NY Times Reporter: Trump Offers 'Wish Fulfillment' for Right-Wing Media's Conspiracy Nuts

May 27th, 2016 6:01 PM

Back in 1995, the Clinton White House produced a 332-page packet for media friends that was badly titled “Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce.” It charged a “right-wing conspiracy industry” spread fictions about the Clintons.

Conservatives might easily think of that when perusing Jonathan Martin’s New York Times piece from Wednesday, headlined “As Donald Trump Pushes Conspiracy Theories, Right-Wing Media Gets Its Wish.” Don't they love to put "conspiracy theories" and "right-wing media" in the same headline?

Martin’s beginning seems a bit obtuse:

WASHINGTON — Ever since talk radio, cable news and the Internet emerged in the 1990s as potent political forces on the right, Republicans have used those media to attack their opponents through a now-familiar two-step.

Political operatives would secretly place damaging information with friendly media like The Drudge Report and Fox News and with radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh — and then they would work to get the same information absorbed into the mainstream media.

Candidates themselves would avoid being seen slinging mud, if possible, so as to avoid coming across as undignified or desperate.

Do Martin and the Times really believe this is a unique process, that the Clintons never place "damaging information with friendly media" without their fingerprints? Are they somehow pretending to be unaware of other examples -- say, a bartender secretly videotaping a Mitt Romney speech in 2012 about the “47 percent” and leaking to the leftist magazine Mother Jones so it can be "absorbed into the mainstream media”?

Martin led with this conventional “conspiracy commerce” Clinton line as a way of suggesting that Trump isn’t using any “two-step” with friendly media to attack the Clintons:

Yet by personally broaching topics like Bill Clinton’s marital indiscretions and the conspiracy theories surrounding the suicide of Vincent W. Foster Jr., a Clinton White House aide, Donald J. Trump is again defying the norms of presidential politics and fashioning his own outrageous style — one that has little use for a middleman, let alone usual ideas about dignity....

With Mr. Trump as the presumptive Republican standard-bearer, the line separating the conservative mischief makers and the party’s more-buttoned-up cadre of elected officials and aides has been obliterated.

Trump revels in appearing outrageous and undignified. But are we to believe that the Times hasn't lobbed some outrageous and undignified collections of badly unsubstantiated claims? That John McCain just might be sleeping with Vicki Iseman? That Nancy Reagan just might be having an affair with Frank Sinatra?

Would Martin and the Times ever describe themselves as "mischief makers" when they would claim they were merely trying to hold government officials accountable? Obviously, they would never describe themselves in their own pages as "liberal," or as part of a "left-wing" media.

Martin emphasizes the "most inflammatory" accusations -- translation, the ones liberals at the Times refuse to investigate, or actively seek to defuse as meaningless piffle:

That the Republican Party has embraced someone willing to traffic in the most inflammatory of accusations comes as wish fulfillment for an element of the right that is convinced that the party lost the past two elections because its candidates were unwilling to attack President Obama forcefully enough.

In this telling, in 2008, Senator John McCain should have focused on Mr. Obama’s relationships with his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and the onetime radical Bill Ayers, and on discredited claims about Mr. Obama’s birthplace and ties to Islam. And Mitt Romney lost four years later because he, too, ignored those issues, as well as other fixations of the conservative news media like the terrorist attack on the United States Consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

Notice Martin blurs together disturbing facts -- Obama's close relationships with a pastor who cheered the 9-11 attacks as the "chickens coming home to roost" and a terrorist who actually bombed the Pentagon -- with unsupported claims Obama was born in Africa. It's quite revealing when liberal journalists mention conservative media "fixations" -- again, dripping contempt for stories they never wanted to pursue because they were potentially damaging to Democrats.

Recall that even as the Benghazi attacks happened on September 11, 2012, The New York Times couldn't put that on the front page. On September 11, they ran an op-ed attacking George W. Bush as responsible for 9/11. On September 12, they published a front-pager headlined "Dissecting Romney's Vietnam Stance at Stanford," and how that square Mitt "stayed true to his chinos and the Vietnam War."