How Karl Rove tricked the media into trashing the messenger while ignoring the messageby Sander Hicks Publisher, Soft Skull Press May 23, 2001
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J.H. Hatfield had just identified Karl T. Rove, the Bush campaign's senior advisor to me personally as the primary source for the G.W. Bush cocaine arrest story.
It took me that whole year to understand why Rove would do such a thing.snip
When the media stumbled upon the story that George W. Bush was arrested for cocaine possession in 1972, it was through an
anonymous tip reported by a columnist at Salon.com ("Bush Up To His Arse In Allegations! Sharp-Toothed E-Mail, Killer Bees and Bags of Worms. Will This Hound Hunt?" by Amy Reiter.) Hatfield's book was in final proofing stages when this hot story broke on August 25, 1999. The piece was the first to state that Bush had been arrested in the early '70s, and that he "was ordered by a Texas judge to perform community service in exchange for expunging his record showing illicit drug use," according to the source. To make matters worse that August, Bush went out on his own on the campaign trail and improvised on camera about his drug past. With his handlers out of town ghost-writing his 'autobiography,' he blurted out at a press conference
that he hadn't done drugs since 1974. The media crowed at the spectacle. For instance, USA Today gushed, "Bush has admitted something, but he refuses to say what."
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Rove and Johnson further ensured they could discredit Hatfield
by feeding him flawed information. They altered key facts in the cocaine arrest story, and thus raised the burden of proof for future reporters. At one point, Hatfield was told that the arresting judge was a Republican, a falsehood which, although easily detected, served to damage Hatfield's credibility. After St. Martin's rushed the cocaine arrest story into the book as an Afterword,
suddenly The Dallas Morning News received the private, criminal record of J.H. Hatfield's felony in Texas. The News published an article about Hatfield's felonious past and it was all over for the Bush cocaine arrest story.This style of disinformation follows the pattern set by all masters of public opinion of the 20th Century. Karl T. Rove is an avid history buff, and applies what he reads. In just two short months
he surgically removed the media's talk of the Bush drug arrest by feeding it to a biographer he knew had a felony conviction in his past. Hatfield broke the story, and then Rove broke Hatfield. The Bush Campaign's friends at the Dallas Morning News broke a salacious, mesmerizing story about a car-bomb, a hit man, a boss, a felony conviction, and the mass media's attention is focused en masse on Hatfield, who can't take the heat, denies the allegations and flees town. St. Martin's doesn't know what's going on, but suddenly they are getting threatened by Bush campaign lawyers who are "looking into" suing them. St. Martin's behavior becomes paranoid, they announce that they are pulling 88,000 copies of the book from stores. So much for America, so much for the Bill of Rights.
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