In this week’s column, I tackle Washington’s “scandal” season…
A clip:
We have officially entered the “summer of the shark” phase of the Obama administration — where nearly any political event is liable to be swept up in the rip currents of the Beltway media’s favorite theme: scandal.
In the local news version of shark summers, one surfer gets bitten, then a swimmer nipped and before you know it, we’ve got ourselves a genuine epidemic of toothy menaces snacking on human bathers. Statistically, there may have been no more shark bites than any other summer, but the media temptation to create a narrative is nearly irresistible.
In politics, the already-brittle relationship between the Washington press corps and the Obama administration broke wide open when not one, not two, but three “scandals” got dorsal fins wagging.
First came Benghazi, the Republican-led, Fox News-fed and right-wing, blog-fueled conspiracy extravaganza born of a very real tragedy: the killing of four Americans in terrorist attacks on a CIA/diplomatic compound in Libya on Sept. 11, 2012. The GOP hoped to make Benghazi Obama’s Waterloo last November, culminating in the “please proceed, governor” moment during the second presidential debate when Mitt Romney parroted the false conservative talking point that the president had failed to call the attacks “terrorism.”
But it was a dramatic report by ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl that catapulted the story from the fever swamps of the right — where the dark theories ranged from the president leaving our diplomat in the region and his cohorts to die, to a nonexistent video feed to the White House — into the mainstream. Karl reported on May 10 that a White House deputy national security adviser, Ben Rhodes, attempted to shape talking points for U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice’s appearances on the Sunday talk shows after the attacks, to give cover to the State Department (which, because it was led by potential presidential candidate Hillary Clinton at the time, was a prime target of Republicans.) …
Read the whole thing here.
