Will Someone Tell Us What Herman Cain Did?
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11/9/2011
news.investors.com
After 10 days of saturation coverage by the media, we still don't definitely know any more about Herman Cain's alleged misdeeds than we did when Politico first broke the story. Media balance, anyone?
Since breaking the sexual harassment story about the presidential contender in late October, Politico alone has published more than 100 dispatches. TV networks aired a whopping 99 stories in the first nine days. And the Cain saga continues to merit front page treatment at major newspapers.
Yet with every news outlet working overtime to keep the Cain story alive, we still know next to nothing about what Cain allegedly did. Which is basically right where the story was when Politico broke it in late October.
Indeed, the only actual, undisputed, verifiable facts about this story are that two women filed sexual harassment complaints against Cain more than a decade ago when he was head of the National Restaurant Association, and settled their claims out of court.
We also know that every harassment claim against Cain dates back more than a decade. Oh, and we now know the name of one of those original accusers: Karen Kraushaar.
That's it.
We don't know what the two women who settled say Cain did. We don't know if their claims were credible. And we certainly don't know if Cain did what he's said to have done in those complaints, since organizations routinely settle harassment claims to avoid costly litigation and bad PR.
It's true that two other women, including Sharon Bialek, have accused Cain since the original story broke, although only Bialek has identified herself and provided any details — 14 years after the fact.
But anyone who comes forward today should be greeted with a high degree of suspicion, since doing so guarantees instant celebrity status, giving her a powerful incentive to fudge the facts.
And in any case, Bialek seems less credible by the day. She's had money trouble, her fiance apparently had never heard of the alleged abuse before she went public, she met and hugged Cain at a Tea Party event just last month, and she happens to live in the same apartment building as key Obama adviser David Axelrod.
Surely the media have a responsibility to perform some due diligence about this accuser.
Meanwhile, we've learned that Kraushaar filed a complaint about unfair treatment at the INS three years after settling with the Restaurant Association, raising questions about her motives and what she considers inappropriate behavior.
To be sure, Cain has been his own worst enemy throughout this saga, acting unprepared to deal with what should have been an expected campaign crisis, offering changing accounts, and making reckless accusations of his own.
But that's hardly justification for how the media have handled the story, particularly while they're yawning about other, genuine scandals that involve the current president.
Columnist Dan Milbank, for example, mocks Republican efforts to keep the "Fast and Furious" scandal alive while being unable to uncover any fresh angles. "The Republicans may be furious," he sneered, "but this political scandal is going nowhere — fast."
Maybe so, but can Milbank, or anyone in the press, reasonably claim that the fact-free Cain story merits the fast and furious level of coverage it's been getting? |
