The Rovian Research Behind Maureen Dowd's Anti-Hillary Screeds
August 1, 2015 ANALYSIS
By Peter Daou and Tom Watson
The shameful episode of the New York Times and its grossly irresponsible and false story about Hillary’s emails has brought the crisis of ethics in U.S. media to the fore.
As of this writing, the leadership of the Times has neither apologized nor taken appropriate responsibility for their bungled and dangerous story, despite an extraordinary letter from the Clinton campaign's Communications Director and a well-deserved backlash among the commentariat. Instead, we are treated by the paper to yet another exercise in anti-Hillary vitriol from Maureen Dowd. As usual, Dowd's writing seethes with Hillary hatred. What's worse is that in this column, Dowd uses the tragic death of Beau Biden as a platform to smear Hillary.
We’ve spent the better part of 2015 writing about the complex process by which Hillary’s integrity is assaulted by reporters, bloggers, columnists and pundits. We’ve made the case that her political fortunes will rise and fall depending on how well her campaign and her supporters fight back against this process of character assassination.
To that end, Peter has identified the key anti-Hillary memes (categories and subcategories) that have permeated coverage for decades:
• CALCULATING (Scheming, crafty, manipulative)
• SECRETIVE (Suspicious, paranoid, uncommunicative)
• POLARIZING (Divisive, alienating)
• UNTRUSTWORTHY (Corrupt, deceitful, dishonest, unethical)
• OVER-AMBITIOUS (Will do or say anything to win)
• INAUTHENTIC (Disingenuous, fake, unlikable, insincere)
• INHUMAN (Machine-like, robotic, abnormal, cold)
• OVER-CONFIDENT (Inevitable, defiant, imperious, regal)
• OLD (Out of touch, represents the past)
In The Great American Brainwash: Half a Billion Dollars to Turn the Public against Hillary, Peter explains how these memes work and where they originate:
From a revealing report on Karl Rove’s Crossroads:
“An expensive and sophisticated effort is underway to test and refine the most potent lines of attack against Mrs. Clinton, and, ultimately, to persuade Americans that she does not deserve their votes. Republican groups are eager to begin building a powerful case against the woman they believe will be the Democratic nominee, and to infuse the public consciousness with those messages. The effort to vilify Mrs. Clinton could ultimately cost several hundred million dollars, given the variety and volume of political organizations involved.”
Crossroads' goal is to indoctrinate the public with anti-Hillary narratives, to insert carefully tested negative memes into the public debate.
Voters need to understand that what they think they know about Hillary is often the result of sophisticated propaganda techniques, where tightly-crafted talking points are focus-grouped and deployed by shadowy GOP groups then magnified by the mainstream media and pundits.
This is the subtext to Maureen Dowd’s new, vicious attack against Hillary. Dowd’s words are chosen meticulously: they fit perfectly into the narratives and frames that have been developed for over two decades to smear Hillary. Each of these terms is taken from Dowd’s new op-ed – many are verbatim matches with our compendium of anti-Hillary memes:
“Acting all innocent, disingenuous, egregious transgressions, militant fans, craving a championship, surreptitious, wanting to win at all costs, calculating, history of subterfuge, crafty, sketchy value system, seamy, Faustian bargain, sheen of inevitability, robotic, queenly attitude, suspicious mind-set, unsavory.”
Delivering such excessive negativity in one piece is not opinion writing. It is not journalism. It is a personal vendetta aided and abetted by the New York Times, with the intention of spreading potent sexist frames crafted by conservative opposition researchers.
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The WORST times I ever had, at the hands of another coworker, with VERY few exceptions, was when that coworker was a woman. I couldn't believe it. I thought - hey, it's a sisterhood! We even put together this little side group that we called "Broads in Broadcasting" with the growing number of women on the air in L.A., whether they were jocks or newspeople. And one would assume we would all hang together and have each other's backs.
But NO! That is not what happened! Most of the knife wounds I had in my back were at the hands of another woman in the newsroom. Usually because the other woman perceived that I was "in her way." And the ruthlessness was such that I just was aghast in disbelief. Hey, sisters, aren't we all supposed to be trying to get ahead together? Aren't we supposed to be sticking together for the good of other women who deserve a place at the table? Shouldn't we all be in this together to break up what used to be yet another in a continuing and nauseating series of Good Ol' Boys Clubs? No. It didn't turn out that way at all. It was really disheartening.
