The View from Somewhere by Lewis Raven Wallace

Author:Lewis Raven Wallace
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LAN000000 Language Arts & Disciplines / General
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2019-10-30T16:00:00+00:00

8

“CAN’T YOU FIND ANY MORE WOMEN TO ATTACK?”

What Happens When Facts Don’t Matter

Criticize other people for not being objective. Be as subjective as you want. It’s a great little racket.

MATT LABASH, writer for the Weekly Standard

“I do not lie on this program,” Rush Limbaugh told his millions of listeners in 1993. “And I do not make things up for the advancement of my cause. And if I find that I have been mistaken or am in error, then I proclaim it generally at the top of—beginning of—a program, or as loudly as I can.”

Limbaugh, at the time, was barely clear of the era of his “AIDS Update,” a regular segment during which he complained about the militancy of anti-AIDS activists over soundtrack of Dionne Warwick’s “I’ll never love this way again.” Another regular segment on Rush’s show in the late ’80s, the “Gerbil Report,” concerned the practice of “gerbilling”—a largely apocryphal sexual practice involving a tube, an orifice, and a gerbil (if you’re still curious, feel free to Google it).

Rush loved to play both sides: he claimed the title of journalist only when it served him and denied it when he was accused of bending the truth. But he had some favorite journalists. One of them, a then-closeted gay man named David Brock, made his name with a 1992 article called “The Real Anita Hill” in the American Spectator. At the time, the entire country was obsessed with the lewd “he said, she said” that had emerged in the confirmation hearings for Clarence Thomas, who was nominated by George H. W. Bush to replace the Supreme Court’s only Black justice before him, Thurgood Marshall.

Anita Hill, who is also Black, alleged that Thomas had sexually harassed her while he was head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission—the federal agency in charge of preventing workplace harassment. Conservatives, hungry for a solidly right-wing justice, immediately set out to paint Hill as a liar, and Brock in “The Real Anita Hill” presented plenty of reasons why she might lie: he called Hill “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty.” Limbaugh gleefully read Brock’s copy on the air, making Brock famous overnight.

What he didn’t say was that Brock’s “investigation” into Hill had been requested and paid for by a wealthy North Carolina conservative heiress, funding that was never mentioned in the Spectator, either. As Brock would later write, “I saw the offer, my introduction to right-wing checkbook journalism, as a big break.”

Brock has a lot to teach about how the misinformation sausage is made. He would go on to write a best-selling book, The Real Anita Hill, based on his “nutty, slutty” article. Later, he confessed to bending, warping, and even fabricating facts in the name of the right-wing cause, defending Clarence Thomas at all costs. Brock’s story provides insight into both the rise of right-wing media, and the production and popularity of stories that are only partially true.

I knew I needed to consider the problem of misinformation and disinformation—“fake news” is, after

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