Slinging Mud at Ashley Judd A leftist magazine exposes a Hollywood actress as troubled and strange.
By JAMES TARANTO
Ashley Judd is a Hollywood actress who thought about, and decided against, running as a Democrat for U.S. Senate in Kentucky, where Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is up for a sixth term next year. That's about all we knew about her until yesterday, except for one other fact that led us to suspect she was kind of strange.
Back in December a reader sent along a headline from a Kentucky paper describing Judd as "Still Mum" on a prospective candidacy. "Mum" is easily recognizable as the British translation of "Mom," so we thought this might make for an amusing juxtaposition. We hit Google in search of a suitable story to complete the gag, and did we ever hit pay dirt with this 2006 item from ContactMusic.com: "Campaigning actress ASHLEY JUDD refuses to 'breed' with her racing star husband DARIO FRANCHITTI while there are starving children in the world. . . . She says, 'It's unconscionable to breed with the number of children who are starving to death in impoverished countries.' "
Yesterday Mother Jones's David Corn published an exposé that shows Judd to be every bit as peculiar as her vulgar Malthusian musings lead one to expect. "I freak out in airports," Corn quotes Judd as saying. "The last time I came home from a trip, I absolutely flipped out when I saw pink fuzzy socks on a rack. I mean, I can never anticipate what is going to push me over the edge."
Associated Press She has the hat to this day.
Her ideas about religion are odd, too: "I have to expand my God concept from time to time," Corn quotes Judd as saying, "and you know particularly I enjoy native faith practices, and have a very nature-based God concept. I'd like to think I'm like St. Francis in that way. Brother Donkey, Sister Bird."
Corn provides some context here, noting that "Judd was referring to well-known stories about St. Francis [of Assisi], who once preached a sermon to birds--'my little sisters'--and who referred to his own body as the 'Brother Donkey.' " Fair enough, but it's still pretty weird for a Hollywood actress to compare herself to St. Francis.
Judd isn't just eccentric, according to Corn, but has a history of mental illness, including suicidal ideation while in the sixth grade and a 42-day hospitalization for clinical depression as an adult.
But the Corn exposé is bizarre in its own way. For one thing, it doesn't actually reveal anything new about Judd. While the facts Corn presents about her may come as news to a low-information entertainment consumer such as this columnist, they were already on the record. The quotes above come from a public speech, and the information about her medical history is from a memoir she published in 2011.
For another, since she isn't running for office, it's difficult to imagine any reason other than sheer sensationalism why Judd's eccentricities and infirmities would be of interest to readers of a political magazine like Mother Jones.
OK, let's square that circle. Corn's article is framed as an exposé not of Judd but of McConnell.
Political commentator Monica Crowley on the reputed bugging of Sen. Mitch McConnell’s office. Photos: Getty Images
Corn obtained an audio recording of a private Feb. 2 campaign meeting at which McConnell and his aides discussed what in political parlance is known as "oppo research"--the gathering of damaging information about political adversaries. McConnell's men had done their homework, reading Judd's memoir and listening to a recording of the earlier-quoted speech. "We're still drilling down and there's a wealth of material," said one McConnell aide. "It's just hard to get all the way around it."
McConnell's team shot back. In an update, Corn quotes a statement from campaign manager Jesse Benton: "We've always said the Left will stop at nothing to attack Sen. McConnell, but Nixonian tactics to bug campaign headquarters is above and beyond." CNN reports the campaign has asked the FBI to investigate the suppositional surveillance.
Corn responded with a qualified denial: "We were not involved in the making of the tape, but it is our understanding that the tape was not the product of any kind of bugging operation. . . . Under the circumstances, our publication of the article is both legal and protected by the First Amendment." The alternate explanation would be that the recording was made surreptitiously by someone who was authorized to be at the meeting.
Legally, that makes a world of difference--between a mere betrayal and a felony. But it's interesting that Corn defends the article's publication as "legal and protected by the First Amendment," which it almost certainly is, and not as ethical. It seems to us it would not be hard to mount such a defense if it is true, as Corn claims, Mother Jones "was not involved in making the tape." It would be an impossible standard to hold journalists culpable for being passive beneficiaries of others' bad behavior.
But there's also a moral hazard here. Corn previously published the infamous Mitt Romney "47%" video, which was also surreptitiously recorded (by an employee of the company catering the event, it later emerged). Occam's razor suggests that whoever betrayed McConnell was inspired by that incident to make the recording and to bring it to Corn.
If that's the case, then Corn is slightly more than a passive beneficiary of illicitly gathered information: His style of journalism encourages illicit behavior. Does that make him blameworthy? We're ambivalent about that question. But if you sympathize with Corn and his leftist politics and are inclined to say not, please explain to us how this is ethically different from Linda Tripp's recording her conversations with Monica Lewinsky, or Andrew Breitbart's publishing James O'Keefe's hidden-video stings.
In journalistic ethics, there is a consequentialist consideration that can't be ignored: newsworthiness. If a reporter gets a scoop--or, to put it in annoyingly high-minded terms, if the story satisfies the public's right to know--it's easier to justify ethically questionable practices. No one would defend Corn if the people on the recording were not public figures but teenage girls gossiping viciously about their rivals. Such recordings surely exist, but no imaginable public interest would be served by publicizing them.
There's no denying the newsworthiness of Corn's Romney scoop. With respect to the McConnell-Judd story, he asserts: "We published the article on the tape due to its obvious newsworthiness." But since Judd is not running for Senate, the newsworthiness is in fact far from obvious.
It looks to us as if Corn's purpose was to smear McConnell and his team by suggesting there was something out of the ordinary in, as the article's subheadline puts it, "how far they were willing to go to defeat" Judd. In truth, oppo research is a normal part of politics. (Although Democratic pols often get assistance from nominally independent journalists--remember when Sarah Palin's book came out and the Associated Press assigned 11 reporters to oppo research?)
The only thing that made the McConnell oppo research effort unusual was the richness of the publicly available material about prospective opponent Judd. Which brings us to a hypothetical question. Suppose Judd were running for the Senate and the same person brought the same recording of the same meeting to David Corn. Would he go with the story?
Under such circumstances the story would unquestionably be more newsworthy than it is now, because the revelations about Judd, and not only those about McConnell, would be of public interest. But the political effect would be quite different. Publishing the story would help McConnell's campaign by disseminating potentially damaging information about his challenger.
It is the nature of hypothetical questions that they are not amenable to definitive answers. All one can say about this one is that if the answer were negative, it would imply Corn was less a serious journalist than a partisan hack.
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