Salon | Newsreal: A massive journalistic breakdown

A L S O+T O D A Y
Salon exclusive:
Justice Department considers investigating key Starr witness
By Murray Waas
FBI recommends probe of alleged payments to Whitewater accuser David Hale.
Stalemate
By Gary Kamiya
Clinton spinners vs. White House media: A damning portrait

T A B L E+T A L K
Is the Republican movement that began with "Contract With America" essentially dead? Mourn or celebrate in Politics

D A I L Y+Q U O T E
Real men like pink

R E C E N T L Y
Behind the Clinton cocaine smear
By Murray Waas
Conservative multimillionaire funded secret investigation of Clinton's alleged drug connections
(03/26/98)
Mission impossible
By Jeff Stein
A day in the life of a U.N. arms inspector
(03/25/98)
Arkansas state trooper denies key part of "Troopergate" story
By Murray Waas
But Los Angeles Times reporter stands by his story -- denies he "put words in (trooper's) mouth"
(03/24/98)
Portrait of a bag man
By Jonathan Broder and Murray Waas
Parker Dozhier was secretly funneling money to a key Whitewater witness and running an intelligence-gathering and dirty tricks operation -- out of a bait shop
(03/23/98)
Still getting away with murder
By Vivienne Walt
The killing fields of Rwanda are in full swing once more
(03/20/98)
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A MASSIVE JOURNALISTIC BREAKDOWN | PAGE 2 OF 2
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The mocking tone of the newspaper and television coverage of the Clintons springs out of the scorn and derision -- loathing, even -- heaped on the Clintons in private by the media elite in Washington and New York. Washington Post writer Sally Quinn exemplified the attitude in a recent Sunday Post magazine story. Of a recent embassy dinner, she wrote, "You could sense the distinction Washington makes between one of its own -- Vernon Jordan -- and the president he serves, who is not of this town and who will be gone in less than three years, if not sooner." Quinn added that a "scandal of this sort can be divisive for the establishment," but can also be a good thing, "in part because the elite rallies to preserve its institutions against interlopers [perhaps the Clintons] who might corrode or undermine them."
In Washington, as everywhere, everybody wants to belong. Having out-of-the-mainstream views on Clinton is not the right prescription for rubbing elbows with the media and social elite, which in this town are almost one and the same. People with minority opinions mute them: As Texas columnist Molly Ivins has observed, "Washington has the lowest level of discourse of any place in the country." In fact, it is somewhat dangerous both personally and professionally to be out of the mainstream on this story.
In this case the story, as told, is flawed, misleading and just plain wrong. What we have witnessed in the Clinton "scandals" is a massive journalistic breakdown that has been building since Whitewater first broke. Led by the nation's two preeminent newspapers, the New York Times and the Washington Post, the elite band of reporters and editors swallowed false allegations from the get-go, thanks largely to their failure to fully understand the complicated legal and financial transactions that underlie the original Whitewater story.
Similarly flawed reporting has appeared in Newsweek (Michael Isikoff, Howard Fineman and Evan Thomas), the American Lawyer (Stuart Taylor, who bought into Paula Jones' increasingly discredited stories) and the New Yorker (Peter Boyer, James B. Stewart and the Clinton-loathing Michael Kelly), and has filtered down to newsrooms across the country.
The Times' Maureen Dowd summed up the elite view of Whitewater: "By now we all know the Clintons did something wrong in Arkansas." Based on what? After four years of investigating the Clintons, Starr has brought no charges based on those allegations against him. Instead, American taxpayers have paid for a six-year smear campaign, beginning in Arkansas with convicted thief and con man David Hale (who, Salon recently revealed, was getting payoffs from Richard Mellon Scaife's scurrilous "Arkansas Project") and ending with a prurient probe, based on illegally taped allegations, into a president's sex life.
The lack of hard information on the Lewinsky story hasn't stopped the unalloyed presumption of Clinton's guilt, either. As comedian Al Franken said on "Larry King Live" recently, "I get my best information from the retractions in the Dallas Morning News, ABC-TV and the Wall Street Journal."
