Interview: Brent Bozell on Collusion: How the Media Stole the 2012 Election

“President Asterisk” is what James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal dubbed Barack Obama in May, after the details emerged that the IRS targeted the Tea Party to keep them on the sidelines during his reelection bid in 2012. But while the radically politicized IRS blocked a large portion of Mitt Romney’s potential grassroots supporters, the MSM worked to both block Romney’s message and to bottle up any negative details of Barack Obama. That’s the topic of the new book Collusion: How the Media Stole the 2012 Election—and How to Stop Them from Doing It in 2016, co-written by L. Brent Bozell and Tim Graham of the Media Research Center, which has been pushing back against the lies and distortions of the MSM since 1987, almost 15 years before being joined by the conservative Blogosphere.

As Brent Bozell told me during our interview, everything boiled to a head in the fall of 2012 and the fallout over Benghazi:

Just think about how [the MSM] pursued foreign policy issues with, say, President George Bush.  Remember WNDs and Iraq.  They wouldn’t leave that one alone until they got what they thought was the to the bottom of it.  Benghazi?  They never even started investigating it.

And what do we know?  We know also that Candy Crowley, who was the debate moderator in the third presidential debate, took away the shining moment from Mitt Romney when Barack Obama made the outlandish statement that he had, in fact, called it terrorism, denounced it as terrorism the first night, when in fact, he hadn’t.  And Mitt Romney looked at Obama in this look of disbelief, like I can’t believe you just gave me the presidency, and she jumped in to defend the President and jumped in to back him up.

And he pulled back to her and he said to her, now say that again.  And she repeated her defense of Barack Obama.  This isn’t — this isn’t journalism.  This isn’t reporting.  They pick sides.

During our interview, Brent will also discuss:

● In Britain, Fleet Street has long taken sides when it comes to British politics, but at least in the UK, there’s a newspaper for virtually everyone’s political worldview. In America, it’s basically Fox and talk radio and the Blogosphere versus the entire American MSM. What is the future of American politics with such an imbalanced news media?
● How did the MSM prep the battlefield for Obama by nationalizing the shooting of Trayvon Martin, and creating characters for national media consumption such as Sandra Fluke?
● Bozell’s take on Romney’s “47 percent” quote, and the MSM’s attempt to turn it into a sort of campaign-ending super gaffe.
● How the untimely death of Andrew Breitbart impacted the 2012 election.
● Why Republican candidates repeatedly allow the MSM to set the terms of discussion.
● What can the conservative Blogosphere and new media do to help prep the battlefield at least a little bit more in the GOP’s favor for the next presidential election year?

And much more. Click here to listen:

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Transcript of our interview begins on the following page; for our many previous podcasts, start here and keep scrolling.

MR. DRISCOLL:  This is Ed Driscoll for PJ Media.com, and we’re talking today with Brent Bozell, the founder of the Media Research Center, and the co-author, along with Tim Graham, of the new book Collusion: How the Media Stole the 2012 Election—and How to Stop Them from Doing It in 2016. It’s published by HarperCollins, and available from Amazon.com and your local bookseller. And Brent, thank you for stopping by today.

MR. BOZELL:  Thank you for having me.

MR. DRISCOLL:  Brent, let’s start with the first word in your new book’s title.  How do you define “Collusion” in regards to the media and the 2012 election?

MR. BOZELL:  Well, collusion, defined loosely, is an action of two — two entities, away from the public eye in secret.  And that is, in fact, what was going on in the 2012 election.  Look, I will tell you, when the publishers first approached me to do a book of this nature, I didn’t want to do it.  I thought it was — it was too heavy-handed.  I thought the idea of collusion and stealing elections was a little bit over the top, and I just didn’t — wasn’t interested.

Until my colleague, Tim Graham, started doing some research on it.  He came back two months later with the research.  We looked at it, and we thought my goodness, it is collusion and they did steal the 2012 elections.

MR. DRISCOLL:  For over half a century, the bulk of the American MSM has tilted left to some degree. But in 2008, enamored with Barack Obama, they really seemed to drop any mask of objectivity. In Britain, Fleet Street has long taken sides when it comes to British politics, but at least in the UK, there’s a newspaper for virtually everyone’s political worldview.

In America, it’s basically Fox and talk radio and the Blogosphere versus the entire American MSM. What is the future of American politics with such an imbalanced news media?

MR. BOZELL:  Well, a couple of points on the status quo.  You’re right.  If you look at the — at the media overseas, what you will find is a biased media known to the public as a biased media.  The conservative papers are known to be conservative; the liberal ones are known to be liberal.  They don’t pretend to be other than what they are.

