While thinking about the dustup last night on Hardball between Chris Mathews
and Michelle Malkin (Jesse Taylor has an excellent summary of the incident
here) it occurred
to me that Matthews may have inadvertently hit upon the best way to deal with
smear artists.
The essence of most smears is not what is directly said but what is
indirectly implied. Malkin does not immediately say that Kerry shot himself in
order to win a medal and get out of Vietnam early. Instead she uses the phrase
"self-inflicted wound" because it is a term that technically can be
construed to include wounds received accidentally from the discharge of
ones own weapon. Malkin knows that "self-inflicted wound" is a phrase that
implies deliberate action on Kerry's part, but she can weasel out of that
implication on that technicality.
She tried to do this on Hardball and did so again on her on blog. However, in
most cases, smear artists like Malkin don't need to fall back on the
technical construction because they know that many establishment journalists,
wanting to be "fair and balanced", will give them the benefit of the doubt on
their implication.
What Mathews did last night was to question her on the implication not just
once but repeatedly. This was a violation of the rules of punditry as
Malkin and other smear artists have come to expect and she was noticeably upset
when he broke protocol.
And that is where I think Mathews hit on the best way to deal with smear
artists: confront them directly and repeatedly on their implications as if
the implications were what they actually said (rather than just implied). Don't
get into technical arguments about terms that might allow them wiggle room. Just
act as if the implications were what they actually said.
When you do this, two things will happen: (1) the implication will become
more clear to the casual audience as it is repeated in a more direct fashion and
(2) the smear artist will, as Malkin demonstrated, become flustered in their
desperate attempts to restore the smear by implication.
The point is to make clear to the audience what is normally obscured by the
smear artist's clever use of the use of implication. It is the implication that
is at the heart of the smear, not the direct statements that are the means of
delivering the smear. It is that implication that must be brought out
into the open and stomped on before it becomes ingrained in the minds of the
audience.
That is how you deal with a smear artist.