Did I Dis Sid? I Did!
Is Chatterbox crazy to think Sidney Blumenthal didn't get enough
favorable publicity after he was forced to appear before Kenneth Starr's grand
jury to tell prosecutors whether he was saying nasty things about them? The
subpoena was, after all, just as outrageous as the commentariat said it was.
(Does Pepperdine law school really want to give its deanship to someone who
doesn' t know the first thing about the First Amendment?) Yet when Blumenthal
finally testified last Thursday, and then denounced Starr from the courthouse
steps, NBC correspondent David "Excitable Boy" Bloom poisoned Blumenthal's
sound bite by characterizing it in advance as a "tirade."... The most
gratuitously anti-Sid coverage was the front-page sneer from John M. Broder in
the New York Times . Broder's story began with this: "After a long career
as a scribbler in the shadows, Sidney Blumenthal got his moment in the sun
today... ." Now, it's true that Blumenthal was obviously loving the exposure,
but so are about 80 percent of the people who appear in the New York
Times . That doesn't usually get them a first-graph smirk, at least when
there are important things at stake. Imagine the respectful tone the
Times would have struck if, say, Erskine Bowles had been hauled before
the grand jury. But the First Amendment issues would have been the same....
Broder's third graph was bizarre: "A former journalist and the White House's
most celebrated conspiracy theorist, Mr. Blumenthal faced the cameras at the
peak of the Western Hemisphere's last total solar eclipse of the millennium."
Chatterbox at first thought this was an adventurous metaphor for the way
Blumenthal's story had been eclipsed by the news from Iraq, or the lull in the
Flytrap scandal, or by Broder's own attitude. But no. Turns out it was an
in-joke--Blumenthal is a millennium freak. You can laugh now... When is an
in-joke too in to run? Chatterbox's rule of thumb is that if Chatterbox doesn't
get the joke, it doesn't belong in the paper. If Chatterbox gets the joke but
the guy sitting next to Chatterbox doesn't, it's cutting-edge journalism....
Why don't reporters like Sid? Not simply because when he was a political writer
he was considered pathetically in-the-tank for Clinton (see Chatterbox for
2/23). It's also his standard demeanor, which features a permanent
I-know-a-secret-that-I'm-not-telling-you grin.... Contacted by telephone, the
Times ' Broder denies any "personal animosity toward Sid."... Yes, that's
right, Chatterbox actually picked up the phone and called somebody for a
reaction. Journalism! Don't expect it to happen again...
CORPORATISM WATCH: "There is a significant difference between asking
a White House official for his sources and asking the owner of a Web page on
the Internet for his sources," Marvin Kalb, director of the Shorenstein Center
on Press and Politics at Harvard, tells the Times . "On the Drudge side,
you're in uncharted waters." Meaning what? That Drudge has different [fewer?]
First Amendment rights than Blumenthal? That Kalb knows how to get his name in
the papers?... It's true that the Sidney Blumenthal now being pursued by Starr
is the same Sidney Blumenthal who recently demanded that Matt Drudge reveal
his sources. There's some hypocrisy there on Blumenthal's part. But
there is a difference between the two situations, and it's not the offensive
Drudge-is-a-peon distinction offered by Kalb. Blumenthal was never in charge of
a grand jury criminal proceeding, the way Starr is. He is suing Drudge in civil
court for libel, the same way any citizen can sue another citizen for libel. If
Starr had similarly sued Blumenthal for libel or slander instead of calling him
before the grand jury (where, among other things, you're not entitled to have a
lawyer present during questioning), we'd have a different story on our hands.
But of course Starr would never do that because he's a "public figure" and
under existing First Amendment precedents would have the same trouble proving
his case that Blumenthal will have in his suit against Drudge...
