My apologies to readers for the misleading headline. Actually,
I’m not in Kuala Lumpur, and have no idea what’s going on in the
Malaysian capital. Nor is it likely I’ll ever go there, as The
American Spectator can’t afford to send correspondents off on
globetrotting expeditions to exotic foreign locales. It was tough
enough for me to make it to Des Moines, Tampa, Toledo, and other
domestic destinations along the 2012 presidential campaign trail.
If I asked our editor Bob Tyrrell to send me on a trip to Malaysia,
Bob’s laughter might damage my hearing, and there’s no health
insurance for freelance correspondents. On the other hand, if I
could somehow hustle up a trip to Kuala Lumpur on my own, Bob would
be happy to have the coverage at the usual rate, which might enable
me to purchase some native trinkets as souvenirs to bring home for
the kids.
The woes of journalism in the 21st century are an
industry-wide phenomenon, and times are tough all over. The other
day, veteran foreign correspondent
Nate Thayer published his e-mail exchange with a young editor at
the Atlantic. The editor, who was still in high school
when Thayer was covering the war in Iraq, seemed to be under the
impression that Thayer would write 1,200 words for free. “We
unfortunately can’t pay you for it,” explained Olga Khan, adding
that many writers are happy just for the exposure of being
published on the Atlantic’s prestigious “platform.” Thayer
was most certainly not happy, and indeed seemed quite insulted by
the presumption that an award-winning journalist would be willing
to write merely for “exposure.” Finally, in an effort to convey to
the impudent Olga just how much she didn’t know about the man she
was dealing with, Thayer explained that a decade earlier, he had
been offered “a staff job with the Atlantic to write 6 articles a
year for a retainer of $125,000, with the right to publish
elsewhere in addition. The then editor, Michael Kelly, was killed
while we were both in Iraq, and we both, as it were, moved on to
different places.”
The heroic namesake of journalism’s Michael Kelly Award could never
imagine what humiliations have been inflicted on the business in
the nearly 10 years since Kelly died in a Humvee crash while
embedded with the Third Infantry Division on the outskirts of
Baghdad. The advent of the Internet has devastated print
journalism, no one has yet figured out how to turn a profit doing
serious reporting on the Web — given the relatively low revenues
of online advertising — and the evisceration of newsroom staffs
has led to an awful decline in the general quality of reporting and
editing. If the Atlantic is compelled to employ as its
“global editor” a 26-year-old who didn’t know who Nate Thayer is
(and evidently couldn’t even be bothered to Google his name), this
is hardly the worst embarrassment the industry has suffered lately.
This brings us back to Kuala Lumpur, and the unfortunate
journalistic scandal I’ve started calling “MalaysiaGate.”
In 2008, powerful interests in Malaysia recognized that their
regime had a public-relations problem. A constitutional monarchy on
paper, Malaysia is effectively a one-party state in which the
ruling Barisan National (BN) coalition exercises authoritarian
power. The word “dictatorship” has been applied to the Malay
government, although it doesn’t seem as oppressive as that term
would suggest. The BN’s rule is not as mild as the regime in
Singapore, but it is certainly not a totalitarian nightmare like
North Korea. In 2008, however, the BN was the target of negative
publicity for suppressing political opposition led by Anwar
Ibrahim. Human-rights activists echoed Ibrahim’s criticisms of the
Malaysian regime as abusive and corrupt. To push back against that
message, Malaysia evidently decided to hire the services of a
public relations firm based in Washington, D.C. That decision
subsequently resulted in a contract that paid nearly $400,000 over
a three-year period to a conservative consultant and writer named
Josh Trevino. He in turn subcontracted out work to ten other
conservative writers and bloggers, who published online pieces
about Malaysia that were in general favorable to the ruling regime
and/or critical of Anwar Ibrahim. The articles appeared in venues
ranging from National Review to the San Francisco
Examiner to the Huffington Post.
This Malay pay-to-play P.R. operation, which had previously been
the subject of suspicion, denials, and controversy, blazed into
headlines last week when
Rosie Gray of BuzzFeed reported on Trevino’s belated filing of a
form complying with the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA).
