Now is the time to ask: What do John Mark Karr and Joseph Wilson have in
common? Wilson is no more a would-be pedophile than Karr is a former
diplomat. But they are both attention-seeking liars who deliberately helped
launch criminal investigations that should never have gone as far as they
did. Moreover, they launched media feeding frenzies that wasted everybody's
time.
It's this second point that interests me more than the first. Ever since it
was reported that Karr wasn't the right guy, the media - cable news networks
in particular - have been taking a beating by the professional
fingerwaggers. The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz declared that the Karr
episode "instantly goes down with the greatest media embarrassments in
modern history."
In fairness, the fingerwaggers have a point. A woman who flew on the same
plane as Karr, for example, was interviewed as if she had survived the
downing of the Titanic. The Karr family baby sitter was filmed in shadows
for her interview, as if she were in witness protection for ratting out
Vincent "the Chin" Gigante.
"The problem is that the New York Times devoted in one of their articles ...
13 reporters to John Mark Karr. They don't have 13 reporters in Iraq. That's
the embarrassment," exclaimed media writer Neal Gabler on Fox News.
But when it comes to the Joseph Wilson story, the wagging fingers shudder to
a full stop. Wilson's allegations were all outright lies or, at best,
deceitful insinuations. At least when Karr lied, he put the blame on
himself. In Wilson's telling, he could do no wrong even as he was a one-man
sprinkler system of false accusations - accusations that launched an absurd
investigation, cost the vice president's chief of staff his job, put a
journalist in jail and threatened to do likewise to many more, and hurt
America's image around the globe.
As it turned out, Wilson's accusation that President Bush lied in his State
of the Union speech about Iraq seeking "yellowcake uranium" was debunked by
the Senate Intelligence Committee. As was Wilson's repeated denial that his
wife didn't help him get the Niger assignment. His suggestion that Dick
Cheney sent him to Africa and that Cheney deliberately ignored Wilson's
shoddy report was pure Wilsonian conjecture. And, of course, his
self-lionizing speculation that the White House launched a vengeful campaign
against his wife never had any basis in fact. Indeed, there's good reason to
believe Wilson himself leaked the information that Plame was an undercover
agent.
But that didn't stop the press from going hog wild. The New York Times led
the clamor for an independent prosecutor (who, once appointed, put the
Times' own reporter, Judith Miller, in jail). And unlike the journalists who
insisted that John Mark Karr was innocent until proven guilty, the Times'
mob of liberal pundits worked from the opposite assumption when it came to
Karl Rove et al. Paul Krugman suggested Rove should receive his medal for
ruining America from a jail cell. Maureen Dowd insisted, "The issue is the
administration's credibility, not Joe Wilson's." And, of course, the
left-wing blogs spewed bile about "treason" all day long.
Now, I'm not saying the press shouldn't have investigated Wilson's
allegations. Even if we now know he isn't a serious man, the charges surely
were. But I don't think it was wrong for the press to cover Karr
exhaustively (as opposed to excessively) either. The press has been in the
true-crime business for centuries. The JonBenet Ramsey murder was a huge
story, and a man with a reported record of interest in underage girls
confessed to the crime in Bangkok - a Mecca for perverts The Karr story was
unfolding in real time, and the news is supposed to cover, you know, news.
Most important, unlike Wilson, Karr was in a position to know the truth of
the matter.
Kurtz wrote this about the Karr story: "Facts don't matter in frenzies; what
matters is camera-ready speculation, where opposing lawyers and
ex-prosecutors can argue on one talk show after another." Just replace
lawyers and ex-prosecutors with spinners, pundits and consultants, and the
same holds true.
I don't know if the Wilson fraud will instantly go down with the greatest
media embarrassments in modern history. However, the press doesn't seem to
mind beating itself up when it overindulges the public's passions. But when
its own self-indulgence is the issue, there's never any need to feel
embarrassed. Indeed, there's no need to say anything at all.