There was one case in which I helped (well, I thought she was) a friend. Tried unsuccessfully to hire her twice. Finally got her an opening in my newsroom when I went on maternity leave, because I recommended her to my supervisor and his supervisor to fill in for me. She was VERY grateful because she hadn't had a break in awhile and was living basically hand-to-mouth, and I thought she was good enough to deserve better. By the time I came back from maternity leave, HOLY CRAP, turns out she'd done a major number on me behind my back, lobbying to take over my job permanently, carrying on all over the newsroom about how I was unfit and had done a shitty job and wasn't up to it and was disorganized and unmotivated (now that I had children - "distracting" me, that is - she breezed past the one photo of both my kids that I'd brought in upon my return and referred to them dismissively as "Flotsam" and "Jetsam"
, and more.
Other people in the newsroom who were still my friends told me all about it. Some of them had long since started disliking her. There'd been some shit-stirring while I was gone. And they sure told me all about it. I was horrified! I couldn't believe it! One of the other women in the newsroom hissed at me about her - "What a bitch - fucking ingrate! And YOU GOT her that job, didn't you! What a backstabber!" I was just aghast. I thought she was my friend. Meantime, while I was gone on maternity leave, she evidently had begun to convince herself that this was really HER job all along and how DARE I return to it and take it away from her, especially since SHE very clearly, and obviously to everyone else everywhere, had done the job far better than I ever had?
She denied it all, of course, and played innocent. That is, until the lovely moment when I tried to get to the bottom of this and she flat-out told me to my face: "I'm going to DESTROY you!" But by then, I'd actually seen a copy of an email exchange that she'd printed out but forgot to either put away or throw away. In it, she'd point-blank asked my supervisor if she could have my job. She wanted it because she'd heard through the rumor mill that the beat to which she'd been reassigned was going to be either moved or discontinued, and she didn't want to uproot from L.A. So she thought I should be the one to get canned and she deserved to have my job (since she'd done SO much better in it, while filling in for me, than I had done). And my supervisor had emailed back that those were just rumors and she shouldn't worry about it and that upper management wasn't going to be making any changes. Yeah, RIIIIIIIGHT, girlfriend. 'No one's sharking your job,' isn't that what you told me? Nobody except YOU, that is!
It was AWFUL. Coming back to that, and learning all of that, SHEESH! I really did not want to stay. And eventually I found a way to retire from there. Turns out she did NOT inherit my job (the one she presumed was actually hers by right). They replaced me with somebody else. And eventually they DID phase out my "friend's" job in L.A. and moved it back east. By then she'd married and they'd adopted a baby and she didn't want to move, so she had to go scrounge up a new job, herself - as her marriage fell apart. But by then, I was long gone. Out of range. I was beyond her reach by then. Which is, realistically, the most you can do in a situation like this. Got an enemy at work? Get out of range.
So maybe this is the same pathology that rules people like maureen dowd. There's this pissy, petty, resentful, sometimes-ruthless, backstabbing, competitive thing that I've actually observed in action - woman-against-woman, that I've not seen with woman-against-man or man-against-woman. It's really shitty. And it shouldn't be happening. I've been retired from it all for some time now, so I don't know how it is, internally, anymore. Especially nowadays, when women aren't just anomalies in the newsroom anymore but usually overpopulate it by now. Used to be a good place to meet men because back when I was starting, there were no other women and I was always surrounded by men. By now, women are everywhere in the average newsroom. But back then, it got pretty nasty. I found that whenever I gained somewhere, there was always somebody taking potshots at me, wanting to damage me or compromise me in some way, because SHE wanted my job and resented my having it. It almost always came from another woman.
And I'll bet that's part of the dynamic here. maureen dowd evidently has a hard-on about any woman getting farther or higher up the ladder than she has. So she's determined to try to tear them down since it probably makes her feel better and bigger about her own shitty, petty, pissant little self. It's there. It really exists. That may just be the mentality ruling here.
Go figure.
They seem to have a lot of Top graduates.
To bad they will be unemployed soon. 