But there are finally signs of some serious rethinking going on. In a March 24 column, Robert Scheer accused his own paper, the Los Angeles Times, of relying in part on the "same dubious sources" used by David Brock and the American Spectator for its own "Troopergate" story in 1992. He also repeats one of the trooper's more recent charges, in a sworn deposition that was originally reported by Salon, that a Los Angeles Times reporter "put words in my mouth."
In the March/April issue of the Columbia Journalism Review, veteran political reporter Jules Witcover takes a hard, critical look at the "major piling-on by much of American print and electronic journalism" covering the Clinton "scandals." The two-source rule that Washington Post editors applied to Watergate "was summarily abandoned by many news outlets. As often as not, reports were published or broadcast without a single source named, or mentioned in attribution so vague as to be worthless." Witcover's observations apply not just to tabloid programs like "Hard Copy" but to the New York Times and the Washington Post.
Former Atlanta Constitution editor Bill Kovach, now chairman of the Committee of Concerned Journalists and curator of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University, criticizes his colleagues for misusing the word "scandal" in the Lewinsky affair. "To me," Kovach said at a press conference in Washington last month, "the word 'scandal' means something that has actually taken place that is reprehensible. And after a month of this story we still don't have enough facts to know what, if anything at all, has taken place that could be termed scandalous."
The Committee of Concerned Journalists issued a report, based on the first week's reporting of the Lewinsky affair, titled "The Clinton Crisis and The Press: A New Standard of American Journalism?"
"From the earliest moments of the Clinton crisis, the press routinely intermingled reporting with opinion and speculation -- even on the front page," the report begins. "A large percentage of the reportage had no sourcing -- 41 percent of it was journalists offering analysis, opinion, speculation or judgments."
The study examined the front-page coverage of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Washington Times, the Los Angeles Times and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, plus the nightly network newscasts, prime-time magazines and specials, "Larry King Live," "The Charlie Rose Show," "Nightline," the morning news shows, the Sunday talk shows and Time and Newsweek.
The study found that the most common statement by journalists about the crisis was a conclusion not based on fact -- "that Clinton was in big trouble," followed by the conclusions that "Clinton was dissembling, and that impeachment was a possibility." Unverified salacious details, such as ABC's report about a semen-stained dress possibly useful for DNA evidence, were repeated and attributed to other news organizations without independent verification.
Doyle McManus, Washington bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times, cited a journalistic axiom that seems to govern so much of the reporting on this story, one to which he says he does not subscribe: "There is no penalty in being wrong. The penalty is being second."
Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein, now an analyst at CBS News, defends the coverage of the story by his alma mater. However, Bernstein acknowledges that the press, including the Post, has been slow to cover one aspect of the story: Clinton's enemies. "It may have taken Mrs. Clinton talking about a vast right-wing conspiracy on the 'Today' show to do that," he acknowledges. Bernstein also questions whether the Lewinsky affair is even a legitimate one for investigation. "This is not about a constitutional abuse of power like Watergate was."
Walter Mears, a veteran political reporter and president of the Associated Press news service, says, "There is a very odd pressure in some organizations to do stuff in order to get on television -- to break something so you'll be part of the story." Mears says everybody is playing off the 20 or so reporters covering the story full time and believes most people shouldn't be on television "pontificating about it with no base of expertise."
The Washington Post, through managing editor Robert Kaiser, says it is "not responding to requests for comment from Web publications -- for now. No disrespect, but we receive so many calls." Michael Oreskes, Washington bureau chief of the New York Times, says, "We don't talk about stories we are working on."
Perhaps the most venomous of Clinton's elite-media critics -- even more so than the Times' Dowd and William Safire -- is former New Republic editor Michael Kelly. Kelly, who now writes columns for the National Journal and the Washington Post, has called Clinton "a shocking liar." In the Feb. 21 issue of the National Journal, Kelly wrote, "When -- it is not a question of if -- the full nature of the relationship between Clinton and Lewinsky becomes known, people like [Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and Education Secretary Richard Riley] are going to walk away from this President." In an earlier column, Kelly announced that "Ken Starr is going to tell Congress that there is serious evidence that the President violated one or more laws."
