Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

When they say they are pro-life, they do not mean yours.

Come on, man.

There is no right way to do the wrong thing.

Let the trolls come, and then ignore them. that’s the worst thing you can do to a troll.

Incompetence, fear, or corruption? why not all three?

GOP baffled that ‘we don’t care if you die’ is not a winning slogan.

Rupert, come get your orange boy, you petrified old dinosaur turd.

Consistently wrong since 2002

Following reporting rules is only for the little people, apparently.

The republican caucus is covering themselves with something, and it is not glory.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

“In this country American means white. everybody else has to hyphenate.”

🎶 Those boots were made for mockin’ 🎵

A tremendous foreign policy asset… to all of our adversaries.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

It’s a good piece. click on over. but then come back!!

“Loving your country does not mean lying about its history.”

Republicans cannot even be trusted with their own money.

In my day, never was longer.

There are no moderate republicans – only extremists and cowards.

Boeing: repeatedly making the case for high speed rail.

The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.

Fear or fury? The choice is ours.

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

You are here: Home / Politics / Media / In Defense of Tapper

In Defense of Tapper

by | 67 Comments

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Here is something you don’t see every day, but I was just reminded about this while talking to DougJ about Jonathon Martin’s appearance on Hardball. The other day, there was kind of a pile-on about Tapper regarding his emails with the Sanford clan in South Carolina. In question was this snippet from a story in the State (that I linked to when discussing the Red State self-policing fail):

The media e-mails also illuminate the tactics of national outlets to land the big interview.

ABC News White House reporter Jake Tapper e-mailed Sawyer twice on June 23, both to note coverage of competitor NBC.

With a subject line of “NBC spot was slimy,” Tapper e-mailed Sawyer a “Today” show transcript of Sanford coverage, calling it “insulting.” Later, Tapper forwarded Sawyer a Twitter post by “Meet The Press” host David Gregory.

Jeff Schneider, a vice president at ABC News, said Tapper was “carrying some water for producers who knew he had a relationship with the governor’s office.”

I’m too lazy to look up all the links, but Tapper got slammed all over the place for this, and it was used to claim he was a “tool of the right wing.” I really think he got screwed by these accusations, and they just strike me as missing the mark.

What Tapper was doing was not “carrying water” for the Governor and the GOP. What he was quite clearly doing was attempting to ingratiate himself to the folks in the Sanford operation at the expense of David Gregory, with the hopes that they would somehow open up to Tapper at ABC instead of the folks at NBC. You may not understand this, especially when we consider how silly the media coverage of everything is, but it is a very competitive business regardless, and they do what they have to do to get the inside connection. I’d be willing to bet they all shit talk each other behind their backs to sources- Jake just got caught this time.

As proof of my thesis, Tapper apologized… to David Gregory. In fact, his response was “busted.” To translate, “busted” wasn’t Tapper saying “I’m sorry I got caught using steroids and I have disgraced the game and I hope my fans and friends can forgive me,” it was “Yeah. You caught me holding Gregory’s jersey on that last play. It’s all in the game, yo.” I’d bet anything Gregory didn’t even flinch, but is sure looking for his chance to put the knife in when he can.

I’m not one to go out of my way to defend these guys in the mainstream media, but I think Tapper got a bad rap on this one. If anyone can point to any piece by him that could be construed as “carrying water” for the GOP in the Sanford case, I’ll amend my statement, but right now all Tapper was guilty of was playing the game, trying to squeeze a scoop out of a source at the expense of David Gregory.

Reader Interactions

67Comments

  1. 1.

    JL

    You might be right that he was trying to get an interview but IMO Jake was the slimy one, not NBC and he got caught. I just realized that on IE, my sign in reverted back to my old moniker.

  2. 2.

    MikeJ

    There’s no problem with his sliming of NBC. The problem comes with the assumption that he’s promising to go easy on an interview subject just to get access. Which was a pretty serious problem for the past eight years.

  4. 4.

    demkat620

    my old moniker.

    Am I the only one using the same name as when I got here?

