Franken-Lies-And-the-Lying-Liars-Who-Tell

Clearly, Caldwell had written his entire piece based on the most damaging moments
of the memorial: five-to-ten-second clips of Rick Kahn, and the one political moment from
Paul's son Mark. Caldwell probably saw them on Fox, although the same clips were played
on CNN and MSNBC. The right wing's story line played to the mainstream media biases of
sensationalism, negativity, and laziness. Once the right wing had created its myth about what
had happened, it became a lot easier to report the distortion than to report the truth. A journalist
would just have to read a couple of op-ed pieces and watch the clips on TV, and he'd have
his story. That's a lot easier than watching the tape of an emotionally wrenching four-hour
memorial service or talking to people who were actually there.
Pretty soon, the story became the story. Predictions about the election noted the public
reaction to the memorial myth rather than what happened at the memorial itself. The day before
the election, Jeff Greenfield of CNN, one of the smartest and most thoughtful political
commentators on the air, said, "Republican senators who had come there were booed by the
crowd. It was a crowd of thousands."
When I called Jeff that day, he told me, "Al, the memorial backfired."
If the Wellstone people, or, worse, the Democratic Party, had tried to use the memorial
for political gain, then, yes, it could be said to have backfired. Greenfield had bought the
spin.
Jeff Blodgett told Mpls/StPaul Magazine about how the Democrats' dastardly plan
had backfired so badly. "We had already been to five funerals.... We weren't thinking straight.
If we had been preparing for a televised event that large numbers of voters would be watching,
we would have scripted every minute. We would have known what every person was
going to say."
"The ultimate irony," Wellstone field director Dan Cramer said, "was that what would
later be billed as a political event came about because we didn't think about it in political
terms."
It was the right, not the left, that tried to cheapen Paul Wellstone's life by dishonoring his
death. It was the right-wing media, not the friends and family who spoke at the memorial or
the people who came to it, that seized on an opportunity to use a tragedy for political gain. It
was Rush, and the Republican Party, and the Weekly Standard, and the Wall Street Journal,
and Fox—and then it was CNN and MSNBC and all the newspapers that wrote hundreds of