In the media today in the United States, the public knows the media to be liberal.  The media deny a liberalism.  They deny any kind of a bias.  But this bias, this liberalism, is far different than it was say five, eight years ago.  We conservatives should rue the day we lost Tom Brokaw and Dan Rather, and Peter Jennings passed away, because when you compare those liberals to today’s crop of journalists, it’s a day and night difference.

Liberalism used to be devoted to a sense of liberalism that was decent and honest and defensible.  Today’s left has become so radicalized and dishonest in the sense that they believe that ends justify the means.  And that’s what you’ve seen throughout the first term and going into the second term of the Obama administration.  And that is exactly what is happening with the national news media, com — you know, look.  If you think about it, the Obama campaign never ended on election day.  It continued.

The media’s coverage of Obama continued the exact same way after the election.  It’s ongoing.

MR. DRISCOLL:  Obviously, the Obama administration’s malfeasance in Benghazi was, in retrospect, one of the key moments of the run-up to the 2012 election. Could you talk about that, and why the MSM was so unwilling to investigate the administration’s role in what went wrong there?

MR. BOZELL:  Sure.  In broad terms, they’re not going to investigate or follow up anything that is harmful to the narrative of the Obama administration.  Look at the IRS scandal right now.  It’s been forgotten.  It’s been dropped.  Have we resolved it?  No.  We’re nowhere nearer than we were a month ago.

Benghazi, we still haven’t gotten back to the bottom of Benghazi.  In fact, the media could have pursued it.  And just think about how they pursued foreign policy issues with, say, President George Bush.  Remember WNDs and Iraq.  They wouldn’t leave that one alone until they got what they thought was the to the bottom of it.  Benghazi?  They never even started investigating it.

And what do we know?  We know also that Candy Crowley, who was the debate moderator in the third presidential debate, took away the shining moment from Mitt Romney when Barack Obama made the outlandish statement that he had, in fact, called it terrorism, denounced it as terrorism the first night, when in fact, he hadn’t.  And Mitt Romney looked at Obama in this look of disbelief, like I can’t believe you just gave me the presidency, and she jumped in to defend the President and jumped in to back him up.

And he pulled back to her and he said to her, now say that again.  And she repeated her defense of Barack Obama.  This isn’t — this isn’t journalism.  This isn’t reporting.  They pick sides.

MR. DRISCOLL:  Brent, what’s your take on Romney’s 47 percent quote and the MSM’s attempt to turn it into a sort of campaign-ending super-gaffe?

MR. BOZELL: It was a gaffe.  It was not a super gaffe.  But if you’re going to cover gaffes, then what happened to the response that the Romney campaign came out with, the taped statement of Barack Obama calling for the redistribution of wealth in America?  A tape that the Obama campaign and the White House both confirmed were something that Barack Obama had said.

What was the coverage there?  Which I think, by the way, is far more serious.  What was the coverage there?  Not only was it not covered, but NBC had the temerity to proclaim on national television that because that tape couldn’t be confirmed or validated, they weren’t going to cover it.  And I repeat, both the White House and the Obama campaign validated it.

MR. DRISCOLL:  Brent, Chapter Eight of Collusion is titled “The Fluff-My-Pillow Interview Tour.” It’s a great title, but what is it referring to?

MR. BOZELL:  Well, if you look at the media’s coverage — hard coverage of Obama in the campaign, the Obama people were very smart in the way they handled media relations.  They didn’t present — they didn’t give anyone any opportunity to ask any tough questions.  The people that they chose for interviews were either entities that weren’t news to begin with, i.e., entertainment shows that he did appearances on, or if they were me — if they were news personalities, they were so much in the tank for him that he could go to them over and over and over and they would give him — over and over and over again, they would give him the kind of puffball treatment that he wanted.

Brian Williams of NBC, is a classic example.  There wasn’t a tough question anywhere all year long that he could ask Barack Obama.  Steve Kroft of CBS is another example, from 60 Minutes.  The reason the Obama people went to him over and over again, was because they knew he would never ask them a serious question.

Now just reverse it.  Think about Mitt Romney.  Think about the interviews he went through.  In one after another after another, they hit him and hit him and hit him.  Now, if you’re going to do — the only thing that — what we should ask for is that they do one or the other, but they not have two standards for two parties.

MR. DRISCOLL:  As we’re recording this interview, the trial of George Zimmerman is taking place. Could you talk a bit about how the MSM prepped the battlefield for Obama by nationalizing the shooting of Trayvon Martin, and creating characters for national media consumption such as Sandra Fluke?

