoption and repetition of Republican-created message points and memes. The second excerpt included above includes two false and very destructive themes that Republicans want Missourians to believe and which Messenger is (unwittingly?) helping to disseminate.
The first is that there is something "wrong" with or "confusing" about Missouri's Sunshine Law which requires changing, and the inadequacy of which is ultimately responsible for all of the Blunt administration's secrecy and stonewalling regarding the retention and provision of public documents. This is a bogus theme that Team Blunt has been pushing from the beginning of the scandal and which Messenger himself has been instrumental in disqualifying. Yet now Messenger is giving oxygen to the idea that Blunt's intransigence was simply attributable to a porous or faulty statute.
Hogwash. The fact of the matter is that the Sunshine Law and records retention schedule are completely unambiguous with regard to documents and emails of the sort that were clearly destroyed or withheld by Blunt's office, and with which Messenger is very familiar. Why Messenger has chosen now to soften on that point is as disappointing as it is confusing. It is another example of the strength of the High Broderist impulse in our political media.
Similarly, Messenger's column helps spread an Orwellian and ludicrous new meme that the GOP has begun to push when he writes, "now they both [Blunt and Nixon] want to make it the central issue of the
2008 campaign for governor."
This is obvious lunacy. Ed Martin, Paul Sloca and John Hancock very much want people, including Messenger, to believe that the Sunshine Law is something that they want the election to be about, but this is just empty posturing meant to shore up their obvious political weakness on the issue. The childlike naivete required for someone like Messenger to actually believe that the Governor wants to talk on the campaign trail about a law that he has consistently and flagrantly broken exceeds that which any seasoned newspaperman could possibly possess. But Messenger allows the meme to be repeated in his column anyway, because it fits into the always-acceptable High Broderist formula: anything is plausible if it helps us pretend that both Democrats and Republicans are equally to blame.
This is not just about trying to score partisan points for one side or the other. It is about pushing back on a style of reporting that engages political correspondents as anthropomorphized equal-signs. It is about forcing our press to realize that sometimes someone from one party does something very bad and very wrong which is not nicely balanced out by something done by someone from the opposing party. Pretending that "both sides do all the same things" when not supported by facts is an insult to good reporting, and should stop.
This could all be construed (and somewhat fairly, I suppose) as an assault on the very reporter who has been most important and most fair in pursuing the truth in the Eckersley scandal. It is intended not as an assault but as a lament. For the reporter who so assiduously cast aside the ordinary conventions of he-said-she-said political reporting in favor of shoeleather fact-gathering and the placing of blame where it was due to revert to the hollow drone of High Broderism, I am genuinely sad.
For three weeks, we could count on Messenger to reject the High Broderism that we've gotten for so long from so many of our outlets. And I hope that for at least the next three weeks (three years? decades?) we can continue to count on that bravery. But for today, the twenty-first day of the Eckersley Scandal, we get High Broderism everywhere we turn. Even from the guy who has done so much to cast it out.
