Issue #11/92, June 8 - 22, 2000   

DAVID HOFFMAN MUST DIE!

by Matt Taibbi

‘Twas a far, far better thing than Indiana University basketball coach Bobby Knight had ever done, Sometimes, when I have nothing better to do, I stay up late at night and stare at David Hoffman's picture.

It would not be entirely correct to say that the man fascinates me. He does not fascinate me. What he does is compel my attention. Like the lingering suspicion that God is dead and life is intrinsically hopeless and without meaning, he is a problem that no person seriously engaged in the search for happiness can afford to ignore.

Hoffman's success in advancing to the position that he has - as bureau chief of the Washington Post - could not be a mistake. It is impossible to be mistaken about Hoffman. His essence is unmistakable. There is nothing subtle about his articles; on the contrary, they literally pulsate with ugliness and evil. And yet, this brazen agent of misinformation is able to use those pulsating article-monstrosities as letters of introduction into the world's most exclusive society. And it works! It works! Something must be very wrong in the world, if things are so right with ol' Dave.

The experience of reading Hoffman's articles is very similar to the experience of watching someone cut in front of you in line. You know the feeling: you're four places behind the cashier at McDonald's, already feeling impatient, when suddenly, a few feet to the left, you see a gaunt but not quite old man in a dirty suit and tie slowly sneaking toward the front of the line. He's looking straight ahead, like he doesn't see you and has no reason to see you, but you know the whole time that he's aware you're there and just waiting for you to tell him to get to the back of the line. But no matter how long you stare at him, he just keeps inching his way toward the front, as though he's being sneaky, even though he's clearly not being sneaky! You can't believe it's happening. How could anyone do such a thing? How could anyone think he could get away with it? Why would anyone intentionally so burden you with the obligation of accosting and stopping him? What an imposition!

Hoffman's latest effort, the June 4 "Russia Was Lab For Theories on Foreign Policy", is a classic of the Hoffman-cutting-in-line genre of newswriting. The piece is more or less a gigantic apology for the performance of Vice President Al Gore in his dealings with Russia. It bests by a factor of ten or eleven the most shamelessly one-sided analyses one would think could ever possibly be printed in a newspaper as prestigious as the Washington Post. From the very first paragraph Hoffman bullies his way to the front, brazenly pushing his way past fact and logic, piling lies and misstatements on top of one another so quickly that one has no time whatsoever to recover.

Hoffman's lead speaks for itself:

"MOSCOW - President Clinton opens a summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin today with an agenda still burdened by Russia's unfinished transition to democracy and market capitalism. After eight years of mixed success and sometimes faltering attempts to engage Russia, the results are now at issue in the U.S. presidential campaign.

"Vice President Gore has vowed to press ahead, calling for 'forward engagement' with Russia, while Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush has suggested he would take a more arms-length approach."

This is probably the least offensive part of Hoffman's piece, and it's still an atrocity. Note the way he frames the issue. "At issue" in the presidential campaign are the "results" - the "mixed success" and "sometimes faltering attempts" to engage Russia. According to Hoffman, one may reach of two conclusions after examining these "results"; one may proclaim favor for the "forward engagement" plan of Al Gore, or one may choose the "arm's- length" approach of George W. Bush.

Well, when you put it that way...who wouldn't favor "forward engagement"? Hoffman has arranged things from the very start in a way that makes it possible to really criticize the Gore administration.

The piece gets worse immediately. It will be necessary to quote the next passage at length to see the breadth of Hoffman's shamelessness here:

"The record suggests that Gore tried repeatedly to bring well-tested Western solutions - based on laws, rules and carefully ordered process - to a country hurtling through an extraordinarily tumultuous period...

"Yet, in health care, space exploration and nonproliferation, Gore's prodding and high-level attention brought about change. In diplomacy, as well, Gore also built a back channel to the upper echelons of the Russian leadership through Chernomyrdin at a time when then-President Boris Yeltsin was increasingly absent and ill.

"These conclusions about Gore's work in Russia come from recent interviews with 14 people who were involved, including Russian officials and Chernomyrdin, Western businessmen working in Russia and U.S. officials, including Gore's national security adviser, Leon Fuerth."

When I first read that last paragraph, about the "14 people", my eyes nearly fell out of my head. My first thought: "Now there's a group of objective sources for you!" No, this was an incredible thing to see: in attempting to gauge the performance of the Gore-Chernomyrdin commission, Hoffman interviewed... the Gore-Chernomyrdin commission!