MR. BOZELL:  Well, they — they not only tried to nationalize it in Obama’s case, just to make sure they were succeeding at it, they actually cheated and they lied.  And NBC doctored footage so that it would make it look like a racist attack on the part of George Zimmerman, who is now suing NBC for a big, big amount of money.  And should he be acquitted in this trial, as one thinks he might be, my guess is NBC is in a lot of trouble.

But this is their — their attempts to use an event to turn it into a political gain.  Sandra Fluke was the exact same thing.

Look, the coverage of social issues was another abomination by the press in the 2012 elections.  They didn’t — they tried to run the same old canard that Republicans are anti-women.  But this time, it’s taken the abortion thing — they ran a whole campaign about how the Republican Party and conservatives were anti-contraception.  There wasn’t a lick of evidence to back that statement up.  Not one lick of evidence.  And yet they repeated it over and over and over.

Why?  Because abortion is a hugely unpopular issue for democrats.  Contraception is a safe one.  So they made it up.

MR. DRISCOLL:  On the flip side, can we talk a bit about Romney himself?  The ancient Chinese strategist Sun Tzu has long been quoted as saying, “Every battle is won before it’s ever fought.”  In your estimation, was Mitt Romney the best choice to fight for the GOP in 2012?

MR. BOZELL:  No, he was a terrible choice.  And you had this — the feeling in the pit of your stomach, just as you did at the beginning of the 2008 campaign with John McCain, that he just wasn’t going to go anywhere.

Look, you — you had the — I think, the single-most vulnerable incumbent in modern times running in Barack Obama, more vulnerable than Jimmy Carter in 1980, because his record was a pure — and continues to be — a pure disaster.  Foreign policy, domestic policy, economic policy, social policy, across the board, it was a disaster.  So my dog should have been able to beat him.

So why couldn’t Mitt Romney beat him?  Because Mitt Romney did not connect with the base of the Republican party.  The Republican party is a conservative party.  Moderates do not connect.  They connect with the press.  They do not connect with the rank and file.  He never connected with the rank and file.

MR. DRISCOLL:  Brent, let’s talk a little bit more about battlefield preparation. As we were discussing before the interview, if I’m remembering correctly, I think we were both on the same National Review Cruise in 2010 with Andrew Breitbart, who passed away in March of 2012. What did you think of Breitbart’s style, and how much was he missed in the run-up to November?

MR. BOZELL:  You know, the more he antagonized the press, the more successful you knew he was being.  If Andrew Breitbart had passed away without a blip, well, that’s one thing.  Andrew Breitbart was a — was a bit of a force of nature, because he just loved calling the press out.  And he humiliated them on a regular basis.  And he embarrassed them on a regular basis.  And he was able to really expose who they were; not just who they were, but — but how vicious they could be.

So he is missed.  Of course he is missed.  He was a champion for conservatives.  He was a good guy.  We gave him the — an award at our annual gala just a year before he passed away.  And I’m glad we chose him when we did.

MR. DRISCOLL:  The Tea Party was also sidelined in 2012; as we now know, they were busy being harassed by all the president’s IRS agents. How badly did that hurt Mitt Romney’s efforts?

MR. BOZELL:  Well, I don’t know that the Tea Party could have connected enough with Mitt Romney.  Mitt Romney was surrounded by baying capital sycophants who knew nothing about the pulse of the conservative movement; even worse, could care less about the pulse of the conservative movement.

This was the most insular mismanaged catastrophe of a campaign I have ever seen, run by people who knew nothing about politics to begin with.  So, you know, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Mitt Romney together again.

MR. DRISCOLL:  Brent, this question is going to take a bit of setup, so bear with me for a moment.

Between the 47 percent quote, and Candy Crowley’s freakout at the second presidential debate, the Romney campaign seemed to go into prevent defense mode in the last weeks of the election, with Romney refusing to bring up Benghazi in the closing weeks of the election. This was very much reminiscent of John McCain refusing to bring up Obama’s connections with Rev. Wright in the last weeks of 2008, for fear of being dubbed racist.

In both cases, it meant that the Republican candidate was letting the media decide what was appropriate to discuss. What did you make of such timidity when the country’s future is on the line, and when is a GOP candidate going to push back against the MSM?

MR. BOZELL:  Mitt Romney is the only candidate in my lifetime that I’ve known to deliberately go into a prevent defense while losing.  And if I never see again, I’ll be a happy man.  But why did he do that?  Why did John McCain do that?

Because the one entity they fear is the Washington press corp.  Why do they fear them?  Because they want to be on the A-list.  They want to be accepted.  They want to be part of the in crowd.  And to do things like question Reverend Wright is just not the right thing to do with the powers that be, so you don’t do it.