In an interview with Salon, Kelly rated Clinton a "good to pretty good" president. On domestic issues, he was "pretty good to very good." He credited Clinton for reshaping the Democratic party into something "coherent enough to become a majority party."
What Kelly can't forgive Clinton for, he says, is that he has crafted "a legacy of lowering ethical standards." How so? Kelly cites "campaign fund-raising and the Lewinsky scandal." What? All these years of sliming Clinton, and it's because of campaign finance and the Lewinsky story?
Kelly says, "Clinton and his teams kicked the slats out from under the liberal principle" that government should be clean. Clinton, says Kelly, "set up a wholesale money laundering operation with utter contempt" for the liberal tradition of driving out corruption.
But hasn't Clinton always been in favor of campaign-finance reform? "He's always been on the record for it, for sure," says Kelly, "but he's done nothing about it." Hasn't Clinton always said he wouldn't unilaterally turn down soft money? Kelly says you can't believe Clinton. "You have to parse his statements carefully because he always leaves wiggle room." He cites Gennifer Flowers as an example of Clinton denying he had an "affair" with Flowers, then admitting in a deposition in the Jones case that he had one sexual encounter with her. As for Lewinsky, "There's enough circumstantial evidence out there ... and all of that is suspicious."
And that is all Kelly, and his colleagues among the Beltway press corps, have: Clinton is somehow "suspicious." Yet so invested are they in presumptions of his guilt that one is forced to raise the disturbing question of whether they would rather see Clinton and his presidency go down than face up to and renounce their years of erroneous and selective reporting.
SALON | March 27, 1998
Mollie Dickenson's articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Miami Herald and other publications. She is the author of "Thumbs Up," a biography of Reagan Press Secretary James Brady.
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DETAIL OF ILLUSTRATION BY ZACH TRENHOLM

A L S O+T O D A Y Salon exclusive: Justice Department considers investigating key Starr witness By Murray Waas FBI recommends probe of alleged payments to Whitewater accuser David Hale. Stalemate By Gary Kamiya Clinton spinners vs. White House media: A damning portrait T A B L E+T A L K Is the Republican movement that began with "Contract With America" essentially dead? Mourn or celebrate in Politics D A I L Y+Q U O T E Real men like pink R E C E N T L Y Behind the Clinton cocaine smear By Murray Waas Conservative multimillionaire funded secret investigation of Clinton's alleged drug connections (03/26/98) Mission impossible By Jeff Stein A day in the life of a U.N. arms inspector (03/25/98) Arkansas state trooper denies key part of "Troopergate" story By Murray Waas But Los Angeles Times reporter stands by his story -- denies he "put words in (trooper's) mouth" (03/24/98) Portrait of a bag man By Jonathan Broder and Murray Waas Parker Dozhier was secretly funneling money to a key Whitewater witness and running an intelligence-gathering and dirty tricks operation -- out of a bait shop (03/23/98) Still getting away with murder By Vivienne Walt The killing fields of Rwanda are in full swing once more (03/20/98) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Browse the Newsreal Archives - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
		A MASSIVE JOURNALISTIC BREAKDOWN \| PAGE 2 OF 2 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - The mocking tone of the newspaper and television coverage of the Clintons springs out of the scorn and derision -- loathing, even -- heaped on the Clintons in private by the media elite in Washington and New York. Washington Post writer Sally Quinn exemplified the attitude in a recent Sunday Post magazine story. Of a recent embassy dinner, she wrote, "You could sense the distinction Washington makes between one of its own -- Vernon Jordan -- and the president he serves, who is not of this town and who will be gone in less than three years, if not sooner." Quinn added that a "scandal of this sort can be divisive for the establishment," but can also be a good thing, "in part because the elite rallies to preserve its institutions against interlopers [perhaps the Clintons] who might corrode or undermine them." In Washington, as everywhere, everybody wants to belong. Having out-of-the-mainstream views on Clinton is not the right prescription for rubbing elbows with the media and social elite, which in this town are almost one and the same. People with minority opinions mute them: As Texas columnist Molly Ivins has observed, "Washington