This is the point where the being-cut-on-in-line feeling begins to kick in in earnest. You see him cutting, you've caught him red-handed; automatic disqualification, you think, must surely ensue. "Aha!" you say, reaching for Mr. Hoffman's lapel. "I've caught you! You can't base an analysis like that on those kinds of sources! I know the rules!" You fold your arms and smile smugly. "You may surrender, now, sir!" you say. "Game over. Finis!"

But the game does not end. Hoffman continues on, ignoring the whistle.

Normally, a paper like the Post will at least give lip service to the point of view it opposes, being content to undermine that point of view through the judicious placement of facts and counterarguments.

Not Hoffman. As it turns out, his article - his giant, 2,700-word article - contains just one quote by a Gore antagonist. That person, Bush advisor Condoleezza Rice, is allowed to throw in her two cents some fifteen paragraphs down.

"The vice president himself oversaw Gore-Chernomyrdin," Rice said. "At the time it was very clear that Chernomyrdin and others who the vice president was calling 'reformers' were stealing the country blind, with the money going into Swiss bank accounts."

Here you might peek out from behind the tree, where you've been hiding for the first 14 graphs from the flying propaganda-shrapnel. You are lured out because...Rice's comments make sense. They are the truth. And if they are the truth, what could they be doing in a David Hoffman article?

Answer: being flattened. Instead of addressing the issue of why Gore was calling thieves "reformers", or even questioning the veracity of that accusation, Hoffman instead immediately allows one of his "sources" to dismiss Rice's charges out of hand:

"Fuerth countered: "I think you have to take that crack for what it is, really just politics. Is the idea supposed to be that we should have boycotted the government of Russia for five years, because that was Chernomyrdin's time in office - or deal with him?"

Clearly, one can deal with Chernomyrdin without calling him a reformer. But in Hoffman's world, if one is not calling Chernomyrdin a reformer, that means one is "boycotting" the Russian government. This returns the reader back to the beginning of the article, in which the only question one is allowed to consider is whether one should abandon Russia, or press on with "forward engagement".

Hoffman's gall is not the only striking feature of his work. Another feature, if I may risk using a word which could be easily misunderstood, is the complexity of his dishonesty. Your average hack may fib here and there, stretch this fact or that, but there are very few out there who are capable of stretching a lie beyond the sentence level.

Hoffman, on the other hand, is willing to make widespread alterations to the entire structure of very long articles in order to preserve a certain misstatement or dishonest assertion. There are times when one has to go back and read his articles very carefully to spot all of the hidden adjustments and omissions that he has used to construct these elaborately fallacious assertions of his. Some months ago, in a performance that helped him win our Worst Journalist Tournament, Hoffman meticulously rearranged the timeline of Anatoly Sobchak's biography in order to preserve the fiction that the late mayor did not flee St. Petersburg in order to avoid prosecution.

In this case, Hoffman goes to extraordinary lengths to explain away the famous "Horseshit" incident, involving Gore and the CIA. This was the incident in which the CIA prepared a lengthy memo detailing corruption allegations connected with Viktor Chernomyrdin, only to have Gore scribble the word "horseshit" on it and send it back.

Hoffman attacks this potentially devastating piece of information using several methods, each more duplicitous than the next. The first thing he does is get two of his beloved "sources" to impugn the accuracy of the CIA report:

"It was previously disclosed that the CIA had written a memo containing rumors of corruption involving Chernomyrdin. According to two sources who have seen the memo, it cautioned that the allegations were unsubstantiated and some were highly improbable."

Hoffman allows his sources here to remain unnamed. This is curious because if you read the passage carefully, you see that the sources are not, themselves, saying that the allegations were unsubstantiated and highly improbable. They are saying that the CIA themselves said this, in the memo.

Now, why would anyone require anonymity to point something like that out? Is it to protect the sources from the revelation that they had seen the report? I doubt it. More likely, the sources knew that this was a very shaky interpretation of the report, and did not want to have to answer for it. After all, if the report was unreliable because it was unsubstantiated and improbable, the CIA not only wouldn't have sent it to Gore in the first place, they wouldn't have leaked to the press their outrage at its being dismissed as "horseshit".

The second thing to note is that the report was, of course, not "horseshit", that there has been enough evidence of Chernomyrdin's corruption made public already to fill an airplane hangar. Among the incidents that come to mind are the Le Monde report about Chernomyrdin's $5 billion fortune, numerous reports about the $1 million cover charge for meetings with the former Prime Minister, and USA Today's naming of Chernomyrdin as one of the figures implicated in the Bank of New York scandal. Hoffman knows about all of this, of course, but lets the "unsubstantiated" and "improbable" line stand.