    Tapper can be alright but sometimes, like with the smoking thing, he goes on the wrong tangents.

  5. 5.

    Demo Woman

    It took Tapper a few times before he came up with the appropriate apology. The blogs might have been easier on him had he not tried to justify his behavior.

  7. 7.

    MikeJ

    but right now all Tapper was guilty of was playing the game, trying to squeeze a scoop out of a source at the expense of David Gregory.

    This sounds a lot like “we didn’t even know about the affair so there was no real story when the governor was missing for five days.”

    Tapper implied they’d pretend to believe any moronic story the gov wanted to give them. With the gov, the real story wasn’t the affair, it was the neglect of office. With Tapper, it wasn’t the trash talking, it was promising to go easy on a pol.

  10. 10.

    JenJen

    However much smack I have talked about Jake Tapper in the past, personally, I thought he was wily as all get-out with those emails. I imagine that if Woodward and Bernstein had email, there would be those who’d have slammed them for ingratiating themselves to get a scoop, too.

    Erick Erickson, though? Totally different story. What bothers me is that as a person who respects blogs as news sources, especially from 2001 on, whenever the MSM picks on Cheeto-fingered bloggers, somehow Red State gets lumped in with TPM, FDL, Yglesias, et al… those who really do their homework, even within a framework of bias. Erick? He’s the very definition of a water-carrier. That’s what pisses me off… that he’s a de facto conventional wisdom member of the evil, evil blogosphere.

    But really. Where Tapper f’d up was when he turned to Twitter to try to explain himself. It was unnecessary and emotional, and that’s the part of the story that makes him look bad. In the end, as far as emailing Sanford’s CoS, Tapper was working it old-school; sneakily pandering, but it’s not the same as practically waving Sanford’s campaign signs.

  11. 11.

    Bad Horse's Filly

    Right or wrong, Jake Tapper sucks. Anyone else on this blog want a Tunch picture?! I know I do. (Although that Lily sure steals the show, doesn’t she, rolling in the grass like a little vixen).

    Less Tapper…More Tunch.

  12. 12.

    mai naem

    Well, you have to look with Jake Tapper’s history(see -Lewinsky,Monica)

    He also was stating there was no story even after it was evident there was a story i.e after Jenny Sanford said she didn’t care where he was, on Father’s Day weekend no less.
    BTW you’re giving Tbogg and his bassetts a good run for his money with Lily.

  14. 14.

    BombIranForChrist

    I think it’s possible that Tapper was just carrying water for himself and his organization, but it doesn’t disprove the idea that Tapper is, in fact, carrying water for the GOP. Maybe those critics were wrong to automatically argue that he was a GOP tool, but it’s still possible he is a GOP tool.

    Course, Tapper could have avoided all of this by being an actual bona fide journalist instead of a news actor. I doubt we will see Seymour Hersh kissing a flacky’s ass anytime soon.

  15. 15.

    sgwhiteinfla

    Hey I am all for him playing the game to try to get a story. But the point was for a lot of us that just by the sheer fact that he and other journos were so quick to dismiss any notion that Sanford was up to something shady, that in and of itself was carrying water for him. I for one was amazed at how the MSM kept running with each changing story until damn near all of them were caught with their pants down once the truth came out because they hadn’t tried at all to get past the evolving cover stories. Do you think they would have done that if Corzine or Kaine had gone missing and nobody had a good story as to where they were? I don’t.

  16. 16.

    General Winfield Stuck

    @Demo Woman:

    Where’s Red Kitten? Hopefully she’s not caught in the firefox trap.

    I just got out, just hope I don’t come across a real attack site.

  18. 18.

    gex

    OT: Has anyone heard from our friend who was in such despair yesterday? Was it arguingwithsignposts? I hope he/she is doing okay today. (Cross-posted in open thread as well).

  19. 19.

    CrazyDrumGuy

    @John Cole, still getting the Malware notice on Google Chrome. I usually read the RSS feed in Google Reader, and I’m getting the message there too.

  20. 20.