With Mitt Romney, it was the idea of not rocking the boat in the least, not doing anything that might upset the enemy.

Now, consider Ronald Reagan.  Ronald Reagan did the exact opposite.  Ronald Reagan took on the press with aplomb and with a gusto and with a smile on his face, and just sprayed them in the process.  So that when they — you know, they would call him the Teflon president, because nothing would stick.  And the reason nothing would stick is because the enemy — my enemy is my friend.  People knew the hostility the media felt towards him, so every time they attacked him, the public was just simply reinforcing their support of Ronald Reagan.

This is a strategy lost on moderates.  Moderates don’t like to — to do conservative things.  The late great Henry Hyde had this great term for conservatives in the eyes of these moderates.  It was “the great unwashed”.  And as long as you’re dealing with the great unwashed, you need them for the votes, you need them for the money, you need them for the activism.  But if you win, you don’t need them ever again.

MR. DRISCOLL:  When you founded the Media Research Center in 1987, it was pretty much your firm and Reed Irvine’s accuracy in media that were alone in documenting the lies and distortions of the liberal media.  Today there are thousands and thousands of bloggers and Tweeters who have joined the cause.  Does having these additional eyes help to push back against the excesses of the MSM?

MR. BOZELL:  No question.  They — we are leaving the news era and we’re into the information era.  The days of the established media dominating the news are coming to an end.  The good news is that they’re — you know, you hear the media talk about the low approval rating of Congress.  What they won’t tell is their own approval rating, which is at seven percent, according to Gallup.  I mean, they’ve got a lower level of approval than the United States Congress.

And what does that tell you?  The public isn’t believing them.  They’re leaving them.  They’ve left fifty percent of the — of the audience has left the nightly newscasts.  The New York Times is a shadow of its former self.  NBC — Newsweek sold for a dollar and even that didn’t work.  So the carcasses are mounting out there.

But here’s the problem.  They still have an audience.  But the bigger problem is, I can find and I can see the bias by commission.  I can see the media twisting a truth.  I can see that.  But what the public didn’t see was the flip side, the politics of the bias by omission, where they simply didn’t report things.

So what happens, Ed, is that at the end of the day, conservatives scratch their heads and say how could America have re-elected a man as failed as him, as dangerous as him, as naive as him, as unprepared as him, as disastrous as him?  And the answer is those things that you and I know are lost on many in the American public, because if they rely on CBS or ABC or NBC for their news, they never heard it.

MR. DRISCOLL:  And last question.  No matter who the Democrats nominate in 2016, what can the GOP, both their presidential candidate and the Blogosphere and new media do to prep the battlefield, at least a little bit more in their favor?

MR. BOZELL:  Well, the first thing that they — that the GOP needs to do is understand the problem and stop trying to make nice with people who don’t want to make nice with them.  They have to be far more selective on how and who they deal with.  They have to be far more aggressive with — with the media that distort the truth on a regular basis.

They need to make the media a national news issue.  They have to be selective on the programs they go on.  Why does anyone bother going on the Chris Matthews show?  Nothing good ever came of it.  Why do people have to go on the Bill Maher show?  Nothing good ever comes out of it.  They’ve got to be smarter.  They’ve got to know that going on Jon Stewart’s show live is fine.  Going on it in a taped venue is disastrous, because they become the butt of the jokes.  They’ve got to learn how — the basic media ins and outs.

Then they’ve got to work with the new media.  There’s so many people who are still so resistant to the times, the blogosphere, the talk radio, so many different venues to go through.  CNS news, Breitbart, there’s so many ways to communicate with the American people.  And you’ve got to use those avenues.  It’s a lot more work.  But when you do it you will succeed in reaching the American public.  We don’t need the old media, we need the new media.

MR. DRISCOLL:  This is Ed Driscoll for PJ Media.com, and we’ve been talking with Brent Bozell, the founder of the Media Research Center and the co-author, along with Tim Graham, of the new book Collusion: How the Media Stole the 2012 Election—and How to Stop Them from Doing It in 2016. It’s published by HarperCollins, and available from Amazon.com and your local bookstore.

And Brent, good luck with the new book, continued success with the Media Research Center, and thank you once again for stopping by today.

MR. BOZELL:  And thank you, Ed.  And thank you to PJ Media.

(End of recording; for our many previous podcasts, start here and keep scrolling.)

Transcribed by eScribers.net, with minor revisions (including hyperlinks) by Ed Driscoll. Artwork created using images by Shutterstock.com.