But that passage pales in comparison to the final paragraph of Hoffman's article, a real tour de force display of doublespeak:

"Gore dismissed the memo by writing an expletive across it, leading to criticism he was indifferent to corruption. But both sources said his assessment of the memo was essentially correct. 'Anyone who deals with Russia at all understands there is a problem that is widespread,' Fuerth said. 'It was on the commission agenda.'"

If you don't understand this passage, don't worry. In fact, the passage makes no objective sense at all. It begins by asserting that the assessment of the memo was right, i.e. that the CIA report on Chernomyrdin was indeed horseshit. It then - in the very next sentence - moves on to assert exactly the opposite, that everybody who deals with Russia "understands" there's a corruption problem and that, essentially, the Gore people were taking that into consideration.

So on the one hand, the report was horseshit. On the other hand, the report was not horseshit, but merely so true and obvious that it did not need to be presented to Gore.

But here's where the real genius of Hoffman's propaganda method comes into play; here's where you see the hard work, the "hustle", the willingness to burn the midnight oil, that sets him apart from other bad journalists in town. You see it when you begin to think closely about that last "it was on the agenda" quote. You might wonder: if "everybody" understood that there was a problem, that how was it that Gore didn't know enough to avoid being "thwarted or overwhelmed by Russia's messy march toward market democracy"?

Because this is the premise of Hoffman's article, that a well-meaning Gore was simply undermined by circumstances beyond his control. The idea is best articulated in a passage buried in the body of the piece:

"In other areas, too, Russia's wild post-Soviet disorder often resisted Gore's proposals for process, laws and rules."

And again in another spot:

"In another example of the focus on rules and Russia's unruly reality, Gore pressed Russia to adopt a more effective system of capital markets...But the Russian brand of unruly capitalism was not easily tamed. In recent years, investors and shareholders have been subjected to frequent and uncontrolled abuse."

You see the theme: well-meaning eager beaver Gore, betrayed by "unruly" Russia. But again, getting back to the end passage - if Gore knew about the corruption, if it was "on the agenda", then how was he beaten by it?

The answer is that he wasn't. If you look carefully at Hoffman's piece, you will not once anywhere find it explicitly asserted that Russian corruption undermined Gore's policies here. The culprit is always some vaprous, nonspecific destructive force - "wild post-Soviet disorder", "unruly Russia", "abuse", or "wild gyrations". Either that, or it was the usual cast of commie villains 0 "parliament" or the "old guard of specialists."

All of that, but no corruption, theft, or anything specifically like corruption or theft. In fact the word "corruption" is only mentioned once in the entire article - the 2,352nd word, in the second-to-last paragraph - and then only in the context of refuting charges that Gore had ignored it.

Without a doubt, Hoffman saw that it would be impossible to argue simultaneously that Gore was both fully aware of Russian corruption and unwittingly undermined by it - logically, it doesn't fit. Equally impossible is the argument that Gore did not know about Russian corruption, and was therefore easily undermined by it. The CIA memo story renders this version of events untenable.

So Hoffman was left with only one choice, which was to argue that Gore knew all about Russian corruption, and was not undermined by it. This is preposterous, of course, but Hoffman - ever the hard worker - manages with great difficulty to patch together a case. He does so by going back through his article and carefully isolating any of the disappointments and failures of Gore-Chernomyrdin from corruption. Helping his cause were careful omissions of any mention of any of the other major corruption fiascoes that stained U.S.-Russian relations in the past eight years (FIMACO and the Bank of New York business come to mind). Also helping keep the article structure together is the careful placement of the CIA memo story at the end of the piece, thereby keeping the internal contradictions hidden for as long as possible.

Make no bones about it, this Hoffman piece is an extraordinarily sophisticated piece of propaganda. It is the work of a first-class disinformation professional. When I read it - and I should note that I wasn't the only one who reacted in this way to this piece - it reinforced my very serious suspicion that Hoffman is more than just a journalist. Only a professional political operative would bother to write such a complexly duplicitous article. Who else would want to? Who else would have the time?

Well...who knows. One might just as easily wonder who would have the time to stay up late at night fantasizing about driving a railroad spike through the chest of the Washington Post bureau chief. That seems unlikely, too. But it happens. It's pathetic, but it happens.

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