    General Winfield Stuck

    It’s kind of funny in an unfunny way, but when my computer was down for a month, the only way I had to know what was going on was from the teevee. At first, it seemed the same old inside the beltway focus on the inane with very little context or nuance. Sound bite media. But after the second week when new events were occurring to where I couldn’t get detailed info from the web, I slipped back into thinking I was getting good news reporting. And when I got back on line, it all became clear, I’d been digesting the same old hackish nonsense, blissfully ignorant, like most Americans remain planted, blissfully clueless in front of their idiot box.

  22. 22.

    DanR2

    Tapper’s stuff at Salon, in the dark recount days between Nov.-Dec., 2000, was enough to forgive him for most of his big-boy network ambitions.

    Still… lately, wtf?

  28. 28.

    JGabriel

    John Cole @ Top:

    What [Tapper] was quite clearly doing was attempting to ingratiate himself to the folks in the Sanford operation at the expense of David Gregory, with the hopes that they would somehow open up to Tapper at ABC instead of the folks at NBC.

    I’m not a Tapper fan, and tend to think of him as a center-right villager type whose worst trait is the pursuit of the false equivalence – if the Republicans do something bad, there must be something from the Democrats to balance it.

    That said, I think your analysis on this episode is correct. Tapper didn’t make any offer or promises of good coverage like Fox, WSJ, and the WashTimes; he just sounded sympathetic to the Sanford staffers’ plight. That’s standard operating procedure for anyone, especially reporters, seeking an interview.

    .

  29. 29.

    lamh31

    demkat620, I’ll believe it when I see it.

    It absolutely pisses me off when I see people like Eugene Robinson, and the 1 other minority “contributor” for MSNBC actually sit there and by there mere presence giving weight to what Buckkkannan says.

    Just once, I would like for one them to just refuse to even be apart of a supposed “liberal” network MSNBC that allows a “racial arsonist” like Pat Buchanan to spout off his bigoted comments.

    When ever Rachel has her “Uncle Pat” on she does not “take him apart”.

    I refuse to watch anything with Pat Buchanan on my screen, hell I can’t even stand Bay Buchanan since she just looks like her brother in drag!

  30. 30.

    jl

    So, OK, I’ll bite. Tapper was not a tool of the GOP wingnuts, he was just a tool.

    I do not follow these media celebrity people enough to understand their records, but the whole business smells like Jr Locker Room Antics and BS.

    I disagree with the comparison to Woodward and Bernstein and investigative reporting in one comment above. Tapper is not primarily an investigative reporter who needs to cultivate sources, piecing together a fiendishly difficult jigsaw puzzle for later publication a la Hersch or Savage. Tapper is a fricken beat reporter, and he should cover his fricken beat, which is public affairs and politics.

    And, as a commenter mentioned above, the primary and obvious public affairs and politics aspect of this story was that a sitting governor walked off his job, without transferring authority, for days on end, and no one seemed to know where he was.

    So, Tapper: tool or fool, you take your choice. IMHO. If Tapper wants to do investigative reporting, he should do that instead of tooling himself instead of covering his beat. But he can’t do that because, how would he stand a chance at investigative reporting? No way he could do that. IMHO.

  31. 31.

    demkat620

    Oh wow, Buchanan is even worse than I thought. Because the country was founded by white people, it should always be run by white people.

    Ye gods.

  32. 32.

    tavella

    I think your problem is no longer with malware, but with Google — it’s got you, via stopbadware, in its bad graces. I get a Google Desktop warning in IE, the StopBadware (partnered with Google) in Firefox, and Google Chrome won’t let me in at all, just gives me a blank screen.

  33. 33.

    lamh31

    Ah wasn’t Jake Tapper one of the culprits in the whole this whole psuedo-controversy?
    LipStick On A Pig
    And can anyone else tell me what’s the point of this post by Tapper here discussing whether Malia Obama’s “inherited her mother’s taste in sometimes expensive clothes”:

    Malia Obama – Budding Fashionista?

    Ah…yeah! I’d call that at RW tool for sure.

  34. 34.

