The American Spectator

Eminentoes

Who Is Sally Quinn?

By Jeffrey Lord on 9.9.08 @ 12:08AM

(Page 2 of 2)

Which is why and how the rest of us in America get to listen to Sally Quinn emerge from her Georgetown parlor (where she dwells with "the title, the social status and the money") to put that upstart Palin woman from Alaska in her place. Perhaps it galls Sally (and certain other members of the liberal media elites -- they would know who they are) that Sarah is where she is and got there without, as far as the liberal media can determine, sleeping with a single man outside of her own husband.

This kind of hit job on Sarah Palin by what's left of the once dominant liberal media is both typical and shameful. It is exactly what passed unquestioned for serious journalism -- and serious journalists -- before the advent of the New Media.

The Sally Quinns of the world were given cachet because liberals like Ben Bradlee got to do whatever the hell they pleased with their power in the media and there wasn't a damn thing the rest of the country could do as one conservative after another from Barry Goldwater to Ronald Reagan to Robert Bork to Clarence Thomas, Dan Quayle, Miguel Estrada, and on and on right up to today's Sarah Palin were trashed. And I do mean trashed. They were painted as idiots, warmongers, bigots, boobs, religious fanatics, wild-eyed zealots, racists, sexual harassers, and God only knows what else. This kind of garbage was bannered and blared unchallenged from every one of the three major networks, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time, Newsweek and the rest of the liberal acolyte media organs. For decades. Until the advent of everything from conservative magazines such as the one you are reading to talk radio to the Internet to Fox collectively shattered the media monopoly.

BEFORE WE LEAVE the Bradlees, let's take another look at a reminder of the liberal media world and how it once worked when there was no one around who could challenge it.

Ben is famous, of course, for being the man who, with Woodward and Bernstein and the late Post owner Katharine Graham , brought down Richard Nixon over the Watergate scandal. But his taste in reporting scandal was selective. Very. He is also famous as the Newsweek correspondent who was a close friend of Nixon's famous successful rival from the 1960 election, President John F. Kennedy. Ben and then-wife Tony hung out regularly with Jack and Jackie. This resulted in a steady flow of stories straight from his friend JFK to Bradlee to the pages of Newsweek, all of which helped Ben's career. But what does Ben tell us decades later, as the liberal media monolith began to crack? We find that right under Bradlee's nose, his pal JFK was not only trysting with a mobster's girlfriend, he was having a fling with Bradlee's own sister-in-law, Mary Pinchot Meyer. Not quite a year after JFK's murder in Dallas, on October 12, 1964, with the Johnson-Goldwater campaign consuming the headlines, Mary Meyer was mysteriously shot to death as she walked along a canal towpath in Georgetown.

There was a diary, as we now know with no thanks to Ben. A diary Mary Meyer -- who was separated from a CIA official -- kept and that was being sought by one James Jesus Angleton, described in Ben's memoirs as "an extremely controversial, high-ranking CIA official specializing in counterintelligence." The startled Bradlees came upon Mr. Angleton rummaging through Mary's home the day after she was murdered, having apparently gained entrance by picking a lock. Then, later, they encountered him again, this second time in the act of picking a lock to get into her studio. Angleton didn't get his hands on the diary -- but Ben and his wife did. What was in sister-in law Mary's diary? The revelation that Mary had been having the hot and heavy affair with JFK. That the President of the United States and his mistress, Ben's sister-in-law, had met "twenty to thirty times in the White House" and "that they had smoked grass (three joints) on one occasion."

Newsworthy, wouldn't you think? Front-page kind of stuff. Especially in the middle of a presidential campaign between JFK's liberal hand-picked successor LBJ and the conservative Goldwater, this would make some real news. An "extremely controversial" CIA type breaks into the house of the murdered sister-in-law of a JFK pal and Newsweek correspondent, searching for a diary that contains evidence of an affair between a now murdered President and his murdered mistress? Who was separated from her CIA husband? That they were smoking dope in the White House? And this is not news? Does the old phrase "hold the presses!" ring a bell here?

