- This is a good illustration of how disinformation becomes Lexus/Nexus gospel.
Right out of the ol' (somewhat tattered) clinton playbook...
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There were two major techniques that we used to implement McCurry's strategy of getting all the bad news out early and helping reporters write bad stories. The first was overt and fully approved within the White House chain of command... "document dumps." The second method was covert, both to the outside world and within the "official" channels of the White House - the selective placement of certain stories and hot documents with a particular news organization, on "deep background," in a manner designed to minimize damage. The trumping argument used by McCurry and me for doing these document dumps was directly out of the rules: that the hot documents were going to be leaked anyway, or worse, they would not be leaked and would be released for the first time during nationally televised senate and house campaign-finance hearings. Better that we put the story out ourselves, with plenty of opportunity to answer questions and to characterize the documents favorably, or at least accurately....We did this rarely; this method was almost always limited to a potentially very damaging story that was complicated, and therefore, which needed a baseline or "predicate" story to frame the issue. I never did a deep-background private placement without at least someone at a high level of the White House chain of command at least generally aware of what I was doing. The advantages of the predicate story as a critical tool of damage control cannot be overstated.... [I]t will become the foundation block for all other reporters and for all future reporting. It will pop up in every Lexis/Nexis database search from then on. If it is complete and accurate, it will likely kill or at least diminish follow-up stories, since there won't be much more to report. If it is incomplete and wrong, then the Lexis database will cause it to repeat and grow, like a virus, more and more difficult to catch up with, correct, and cure.... [T]his procedure offers us the maximum chance to get into the story our interpretation or characterization of the facts most favorable (or least damaging) to the President. [W]hen we were trying to kill the impact of the story, we used certain news organizations for this purpose. And we chose certain time periods or days of the week to place these stories with the same purpose in mind. Usually our first choice was the Associated Press. Not only was the AP's team of investigative reporters first-rate and notoriously fact-oriented and fair, but we found that when an AP story went out on the overnight wires, the major daily national newspapers, such as The Washington Post or The New York Times, would not be inclined to give it front-page play. If they printed it at all, it was often buried on an inside page. More importantly, if an AP story was comprehensive and accurate - meaning, an effective predicate story - it was less likely that the major dailies would have much left to report in the next day's papers. ...So we decided to call John Solomon at the AP and invited him to come over to the White House... We had come to regard Solomon as the most factually-oriented, middle-of-the-road journalist of any on the scandal beat. He would kill us with stories, for sure; but they were always factual and he went the extra mile to be fair and complete in his reporting.... [W]e hoped the story would have died down almost completely. As it turned out, we were right. Manipulative and strategic in the choice and timing of the publication of this story? I guess. |
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