    AhabTRuler

    Like Ayn Rand said “Alan Greenspan Everyone is just trying to get bust a nut”

    Fixed for more funner that way.

    ETA: Isn’t it reassuring to know that at least the failure of the p-tags is consistant across multiple browser platforms. It’s like suck implimented in an environment that is highly accessible to the end-user. Oh, and paradigm and proactive. Also.

  35. 35.

    Demo Woman

    @demkat620: Rachel tried to diffuse the situation by saying he was dating himself, but as was mentioned in the open thread, someone needs to take him down. There is enough hate on the radio stations and FOX TV without Pat spewing his filth on Rachel’s show.

  38. 38.

    linda

    jeff sharlett was just on with maddow discussing the latest member of the c street gang caught with his pants down. sharlett made the point how frightening it is to have this group of men whose loyalty is to one another before all others; and whose sense of entitlement is unlimited. morals are for the little people; they are god’s chosen. and they are also members of congress.

    sharlett’s going on vacation. i hope he’s not flying in any small aircraft.

  39. 39.

    Mike in NC

    I can’t even stand Bay Buchanan since she just looks like her brother in drag!

    Why are these morons even allowed a soapbox on cable? Unrepentant Nixon era racists and anti-semites.

  41. 41.

    lamh31

    @John Cole,

    I stand corrected then, but I’m still not on the “cut Tapper some slack” bandwagon yet. He just seemed to be too thrilled that Rush Limbaugh thought he was the only reporter in the “liberal” media not to be “Obama’s butt boy”.

    OT, U.S. Sen. Zell Miller criticized President Barack Obama’s recent travels overseas, telling a group of mostly Republican lawmakers Thursday that the White House Chief of Staff needs to put “Gorilla Glue” on Obama’s chair to keep him in the Oval Office.

  44. 44.

    mai naem

    Okay, I watched Rachel Maddow tonight. I am apparently a glutton for punishment. Did Pat bring any of this stuff up with Roberts and Alito and hell, even. Clarence Thomas. Thomas was an affirmative action baby. Did Roberts graduate from law school and college cum laude because they all graduate cum laude? Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t the Law Review Editor position a somewhat elected position. Wouldn’t she have had to win over her classmates at Yale to get it? And are they going to choose an underachiever. Furthermore, having had a few family members attend Ivies, the admission is not based on test scores alone. And she graduated second in her class at Princeton, apparently she was smarter than a lot of white people who got in the “old fashioned” way who graduated below her right? Also too, wouldn’t graduating second in your class at Princeton kind of guarantee you a spot at Yale Law School unless your LSAT scores are absolutely horrible?

  45. 45.

    arguingwithsignposts

    @gex:

    To all who might be wondering, i’m still here. just got back from dinner with a friend of mine who flew in to spend a couple of days helping out. i’m exhausted, but can’t get to sleep at the moment. (slept all of two hours last night)

  46. 46.

    General Winfield Stuck

    @demkat620:

    Betcha he and Pat Buchanan are pen pals.

    Yup, and they both sound more and more like the ghost of Lester Maddox, Zell’s old employer/

  48. 48.

    tofubo

    i still say he’s to be blamed for being a little tooley, i mean, anyone who would apologize to gregory just isn’t all there

    meanwhile…

    http://www.chris-floyd.com/component/content/article/3-articles/1798-making-their-bones-the-american-elites-bi-partisan-murder-racket.html

    http://original.antiwar.com/scahill/2009/07/15/the-democrats-selective-amnesia-on-assassination/

    http://www.minnpost.com/ericblackblog/2009/03/11/7310/investigative_reporter_seymour_hersh_describes_executive_assassination_ring

  49. 49.

    mai naem

    Glad you’re back. Hope you are getting all the help you need.

    If you want a laugh, Countdown is running a montage of the SNL 2008 election skits towards the end of the hour. Very funny. “Can I have a life line Katie?”

  50. 50.

    White House Department of Law (fmrly Jim-Bob)

    THAT’s a defense?