Well, no. This was not news, alas. Not to correspondent Bradlee. At least it wasn't when it might have made an impact. God only knows what would have come out in the 1964 campaign if the aggressive Washington Post-style coverage of Watergate had been put into motion over this discovery. But this was the day of the Old Media. While it may be OK to get Richard Nixon or bork Bork or smear Clarence Thomas, or these days to try and ruin a 17-year old daughter of Sarah Palin and hence Palin herself, when it came to a liberal icon and friend of Ben, things were done differently. After all, neither Dick Nixon, Bob Bork, Clarence Thomas or now Sarah Palin were or are members of the club. Ben, however, is and was. So with incriminating diary in hand, if Ben believed another standard should be applied to his liberal buds, that was the way it worked. Says Ben: "It is important to say that I never for a minute considered reporting the discovery of the diary and its contents." When, in 1976, the National Enquirer uncovered the story and ran with it, Ben says he was "extremely troubled." He also admits that he knew his wife Tony had destroyed the diary.

WHY BRING THIS STUFF up now, in 2008? What's the point?

The point is simple: it's about the treatment of Sarah Palin over the next two months -- and afterwards if elected. The origins of Sally's career as a powerful liberal establishment media figure and husband Ben's journalistic judgment on the explosive story of Mary Meyer and JFK are emblematic of the biased journalism that angered Americans for decades when discussing the "liberal media." It reeks of double-standards, class warfare and hypocrisy in relentless pursuit of an agenda. The shorthand to conservatives back before the advent of the New Media was this: because we, the liberal media, have the power and you don't, we will promote whomever we damn well please to positions of whatever media power positions we choose for whatever reasons we want, honorable or not. We will give them fame, power, money and prestige so that they may be seen by the American public as the sage, trustworthy members of our society whose views should be heard, respected and generally followed. Under the guise of scrupulously objective reporting, we will advance our elitist agenda by presenting our beliefs as the mainstream of American thought and using our power to destroy whichever conservative we feel is the most serious threat to that power and world view.

The liberal media elites can still play their game, as is witnessed with the cover of supermarket tabloid US Weekly's Palin cover proclaiming "Babies, Lies & Scandal." But these days the recognition of the game is quick, the reaction time instantaneous and thorough. Images shot around the Internet with a pairing of the US Weekly Palin cover hatchet job quickly matched with an earlier, loving US Weekly cover of the Obamas, cooing "Michelle Obama: Why Barack Loves Her." Fox correspondent Megyn Kelly investigated, eviscerating US Weekly senior editor Bradley Jacobs in front of Fox cameras. (See
here.)

Word spread instantly to those who might not know that US Weekly is owned by the lefty Jann Wenner, founder of Rolling Stone. Wenner is an Obama (and Gore, Edwards etc., etc., etc.) contributor. "I finance all the Democrats," Wenner told Business Week. Indeed, and he uses his magazines to push his politics (not that there's anything wrong with that). He was in the news awhile back for leaving his wife for another guy and the two men had twins earlier this year (don't ask). All of which is to say that, in the tradition of Ben and Sally and other of his fellow liberals in the media, the liberal Mr. Wenner has an agenda, in his case of despising social conservatives and their beliefs centering on same-sex marriage or gay rights in general. But unlike the straight-forwardly political and left-leaning Rolling Stone, US Weekly is commonly viewed as something else entirely, which Wenner and company certainly know. So under the sly guise of a seemingly innocent, gossipy tabloid he will ruthlessly pursue that agenda in typical liberal media fashion. Which we have all learned long ago means making the philosophical deeply personal, savaging whomever -- in this case Sarah Palin -- to try and manipulate public opinion. Pretending all the while the media venue at issue is completely objective, as indeed the US Weekly senior editor tried to pretend to Fox's Megyn Kelly. In the case of US Weekly we are supposed to think it simply a harmless little celebrity magazine for you to peruse while waiting to check out your canned beets. This is, of course, a lie.

This election, so unpredictable all year long, has now taken on an additional unforeseen aspect. Thanks to the selection by John McCain of Sarah Palin, this race will become in part a referendum on the core beliefs of the liberal media itself and the tricks of the trade they employ to advance their agenda. A discussion of the deeply elitist concepts of class, women, favoritism, special treatment and, well, old-fashioned straight up snobbery by people who quite laughably have zero to be snobs about.

Who is Sally Quinn? Someone who got her career in a decidedly different way than Sarah Palin.

Who is Sarah Palin? Decidedly not Sally Quinn.

Thank God.

Jeffrey Lord is a former Reagan White House political director and author. He writes from Pennsylvania.

Letter to the Editor

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Trade, Sarah Palin, Television, Business, Law, Alaska