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Can One Reporter Take Down a Presidential Candidate? John Solomon Is Trying to Find Out
By Alexander Zaitchik--AlterNet
Saturday, August 4, 2007---- Earlier this summer, the Washington Post ran a profile of Joseph Torrenueva, a Beverly Hills Democrat better known these days as John Edwards' barber. The article, which led the paper's "style" section, has achieved minor infamy for the author's solemn assertion, "It is some kind of commentary on the state of American politics that hair seems to have attracted as much attention as, say, his position on healthcare."
Has it now? The truth is nobody knew anything about Joe Torrenueva before the Post article appeared. Miniscandals about politicians' haircuts are more like Chia pets than human heads of hair. They don't grow on their own. They require reporters to pursue and water them with investigations into the practices and prices of high-end barbers; only then is national attention focused on who and what presidential candidates pay for their monthly snips. The Torrenueva profile didn't offer "some kind of commentary" on the state of American politics so much as it offered insight into the peculiar priorities of its author, Post money and politics reporter John Solomon.
If Solomon were some deadbeat alt-weekly columnist with a grudge against Edwards, the haircut story would make for mere humor, but the Post has reach far beyond its own pages -- it's one of a handful of media outlets that can establish diehard narratives about politicians that can dog them for decades. The Post in Solomon’s hands is a weapon that can almost single-handedly force Edwards or another candidate off their campaign focus. In the case of Edwards, that means a total distraction from trying to start a national discussion on poverty issues.
No one who has followed Solomon's controversial reporting career was surprised to see his byline on the Torrenueva profile. When he jumped from the Associated Press to the Post at the end of 2006, Solomon took his well-known obsessions with him. Among these are the personal finances of prominent Democrats and, apparently, their boyish bangs.
The only thing that likely surprised Solomon watchers about the Torrenueva profile was its placement in the "style" section. This may have even surprised Solomon himself, as the article appears written with more prime Post real estate in mind. How else to explain Solomon's newsy tone, as if the words of Joe Torrenueva, stylist to the stars, could unleash another season's worth of Hairgate exposes leading all the way up to and through the door of the Edwards' campaign bus?
(...)
If Solomon expected placement of the Torrenueva article in the news section, it's understandable. After all, one of his very first stories for the Post set a precedent for landing his petty and misfiring Edwards hit-jobs on A1. Back in January, fresh to the job, Solomon penned an article with Lois Romano that announced the sale of Edwards' Georgetown home for $5.2 million -- or $1.4 million more than he paid for it in 2002. Although practically dripping with innuendo that Edwards had been involved in a sleazy land deal with known criminals and then lied about it, the article noticeably failed to contain any dirt. The article basically reported that Edwards had bought a house in D.C.'s booming real estate market, fixed it up and sold it three years later for a profit. The banality of these facts did not stop Post editors from placing the article above the fold, alongside the latest news from Iraq.
A couple of weeks after Solomon reported on the unremarkable sale of Edwards' Georgetown mansion, Post ombudswoman Deborah Howell conceded that the story was controversial in the paper's own newsroom for being "accurate misleading ... 'gotcha' without the 'gotcha.'"
(...)
Take two Solomon stories from April and May of this year. The stories highlight the consulting work Edwards did in 2005 and 2006 for Fortress Investment Group, a New York-based firm with a $30 billion hedge fund basket, all of them incorporated in the Cayman Islands, the famous tax shelter. As a presidential candidate, Edwards has decried offshore tax shelters, and Solomon's April 23 story (co-written by Alec MacGillis) "Hedge-Fund Ties Help Edwards Campaign; Firms Increase Political Gifts" was justified in highlighting the discrepancy between Edwards' statements on tax shelters and his lobbying efforts on behalf of Fortress, which included a May 2006 meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
But even as the piece noted that Edwards was hardly alone in his ties to the hedge fund industry -- Rudy Giuliani raised nearly as much as Edwards for his campaign from hedge fund Elliott Associates -- the article pointedly returned to the object of Solomon's obsession, Edwards, and ended by implying that Edwards was not, and perhaps could not be, an honest advocate for the poor as he claimed. To drive the point home, Solomon again mentioned the $400 haircuts. Four months later, he would track down Joe Torrenueva and get the whole story, increasing the chances that, in his words, "the whole issue go away."
(...)
In 2006, his last year at the AP, Solomon made a name for himself on liberal blogs and media watching sites with sustained and poorly researched attacks on Harry Reid, who survived the assault to become Senate majority leader in November.
http://www.alternet.org/story/58593/
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