The Vicious Season
Generally, the term 'The silly season' is used to refer to the time period when Congress is not in session during the summer. It is a time when there is little day-to-day news coming out of Washington and newspapers have traditionally had to come up with something to fill the paper. Hence, stories that normally would never get published get treated as serious and newsworthy, regardless how silly those stories are. I have sometimes seen the term applied to the campaign season after Congress adjourns as well, but that isn't really where the term originated. Yet it is an apt way to describe the campaign break most of the time.
We had the traditional silly season last month while Congress was adjourned. It was somewhat less noticeable because of other world events, but I could see it in some of the stories that were getting coverage. But after Congress reconvened, there should be less silly stuff getting ink, right? And so it is that this year, the humorous stories are fewer now, and the mountain out of a molehill stories that normally wouldn't see print are again not getting printed. But there is something else this year. The silly season has been replaced by something else.
The Vicious Season.
The worst manifestation of how utterly vicious it has gotten this year is the mess in the Virginia Senate campaign. The kinds of vile charges being thrown there this year is about the worst I can remember. The sudden accusations against Senator George Allen of his use of a highly inflammatory word were published despite some rather obvious problems with them. Allen has served in public office for many years now. Why would these suddenly pop up now? Only one source for these stories came forward publicly. That source is highly motivated to pull a political hit on Allen. The stories did not pass even rudimentary interpretations of journalistic standards, but saw print anyway.
The Allen campaign counterattacked and disproved key assertions of the story at once. Now journalists cannot get any collaboration for the deer head story from people who would remember such an event, law enforcement officials. It also turns out that opposition candidate Webb himself has used the offensive term in published writings.
Also Tuesday, Allen's Democratic opponent, Jim Webb, declined to say definitively whether he had ever used a racial slur to describe blacks.
"I don't think that there's anyone who grew up around the South that hasn't had the word pass through their lips at one time or another in their life," Webb told reporters.
Webb referred to his novel, "Fields of Fire," which aides said includes passages using the n-word as part of character dialogue. But he added: "I have never issued a racial or ethnic slur."
Asked for clarification of his original answer, spokeswoman Jessica Smith quoted Webb as saying, "I have never used that word in my general vocabulary or in any derogatory way."
She declined to say whether he had ever used the word apart from when he wrote his book.
Allegations of racial insensitivity by Allen dating to his high school days in California have become a major distraction for the senator since August, when he called a Webb campaign volunteer of Indian descent "macaca." The word is considered a racial slur in some cultures.
On Monday, a former football teammate of Allen's, Dr. Ken Shelton, said he heard Allen frequently use a common slur applied to blacks among white friends while in college. Allen called the claim "ludicrously false" and released statements from four other ex-teammates defending the senator and rejecting Shelton's claims.
Also in interviews with the AP and Salon.com late Sunday, Shelton claimed that on a hunting trip to Louisa County in 1973 or 1974, Allen stuffed the severed head of a female deer into the oversized mailbox of a black household near Bumpass, Va., 40 miles east of the university.
But in interviews Tuesday, two Louisa County sheriff's deputies who were on the force in the early '70s said that they recall no complaints about severed animal heads.
Retired Lt. Robert Rigsby said he was in charge of investigations in the early '70s, and any such report would have gone through him.
"I think that's a myth," Rigsby said.
Another veteran officer, Deputy William Seay, also could recall no such incident. Authorities said they did not know if records from so long ago would be preserved.
So we appear to have allegations that are unraveling very quickly indeed under scrutiny. Even the much ballyhooed statement by Larry Sabato turns out to have been hearsay on his part (and he has likely just damaged his "most quoted" status because of that). Had the journalists involved done even rudimentary fact checking and followed normal rules, this story would never have been published. But if in the silly season, stories that are really molehills can be made into mountains. In the vicious season, false allegations can be made into major stories for political reasons, it seems. The press will cooperate.
By f mcdonald, Wednesday, 27 September , 2006 @ 3:42 pm
“The press will cooperate.”
Yes indeed they will cooperate, abet and conspire to further their ideology.