I'll leave it to
Fred Kaplan, who knows way more about military stuff then I do (also cited in
this diary), to refute the jaundiced portrayal of Wesley Clark in the
New Yorker by Peter Boyer, which was the subject of
this earlier diary.
I'll just point out that the author of the article, Peter Boyer, is well-known as one of the chief big-media hacks in the Clinton culture wars, responsible for giving mainstream media credence and respectability to a whole raft of anti-Clinton and anti-Gore stories and memes that I think most of us would agree, in retrospect, to have been catastrophically misguided, if not maliciously overblown or false (see, among other places, M.Dickinson in a Salon: "A Massive Journalistic Breakdown"). When it comes to political journalism, Boyer reliably takes the contrarian, anti-liberal slant. A half-hour of googling the article's author name gives a flavor of some of his past work.
Besides writing for the New Yorker, Boyer has also worked as a correspondent on at least three Frontline documentaries,
"Choice 2000",
"Once Upon a Time in Arkansas", and
"The Children of Waco".
Here's Frontline's own description of the way Boyer and his colleague Michael Kirk approached the subject of Al Gore in their profile of the two candidates:
Behind Al Gore's urge to know more than the other guy and work so relentlessly was his parents' expectation from the day he was born that he would be president. "It was always part of his parents' plan to prepare him for the presidency." says Gore family confidant Dr. James Fleming. FRONTLINE looks at Gore's lifelong problem--what his friends call "his wooden Apollo" image--and also chronicles his malleability on issues and his tendency to exaggerate his accomplishments. "He did it, I think, honestly, to try to connect with the person he was dealing with." says campaign aide Mike Kopp.
And here are some contemporaneous press reviews, also from the Frontline website:
"Neither man is all hero or all cad in Michael Kirk and Peter J. Boyer's measured but unfailingly watchable piece of work. If anything, despite the (undeserved) PBS reputation for liberalism, it is more revealing about and damaging to Gore, nailing him on that tendency to biographical exaggeration and a willingness to try to exploit personal tragedy for political gain." Steven Johnson, Chicago Tribune
"A quick note to conservatives: Before you complain about another biased, liberal TV report, pay attention to how Frontline treats the vice president.
Words such as opportunistic, even conniving, come to mind." Dusty Saunders, Rocky Mountain News
And here's the Frontline synopsis of "Once Upon a Time in Arkansas":
This program takes a fascinating journey through time - and Arkansas - showing how the Clintons' close personal and political relationships formed the twisted financial bonds of land deals and alleged cover-ups that have come to be known as Whitewater.
The main focus is on two of the state's most prominent couples back then - Bill and Hillary Clinton and Jim and Susan McDougal. (Both McDougals were interviewed while serving separate jail sentences. Jim McDougal has since died.)
The program lays out how the Clintons - he was the young Attorney General with his eyes on the state governorship - were brought into an ambitious McDougal deal to build vacation homes on the White River. Clinton, with few assets, just needed to sign for a loan arranged by his pal McDougal. "McDougal made his political friends partners in his deals and used their stature to make it easier for banks to say yes," says FRONTLINE correspondent Peter Boyer. "And the politicians, like his friend Bill Clinton, were happy to go along with it."
And here's Walter Goodman, of the NY Times, reviewing the program:
"'Once Upon A Time In Arkansas' presents no new smoking guns about Whitewater. But the air in Little Rock was evidently so fetid that the whole place was smoking all the time. "
"...This hour focuses on the good-old-boy friendships and favors that embroiled the Clintons in a shaky operation in the first place and then caused a falling out among the sometime partners. Mr. Boyer suggests that it was the couple's effort to distance themselves from their old and obliging pal, Jim McDougal, even while trying to squeeze a few thousand dollars more out of him in his time of trouble that sorrowed and angered him enough to implicate them in his embarrassments."
"...So stands the tale known as Whitewater. Viewers may be left with the dismaying sense that the one person in Arkansas for whom politics was very much a full-time, lifetime vocation, never mind the money, was Bill Clinton but that he could not say no to the kindness of friends."
There's lots more where that came from. Boyer also wrote a psycho-babbling negative profile of Janet Reno in the New Yorker (also called "The Children of Waco" , 5/15/95), and a lurid piece about Vince Foster, also in the New Yorker ("Life after Vince," 9/11/1995) but not online so far as I know. Among his biggest online fans are such reliable anti-Clinton/Gore sources as Christopher Hitchens, Newsmax, and Media Reality Check, which approvingly cites a WaPo piece by Howard ("Conflict of Interest") Kurtz on Sidney's Blumenthal's supposedly nefarious attempts to derail a piece on "Travelgate" (remember that crucial story?) that Boyer wanted to write:
Kurtz also wrote "Peter Boyer, a New Yorker writer, says Blumenthal tried to sabotage his story about the Travelgate affair last year. Boyer says he mentioned the piece to his colleague after learning that Blumenthal had lunched with Clinton's friend Harry Thomason on the day the Hollywood producer pushed for the firing of the White House travel office employees....Boyer says he was later told.... Blumenthal had warned them Boyer was anti-Clinton and planned to smear them."
I'll leave you to decide which side of that debate, in retrospect, was the right one.
And here's my personal favorite, Boyer on Newt Gingrich, also in the New Yorker (11/26/01), in a piece called "The Worrier: Newt Gingrich returns":
Gingrich, like Churchill, is one of those figures who fix on dangers only dimly perceived by others, and whose urgent warnings are often unheeded because of the messenger's complicated political biography. Gingrich issued his first warnings about the need to confront terrorism in his 1984 book "Window of Opportunity," and he has been a serious student of the subject ever since.
Again, I'll leave you to decide which comparison you think is more valid: Wesley Clark as an incompetent military strategist, or Newt Gingrich as a "Churchillian" anti-terrorism mastermind.
Boyer also made a bit of a splash lately with his pro-Mel Gibson piece, also in the New Yorker. Here's Frank Rich in the NYTimes, ripping Boyer's soft-pedaling of Gibson's father's anti-semitism:
In the New Yorker article, [Mel] says that his father, Hutton Gibson, a prolific author on religious matters, "never denied the Holocaust"; the article's author, Peter J. Boyer, sanitizes the senior Gibson further by saying he called the Holocaust a "tragedy" in an interview he gave to the writer Christopher Noxon for a New York Times Magazine article published last March. Neither the word "tragedy" nor any synonym for it ever appeared in that Times article, and according to a full transcript of the interview that Mr. Noxon made available to me, Hutton Gibson said there was "no systematic extermination" of the Jews by Hitler, only "a deal where he was supposed to make it rough on them so they would all get out and migrate to Israel because they needed people there to fight the Arabs. . . ." (This is consistent with Hutton Gibson's public stands on the issue; he publishes a newsletter in which the word Holocaust appears in quotes.)
And check out Boyer's defense of Gibson, and attack on Rich, in his conversation with that paragon of fair and balanced journalism, our pal Bill O'Reilly: "Fair Treatment for Mel Gibson and his movie". It's too long to excerpt, but he agrees with O'Reilly that the media is biased against Gibson. Here's a nugget: "I do think that the reflexive response on the part of some in the media is wait a minute... Mel Gibson, Christianity, traditional Christianity, based on the gospels on the one side, and then you have the academics and the ADL and those on the other side -- sort of reflexively, they -- they come to this point of view. That's what I think..."
Sorry for the overlong, obsessive screed here, but that New Yorker piece really pissed me off. We report, you decide.