    Sorry, John, I don’t care why Tapper appeared to offer cover for Sanford’s misdeeds. The fact is that Tapper did it. Defending him because he’s not a right-wing stooge, but just plays one on television is kind of fucking stupid. Or at least it’s a jump into the swamp of moral equivalence.

  51. 51.

    Charles

    No, you’re right, John. Tapper is a suck-up and a sycophant. He would carry water for the GOP if they’d let him, but their ethics are too high.

    And Tapper is all too characteristic of the electronic media today: all lips and no sense of shame.

  53. 53.

    freelancer

    @arguing

    So glad to see you posting. As someone who years ago stood at the brink and saw the abyss look back at him, you scared the shit out of me last night. But you reached out, and I’m so glad you did. I hope you know your search for help isn’t over at this point, but I’m glad you felt the willingness to take the first step.

    Also, I’m so very proud of the outpouring of concern and support I saw here last night. This is indeed a special place, full of like-minded (and not), quirky, funny, fucked up, caring people.

    to quote Det. Norris from The Wire: “I fucking love this town.”

  54. 54.

    Sebastian Dangerfield

    Gotta join the chorus here. Whatever his motives, Tapper was showing sympathy for Sanford and apparently buying the flacks’ absurd series of “explanations.” He called reporting that raised legitimate questions about Sanford’s disappearance “slimy” and “insulting.” Regardless of whether he was sucking up in whole or in part for access, such sucking up is the very definition of what’s wrong with access-oriented journalism. If he had got the get, I doubt he would have pushed the hard questions. Tapper is by far not the worst of the lot (Gregory himself is a major offender, although he rightly smelled a story here) but the e-mail trail shows that Tapper is indeed “all in the game.” And the game as played by these access-drunk clowns is rotten.
    It’s a sad statement that the only one who came out looking good in this was Cilizza, who is a douche of the highest order himself.
    I’d love to see the e-mails that were (inevitably) withheld, such as the one that doubtless gave Erikson the material for his post explaining that everyone who mattered knew where he was but he needed to stay incognito.
    Bag of douche, Tapper. No pass from this consumer of news.

  55. 55.

    HRA

    Arguing, it’s great you were able to get out for dinner with your friend. A warm drink may help you get some sleep. It has to be a non-caffeine drink. I prefer to sip warm milk with honey.

    Tapper is the one who got bit by Bush’s dog. You all can pick up the meaning of it from that line.

  56. 56.

    Libby

    I’ll delurk for this one. I agree that Tapper was just doing what they all do. It really is a cutthroat business. I didn’t read that as offering to slant the coverage.

    Which is not to say I think he wouldn’t have repeated any bullshit line they gave him, if it was an exclusive. Tapper is weird. Once in a while he comes up with a very good piece that closely approximates real journalism. Unfortunately he also posts a lot of water carrying crap for the Villagers and trivial gossip.

    He’s definitely part of the problem and not the solution.

  57. 57.

    Allan

    John, have you actually read any of Tapper’s work during the Obama administration, or followed his fappery on Twitter? Today he’s parsing the President’s statement that if you are happy with your health insurance you can keep it, and finding it “questionable.”

    You see, your employer might someday decide to change the health insurance they offer you, and in that case, you wouldn’t get to keep the plan you have, now would you?

    Pedantry. But he’s very proud of his catch.

    It was fun tonight on Twitter as dozens of us called him on his sophistry, after which he responded:

    “ppl have got to stop treating reporters fact-checking health care reform claims as if theyre Birther wackadoodles.”

    Got it? Questioning his SPIN is a deranged challenge of his “fact-checking.”

  58. 58.

    Chuck Butcher

    What Tapper did may be more of the same that the others do; and that means exactly what beyond there is a general problem. I don’t see how making the case that NBC’s piece was slime doesn’t indicate a willingness to go in a softer direction. Since when did journalism become a therapy session for injured families of adulterers?

    I’m real tired of these half-assed twits, ask one them how the hell Knight-Ridder (now McClatchy) got Iraq right while all their high-zoot entre’ screwed the pooch. KR didn’t have the big name contacts – they worked the seams, the grunts and did the work none of the rest got done.