has the lowest level of discourse of any place in the country." In fact, it is somewhat dangerous both personally and professionally to be out of the mainstream on this story. In this case the story, as told, is flawed, misleading and just plain wrong. What we have witnessed in the Clinton "scandals" is a massive journalistic breakdown that has been building since Whitewater first broke. Led by the nation's two preeminent newspapers, the New York Times and the Washington Post, the elite band of reporters and editors swallowed false allegations from the get-go, thanks largely to their failure to fully understand the complicated legal and financial transactions that underlie the original Whitewater story. Similarly flawed reporting has appeared in Newsweek (Michael Isikoff, Howard Fineman and Evan Thomas), the American Lawyer (Stuart Taylor, who bought into Paula Jones' increasingly discredited stories) and the New Yorker (Peter Boyer, James B. Stewart and the Clinton-loathing Michael Kelly), and has filtered down to newsrooms across the country. The Times' Maureen Dowd summed up the elite view of Whitewater: "By now we all know the Clintons did something wrong in Arkansas." Based on what? After four years of investigating the Clintons, Starr has brought no charges based on those allegations against him. Instead, American taxpayers have paid for a six-year smear campaign, beginning in Arkansas with convicted thief and con man David Hale (who, Salon recently revealed, was getting payoffs from Richard Mellon Scaife's scurrilous "Arkansas Project") and ending with a prurient probe, based on illegally taped allegations, into a president's sex life. The lack of hard information on the Lewinsky story hasn't stopped the unalloyed presumption of Clinton's guilt, either. As comedian Al Franken said on "Larry King Live" recently, "I get my best information from the retractions in the Dallas Morning News, ABC-TV and the Wall Street Journal." But there are finally signs of some serious rethinking going on. In a March 24 column, Robert Scheer accused his own paper, the Los Angeles Times, of relying in part on the "same dubious sources" used by David Brock and the American Spectator for its own "Troopergate" story in 1992. He also repeats one of the trooper's more recent charges, in a sworn deposition that was originally reported by Salon, that a Los Angeles Times reporter "put words in my mouth." In the March/April issue of the Columbia Journalism Review, veteran political reporter Jules Witcover takes a hard, critical look at the "major piling-on by much of American print and electronic journalism" covering the Clinton "scandals." The two-source rule that Washington Post editors applied to Watergate "was summarily abandoned by many news outlets. As often as not, reports were published or broadcast without a single source named, or mentioned in attribution so vague as to be worthless." Witcover's observations apply not just to tabloid programs like "Hard Copy" but to the New York Times and the Washington Post. Former Atlanta Constitution editor Bill Kovach, now chairman of the Committee of Concerned Journalists and curator of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University, criticizes his colleagues for misusing the word "scandal" in the Lewinsky affair. "To me," Kovach said at a press conference in Washington last month, "the word 'scandal' means something that has actually taken place that is reprehensible. And after a month of this story we still don't have enough facts to know what, if anything at all, has taken place that could be termed scandalous." The Committee of Concerned Journalists issued a report, based on the first week's reporting of the Lewinsky affair, titled "The Clinton Crisis and The Press: A New Standard of American Journalism?" "From the earliest moments of the Clinton crisis, the press routinely intermingled reporting with opinion and speculation -- even on the front page," the report begins. "A large percentage of the reportage had no sourcing -- 41 percent of it was journalists offering analysis, opinion, speculation or judgments." The study examined the front-page coverage of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Washington Times, the Los Angeles Times and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, plus the nightly network newscasts, prime-time magazines and specials, "Larry King Live," "The Charlie Rose Show," "Nightline," the morning news shows, the Sunday talk shows and Time and Newsweek. The study found that the most common statement by journalists about the crisis was a conclusion not based on fact -- "that Clinton was in big trouble," followed by the conclusions that "Clinton was dissembling, and that impeachment was a possibility." Unverified salacious details, such as ABC's report about a semen-stained dress possibly useful for DNA evidence, were repeated and attributed to other news organizations without independent verification. Doyle McManus, Washington bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times, cited a journalistic axiom that seems to govern so much of the reporting on this story, one to which he says he does not subscribe: "There is no penalty in being wrong. The penalty is being second." Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein, now an analyst at CBS News, defends the coverage of the story by his alma mater. However, Bernstein acknowledges that the press, including the Post, has been slow to cover one aspect of the story: Clinton's enemies. "It may have taken Mrs. Clinton talking about a vast right-wing conspiracy on the 'Today' show to do that," he acknowledges. Bernstein also questions whether the Lewinsky affair is even a legitimate one for investigation. "This is not about a constitutional abuse of power like Watergate was." Walter Mears, a veteran political reporter and president of the Associated Press news service, says, "There is a very odd pressure in some organizations to do stuff in order to get on television -- to break something so you'll be part of the story." Mears says everybody is playing off the 20 or so reporters covering the story full time and believes most people shouldn't be on television "pontificating about it with no base of expertise." The Washington Post, through managing editor Robert Kaiser, says it is "not responding to requests for comment from Web publications -- for now. No disrespect, but we receive so many calls." Michael Oreskes, Washington bureau chief of the New York Times, says, "We don't talk about stories we are working on." Perhaps the most venomous of Clinton's elite-media critics -- even more so than the Times' Dowd and William Safire -- is former New Republic editor Michael Kelly. Kelly, who now writes columns for the National Journal and the Washington Post, has called Clinton "a shocking liar." In the Feb. 21 issue of the National Journal, Kelly wrote, "When -- it is not a question of if -- the full nature of the relationship between Clinton and Lewinsky becomes known, people like [Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and Education Secretary Richard Riley] are going to walk away from this President." In an earlier column, Kelly announced that "Ken Starr is going to tell Congress that there is serious evidence that the President violated one or more laws." In an interview with Salon, Kelly rated Clinton a "good to pretty good" president. On domestic issues, he was "pretty good to very good." He credited Clinton for reshaping the Democratic party into something "coherent enough to become a majority party." What Kelly can't forgive Clinton for, he says, is that he has crafted "a legacy of lowering ethical standards." How so? Kelly cites "campaign fund-raising and the Lewinsky scandal." What? All these years of sliming Clinton, and it's because of campaign finance and the Lewinsky story? Kelly says, "Clinton and his teams kicked the slats out from under the liberal principle" that government should be clean. Clinton, says Kelly, "set up a wholesale money laundering operation with utter contempt" for the liberal tradition of driving out corruption. But hasn't Clinton always been in favor of campaign-finance reform? "He's always been on the record for it, for sure," says Kelly, "but he's done nothing about it." Hasn't Clinton always said he wouldn't unilaterally turn down soft money? Kelly says you can't believe Clinton. "You have to parse his statements carefully because he always leaves wiggle room." He cites Gennifer Flowers as an example of Clinton denying he had an "affair" with Flowers, then admitting in a deposition in the Jones case that he had one sexual encounter with her. As for Lewinsky, "There's enough circumstantial evidence out there ... and all of that is suspicious." And that is all Kelly, and his colleagues among the Beltway press corps, have: Clinton is somehow "suspicious." Yet so invested are they in presumptions of his guilt that one is forced to raise the disturbing question of whether they would rather see Clinton and his presidency go down than face up to and renounce their years of erroneous and selective reporting. SALON \| March 27, 1998 Mollie Dickenson's articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Miami Herald and other publications. She is the author of "Thumbs Up," a biography of Reagan Press Secretary James Brady. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - DETAIL OF ILLUSTRATION BY ZACH TRENHOLM