This form, filed in January with the U.S. Department of Justice,
specified for the first time the names of those hired by Trevino
and the amount they were paid for their services, described as
“opinion writing.” The sums ranged from $36,000 paid to Ben
Domenech, a co-founder of the Red State conservative blog, to as
little as $2,000 for Red State contributor Kevin Holtsberry. On the
FARA form,
Trevino described the clients who footed the bill: “Government
of Malaysia, its ruling party, or interests closely aligned with
either, acting through one or more of APCO Worldwide and the David
All Group (May 2008 through September 2008), and FBC Media
(February 2009 through April 2011), with whom registrant had its
relationship.”
As might be imagined, liberal bloggers had a
Schadenfreude festival over the right’s embarrassment. The
BuzzFeed article provoked sneers and guffaws from such leftward
outfits as
Talking Points Memo,
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow blog, and
Daily Kos, which crowed that Trevino’s Malaysian P.R. campaign
proved that the Republican Party “really is just an astroturf
operation from top to bottom.”
The left’s glee, however, overlooked the fact that one of the
original partners in this foreign-funded astroturf operation was a
pioneer of progressive blogging, Jerome Armstrong. David All had
brought aboard the liberal Armstrong for one of their projects, a
now-defunct website called MalaysiaMatters.com. On the website of
his own consulting firm, Armstrong listed the Malaysian government
as one of his former international clients. Armstrong is no obscure
or marginal figure in left-wing politics. A former business partner
of Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, Armstrong is credited
with having coined the word “netroots” to describe the
Internet-based movement that helped progressive activists seize
control of the Democrat party after 2004. And, quite interestingly,
Armstrong’s U.S. consulting clients have included such eminent
Democrats as a former senator from Massachusetts who just happens
to be the current Secretary of State, John F. Kerry.
My own
blogging about Armstrong’s role in the MalaysiaGate controversy
prompted
BuzzFeed’s Gray to follow up Monday with a new article that made an
obvious point: If Trevino was required to report his Malaysian
clients to the feds — as Trevino says his lawyer advised him to do
— why haven’t David All and Jerome Armstrong also complied by
filing FARA forms? If Trevino was paid nearly $400,000 as a
contractor, what was the total value of the Malaysia business
reportedly brokered by All, and how much was Armstrong paid for his
share of the deal? Have laws been broken? Will Congress or the
Justice Department investigate this Malaysian P.R. operation? The
left-wing bloggers who chortled at the embarrassing spectacle of
Republicans engaged in pay-for-play journalism don’t seem too
interested in the answers to those questions, now that one of their
own “netroots” heroes is part of the scandal.
The larger and more embarrassing scandal, however, may be what
MalaysiaGate exposes about the decrepit state of journalism in the
21st century. A few decades ago, American newspapers and magazines
had their own overseas bureaus, and offered freelance assignments
to independent correspondents. The foreign bureaus have been nearly
all shuttered in recent decades of cost-cutting. Entire
publications have ceased to exist, with what remained of the
once-mighty Newsweek having been gobbled up by Tina
Brown’s Daily Beast site, which can scarcely afford to send
reporters to cover whatever is going on Kuala Lumpur these
days.
Hollowed-out and decadent, with even such once-proud
publications as the Atlantic forced to beg reporters to
write stories for free, American journalism has reached a sad state
when editors are so desperate for anything to publish that they
even don’t care who’s paying for the stories. Much of the anger
over MalaysiaGate came not from anyone who cared about the alleged
human-rights violations of that country’s government, but from
bloggers apparently upset that they can’t get paid to write about
anything, foreign or domestic.
No authoritarian regimes have offered to pay my bills, but I’m
sure Bob Tyrrell wouldn’t complain if the Malaysians wanted to fly
me in for an all-expenses visit at the luxurious Genting
resort. How oppressive and dictatorial can the regime be? There
are no luxury resorts in such genuinely despotic nations as North
Korea, Cuba, and Iran. But some facts are so obvious that it’s hard
to get paid to report them, so it’s unlikely I’ll be filing under a
Kuala Lumpur dateline anytime soon.
Photo: UPI
