The October Surprise. These days the phrase is often used to describe fears that a political campaign will drop some sort of bombshell in the final weeks before Election Day.
Then-FBI Director James Comey’s reopening of the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails in 2016 would certainly qualify, though there was no evidence that the Trump campaign was behind it — nor, for that matter, any evidence of wrongdoing by Clinton.
So, too, would the Hunter Biden laptop story of 2020, though the Trumpers who were behind it were hampered by the inconvenient fact that they’d targeted the wrong Biden.
But I don’t think anyone used the phrase October Surprise until 1980, when it was used to describe something that Ronald Reagan and his associates feared would happen but ultimately did not: the release of more than 50 American hostages who had been held by Iran for many months. If President Jimmy Carter brought them home just before the election, it could have given him the boost he needed to win a second term.
For years, questions have been raised by former Carter national-security official Gary Sick and others as to whether the Reagan campaign, and especially his future CIA chief, William Casey, put their thumb on the scale and somehow convinced the ayatollah to hold off on releasing the hostages until after the election. In fact, the Iranian government ended up releasing them almost simultaneously with Reagan’s swearing-in.
No one has devoted more attention to the October Surprise than Craig Unger, a journalist who worked as an investigative reporter for Newsweek back when it was a respectable newsmagazine as opposed to whatever it is today. Unger’s obsession all but wrecked his career. I remember him as the editor of Boston magazine in the mid-’90s. He was in Boston because he’d been let go by Newsweek and sued for $10 million.
Unger never stopped believing, though, and now he’s written a book about it called “Den of Spies.” In an interview (gift link) with Gal Beckerman in The Atlantic, Unger talks about new evidence that’s emerged over the years and his belief that the Reagan campaign really did try to prevent the hostages from being released.
Beckerman, though, expresses deep skepticism over what Unger tells him. He writes:
This is how Unger thinks. His previous two books tried to cement the idea that Donald Trump is an asset of Vladimir Putin. Unger’s modus operandi is to point to many different dots and then wonder at how they might connect, even when he can’t connect them himself or when those dots are being served up by deeply unreliable sources, such as a former KGB agent. Suspicion is what matters. He traffics in doubt. One negative review of his book “American Kompromat” in The Guardian described it as “dozens and dozens of wild stories and salacious accusations, almost all ‘too good to check,’ in the parlance of old-time journalists.”
Later on, Beckerman adds that journalism of the sort practiced by Unger might be at least partly to blame for the distrust into which the media and other public institutions has fallen:
I wondered, though, in my discussions with Unger, whether reporters like him bore some of the responsibility — whether the kind of skepticism and mistrust that marked his generation of journalists had helped create our post-truth reality. There were moments when he slipped from crusading truth teller to something closer to a conspiracy theorist willing to believe the most outlandish speculations. In the book, for example, with very little proof, he entertains the idea that rogue spies looking to undermine Carter sabotaged the helicopters used in a failed hostage-rescue mission in April 1980, which ended with eight soldiers dying in a crash. I asked Unger whether he really believed this. “Well, I think it is a possibility,” he told me.
It has to be said that the October Surprise is hardly outside the realm of politics-as-usual in the U.S., especially among Republicans. As John A. Farrell found in his biography of Richard Nixon, the Nixon campaign in October 1968 conspired to derail peace talks between South Vietnam and North Vietnam, thus depriving President Lyndon Johnson of the opportunity to bring the war to a close in time to help Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey — and thus further confirming my Richard Nixon Unified Field Theory of Everything.
In August of this year, The Washington Post reported that the Trump campaign may have received an illegal $10 million payment (gift link) in 2016 from the Egyptian government.
Like Unger, I think it’s a possibility that the original October Surprise is true. But I’d like to see proof, not speculation. Nearly 44 years after Reagan was elected president, we’re still waiting.
Extremism in New England
A website that hosts neo-Nazis and members of the Ku Klux Klan has extensive ties to New England, according to a story by GBH News reporters Tim Biba and Phillip Martin. The site, which is called Odysee, is the online home of right-wing extremists like David Duke and Alex Jones. Biba and Martin write:
The site also comes with strong New England ties. Odysee was created by a now-defunct New Hampshire cryptocurrency company and began with seed money from a downtown Boston-based venture capital firm called Pillar VC, financed by a diverse constellation of local investors.
Odysee also has ties to Jeremy Kauffman of the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire, who recently posted a message on Twitter saying, “Anyone who murders Kamala Harris would be an American hero.” (He quickly took it down.) When The Boston Globe contacted the party for a response, Kauffman replied that the organization “believes that the journalists at the Boston Globe are as evil as rapists or murderers.”
Kauffman responded to GBH News in a similar vein, sending an email that said, “Every so-called journalist at GBH Boston is as evil as a reporter for Pravda, and a proper society would deport, jail, or execute them.”
Yikes.
More on sponsored content
Last week I defended the Maine Trust for Local News for running sponsored content on the websites of its newspapers, the largest of which is the Portland Press Herald. Sponsored content is advertising — indeed, it is sometimes referring to as “native advertising” — and I see no serious problems with it as long as its provenance is fully disclosed.
Two of my favorite local publishers disagreed with me in the comments. Nancy West of InDepthNH wrote, “Sponsored Content is Fake News. It’s that simple.” And Ed Miller of The Provincetown Independent called it “nothing more than a deceptive euphemism for advertising.”
Ed has also devoted his weekly column to the topic in which he took issue with me and wrote:
A few years ago, this trend still raised eyebrows. In 2015, the Columbia Journalism Review published a piece titled “Disguising Ads as Stories,” in which Damaris Colhoun argued that sponsored content would undermine newspapers’ credibility. “But despite these news ethics concerns, native advertising is becoming an increasingly important revenue generator for major news outlets,” wrote Colhoun. “They’ve also attempted to sidestep the critique that sponsored content compromises a news brand by putting language like ‘storytelling’ and ‘content,’ rather than ‘advertising,’ at the fore. To critics, this amounts to false labeling.”
These days, no one seems to blink an eye at this kind of marketing disguised as news.
Well worth your time. And now for the disclosures. Ellen Clegg and I will be speaking at a book event in Portland on Oct. 15 that’s sponsored by the Maine Trust. I serve on the advisory board of the Local Journalism Project, a nonprofit that helps pay for public-interest journalism at the for-profit Independent, and Ed and Nancy have both been guests on “What Works,” our podcast about the future of local news.
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The Netflix doc on Danny Casolaro is pretty good.
I remember Unger’s name but not the controversy. And I know nothing about his books. The comments here remind me of why Seymour Hersh supposedly stopped showing up in The New Yorker: Under-sourced reporting and speculation presented as gospel.
That’s a great analogy, though I think Hersh is a lot wackier than Unger.