    I’m supposed to give a damn the blogosphere dropped like a brick shithouse on Tapper? I only mind it didn’t on all of them.

  60. 60.

    Lee

    All I have to say about that is that is exactly the type of crap that leads to soft coverage. People trying to get the exclusive interviews and high ratings was responsible for a lot of fluff or flat out wrong coverage leading up to Iraq. When journalists run around trying to be liked more than trying to report the news, it isn’t journalism anymore.

  61. 61.

    kommrade reproductive vigor

    What he was quite clearly doing was attempting to ingratiate himself to the folks in the Sanford operation at the expense of David Gregory, with the hopes that they would somehow open up to Tapper at ABC instead of the folks at NBC.

    I congratulate you for attempting to read Tapper’s “mind” (did you use an electron microscope?) but I work for a tiny inconsequential newsletter and we all know this is not how you approach a potential source E.V.E.R. I don’t care if the source has been accused of skull fucking kittens. If Tapper were some intern I might buy your version of events, but he ain’t. So that leaves, conniving, unethical prick.

    And then there’s the comment by the ABC exec. Hmmm.

    Really this is turning into an echo of the Sanford Affair. No one seems to know what’s going on, people are tossing out conflicting stories and people far removed from the scene are trying to reconstruct what happened to make the original idiot seem like less of an idiot.

  63. 63.

    kay

    @Allan:

    It’s not that I mind fact-checking health care reform proposals. I mind selective reporting. They’re relying on the CBO report to check Democrat’s claims on cost of health care. Fine.
    Can anyone explain to me why they didn’t rely on the CBO numbers to check Republican’s claims on cap and trade?
    Because they didn’t. The CBO report is out there, and has been since June 23rd. It completely discredits GOP claims on the cost of cap and trade.
    That went unmentioned, and Republicans are still making up numbers on cap and trade, yet the CBO report on health care is today’s top story.
    Numbers are numbers, and the CBO is a single source. If we’re going to use CBO numbers, let’s use CBO numbers! We only rely on CBO numbers to dispute Democrat’s claims? WTF? This is reporting? It’s editorializing.

  64. 64.

    Sinister eyebrow

    I think the nickname for the national political press is mis-coined. They’re not the Villagers. They’re the cast of Mean Girls.

  65. 65.

    geg6

    John, you seem confused about what a journalist is supposed to do. What Tapper did is not what journalists do, it’s what gossip columnists do. Journalists do not spends their time sucking up to their subjects. They don’t trash their competition to get a leg up. They spend their time on the ground, seeking multiple sources and putting those multiple threads together in a way that, hopefully, approximates the truth. All Tapper was interested in was a headline, regardless of the truth or untruth of what Sanford would say in it. The only journalist in this entire affair was the one who showed evidence of committing journalism: the reporter who tracked him to the airport. And she didn’t do it by sucking up. She did it the old fashioned way. She followed where the evidence took her. And got the headline that Tapper so desperately wanted but didn’t have the skills to get. Well, he’s got the headline now, doesn’t he? Though I’m guessing it’s not exactly how he imagined or desired. Too fucking bad. The gossip columnist had the tables turned in him. I think it’s hilarious and well deserved.

  66. 66.

    JackieBinAZ

    He was trying to ingratiate himself by implying he would provide more sympathetic coverage than NBC did. How is that interpreted as anything but being there with the bucket ready?

  67. 67.

    itsbenj

    Ummmm, no. People were/are mad at Tapper because he offers overtly ‘friendly’ coverage to anyone in the GOP regardless of their level of weirdness or corruption. Tapper was trying to scoop NBC, sure, but he was also directly sucking up to a politician in hopes of being in his good graces – and hoping to help cover up a valid story as part of the deal.

    That immediate assumption that the GOP is being “attacked” when someone reports the truth about them, and that immediate assumption by main stream, not-very-bright people like Tapper, that he as a media figure, needs to go to the mat for the GOP, just…no matter what. It’s their first instinct. If you don’t find something wrong with that, I just don’t know what to say…

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