The Gang of 500 and the Terrible Three

Bob Sommerby, who, regrettably, we haven't checked in with for awhile (we will make amends for that in this run-up to another addled election), is running a series on a new book, The Way to Win, by John Harris and Mark Halperin. The book is apparently an appraisal of just how and why George W. Bush was able to become President of the United States.

In the book they come to a "stunning" conclusion. Sommerby appreciates the honesty with which Halperin and Harris point to their fellow journalists' complicity in the fateful election of 2000, but takes exception with the way in which they get there.

PART 1—BURY THE TRUTH: Deep inside their important but deeply flawed book, John Harris and Mark Halperin tell an astonishing story about the most important political event of the past twenty years. How did George W. Bush reach the White House? In the following passage, Harris and Halperin refer to the “Gang of 500"—roughly speaking, to “the group of columnists, consultants, reporters and staff hands” (page 24) who constitute Insider Washington:

HARRIS/HALPERIN (page 129): A number of members of the Gang of 500 are convinced that the main reason George W. Bush won the White House and Al Gore lost was that Gore’s regular press pack included the trio of Katherine “Kit” Seelye (of the New York Times), Ceci Connolly (of the Washington Post), and Sandra Sobieraj (of the Associated Press).

Simply put, that’s an astonishing statement—but it appears as a minor aside, buried deep inside a very long book. In this passage, Harris and Halperin—major press corps insiders themselves—say that some of their well-placed colleagues believe that George Bush reached the White House because of the work of just three Gore reporters! Harris and Halperin have dropped a bomb here. And as they do so, they pretend they have not.

How astounding is that statement by Harris and Halperin? As with much that they write in this book, the statement is carefully couched and qualified; for example, the writers don’t tell us how many members of the Gang of 500 think that Bush became president because of Seelye, Connolly and Sobieraj. But make no mistake about the significance of the passage we have quoted. Harris and Halperin are discussing the three most important Gore reporters of Campaign 2000—and here’s the paragraph which immediately precedes the one we have just presented:

HARRIS/HALPERIN (page 129): No one who kept a close eye on the media coverage of the 2000 campaign would deny that the press corps assigned to Gore was more aggressive and more hostile toward the candidate than those assigned to Bush ...This discrepancy made Old Media reporters much more likely to buy into political party press releases, late-night comic jokes, and the general story line that mirrored the Bush campaign’s crafted version of Gore.

A number of members of the Gang of 500 are convinced that the main reason George W. Bush won the White House and Al Gore lost was that Gore’s regular press pack included the trio of Katherine “Kit” Seelye (of the New York Times), Ceci Connolly (of the Washington Post), and Sandra Sobieraj (of the Associated Press).

We begin to see how astounding their statement really is. According to Harris and Halperin, no one denies that the reporters assigned to Gore were “more hostile” toward Gore than those assigned to Bush. It is in that context that they makes their next statement—saying that some insiders “are convinced” that Bush reached the White House just because of three such reporters. For the record, Harris writes for the Washington Post—the newspaper for which Connolly covered Gore. Indeed, as we will see at the end of the week, Harris co-authored some of the reports in which Connolly made up fake tales about Gore! Yep—Ceci Connolly made it up about Gore for twenty straight months. And on occasion, John Harris helped out.

As such, this statement by Harris and Halperin is little short of astonishing. And make no mistake—Harris and Halperin don’t believe that the three reporters they name were alone in their journalistic misconduct—in the “hostile” way they “b[ought] into...the general story line that mirrored the Bush campaign’s crafted version of Gore.” As we noted in a post last week, they go on to say that the entire press corps behaved in this startling fashion:

HARRIS/HALPERIN (page 129): And it was not just those three tone-setters who latched onto a negative image of Gore. Nearly every newspaper and television network in the country did stories at some point during the campaign raising the question of whether the vice president was a big liar or merely a small one. As Rolling Stone pointed out long after the election, “Journalists just refused to drop unflattering Gore stories, no matter what the facts revealed.”

As we noted last week, Harris and Halperin accept the judgment of Eric Boehlert, who wrote that statement for Rolling Stone. Incredible, isn’t it? According to Harris and Halperin, “no matter what the facts revealed,” their colleagues just kept repeating their negative tales about Gore! Indeed, what do Harris and Halperin say about the press corps’ endless assaults on Gore’s character? “Nearly every one of these controversies was overplayed or mischaracterized” by the mainstream press corps, they write on page 128.

Truly, these are astonishing statements—statements about the White House campaign which has now transformed U.S. (and world) history. And yet, this analysis is buried deep in this book—thrown away as a mere aside on two pages of a 413-page book.

Astonishing stuff. Even more astonishing that two journalists would come to the (obvious) conclusion that influential members of the press corps had their thumb on the scale during campaign 2000 is the further conclusion that Harris and Halperin arrive at, as covered in Part 2 of Sommerby's series: That it was all Gore's fault.