Presswatch / The Straight and Narrow

...She ended by saying it is "no wonder voters are cynical...

...When Clinton insisted that his administration had been the most scrutinized in history, David Letterman said, "Bill, if you're tired of scrutiny, quit dropping your pants...

...Creepy, half-baked tribalism," said another...

...The press coverage, though, was dreadful...

...A new study from the Center for Media and Public Affairs finds that the press has done its best to ignore the least attractive aspects of the man...

...This brings us to Bill Clinton...

...Brown's Story," which was published in this magazine in April, amplified on the seediness of Clinton's tenure as governor...

...The troopers' accusations appeared first in The American Spectator...

...Therefore, the major news organizations felt that they had to dismiss them...

...It also corroborated the piece by David Brock four months before...

...Forsaking its usual devotion to the politi52 The American Spectator December 1994 cally correct, the Sunday New York Times Book Review assigned The Bell Curve and two other books that dealt with human intelligence to Malcolm W. Browne, not an ideologue but a respected science reporter...

...If the charges of sexual misconduct are true, Clinton has, among other things: habitually lied...

...It also points out, gingerly, that blacks do not do as well as whites on IQ tests...

...At the time of Foster's death," Brock wrote, "the media assumed that such a 'minor' issue could not possibly have been a factor," but for Foster it was not minor at all...

...A page-one headline in the Washington Post declares, for instance: "Rising Tide Doesn't Lift Clinton/Despite Recovery, Voters Deny President Credit on Pocketbook Issues...

...News organizations unhesitatingly pursued skimpy rumors about George Bush in both the 1988 and 1992 campaigns before deciding they were groundless...

...Old beliefs must be sustained even when disproved...

...They also ought to have pointed out that during the Reagan-Bush years the press reported on Republican sex scandals, meager as they were, with great delight...

...When the New Republic published the eleven-page Murray-Herrnstein article, it accompanied it with seventeen separate rebuttals...

...But The Bell Curve ought to be remembered for more substantive reasons than that, a fact stunningly recognized in one of the last places serious media watchers expected to find it...

...However, as NBC's Lisa Myers tells us tonight, it is long on promises and short on sound premises...

...This implies that government ought to rethink many social programs, from remedial reading through job training to affirmative action, and presumably this was one reason the staff had its tantrum...

...Some even had position papers to prove they were serious...

...Ignore now the cover story in Time magazine a week later—"Boom for Whom?/America's economy is back on top...

...It wonders now why Clinton is not getting credit for his supposed successes, and although it talks about the character issue, it does not understand it...

...The rebuttals took up fifteen pages and appeared before the article...

...The White House had been running a cover-up, and Foster was troubled...

...CI The American Spectator December 1994 53...

...Supposedly the press sticks it equally to conservatives and liberals alike...

...Pseudoscientific racism," wrote one New Republic editor...

...A college English instructor in Texas called the Spectator, and said one of Clinton's trooper bodyguards propositioned her on his behalf at a dance in the mid-1980s...

...major news organizations consider tawdry sex scandals unworthy of serious attention...

...Few serious people think the charges against Clinton are groundless, but the press prefers to ignore them...

...When Clinton said he would expand Head Start, Jay Leno said this meant that "now women in his hotel room will get a 20-minute head start...

...they did not want to damage the office of the,presidency...

...The president is a national embarrassment, even if the news organizations do not know it...

...M eanwhile, the staff at the New Republic had a much publicized tantrum when its editor, Andrew Sullivan, commissioned a piece by Charles Murray and the late Richard Herrnstein, co-authors of The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life...

...Intellectual integrity was served and politics wasn't...

...The vituperative spirit was intense, even for a liberal magazine...

...The book argues, among other things, that intelligence is partly inherited, and warns that we may be approaching a two-tier society made up of the smart and the dumb...

...Foster had taken his own life, it said, because he was in despair over editorials in the conservative Wall Street Journal...

...Sabato and Lichter also touch delicately on what they call "the conservative taint...

...D aniel Wattenberg's "Love and Hate in Arkansas: L.D...

...Simpson...

...B ut you can imagine it, of course, if that democratic society is guided by a press that finds some topics too distressing to dwell upon...

...Journalists are more tolerant of sexual misbehavior than most people...

...Political bias is a touchy subject among journalists, most of whom deny its existence...

...and become vulnerable to either subtle or blatant forms of extortion...

...Inspired by the furor and also grinding an ax of its own, Time ran a two-page article about The Bell Curve that said, in the last sentence, "It looks as if it is likely to be remembered for some dubious premises and toxic conclusions...

...Media reluctance to explore the charges against Clinton comes from a double standard...

...Its tangled roots, stretching back to Little Rock, had been choking Vincent Foster...

...Brown is now suing Gov...

...Editorializing, however, has now become a game any number of journalists can play, whether qualified to or not, especially on issues that agitate liberals...

...It may mean something that the circulation of this magazine has climbed, even as the rest of the press loses esteem, and 71 percent of all Americans think it stands between them and their problems...

...Nonetheless, the study found, the national media ran more than six times as many television and print stories on Whitewater and its related events than they did on the sex scandals, including the charges of harassment by Paula Jones...

...Then Myers dismissed the Republican effort as a political ploy...

...So why were the charges of sexualmisbehavior minimized in the press...

...used state employees as procurers...

...Putnam's sons...

...Indeed it does, and in citing them Sabato and Lichter indict both Clinton and the reporters who excuse him...

...They promised that if they won control of the House they would submit to a vote ten bills on a wide range of issues—term limits, a balanced-budget amendment, and a cut in the capital-gains tax among them...

...Some in the press corps have repeatedly suggested that the sex allegations against Governor Clinton, even if true, are irrelevant to President Clinton's conduct of office," the authors of the study, Larry J. Sabato and S. Robert Lichter, write, "but this view ignores several factors...

...Confirmation of this soon came from an unexpected source...

...It is hard to imagine a democratic society," he said, "doing otherwise...

...Conventional media wisdom, of course, had held otherwise...

...The major news organizations, except for the Washington Post, ignored Wattenberg's findings, and the Post dismissed them as "old allegations...

...A report by Robert W. Fiske, then the independent prosecutor on Whitewater, said that people close to Foster believed that the travel office had been the great source of his "stress and anxiety in the weeks prior to his death...

...Liberal journalists deplore the idea of change...

...Apparently, though, the cynicism is "politically neutral...

...Today, GOP congressional candidates were summoned to Washington and given a battle plan," Tom Brokaw reported...

...Sabato and Lichter ought to have bitten the bullet and called this what it was: political bias...

...Brown also made it clear that many sources in Arkansas declined to talk about Clinton because they fear reprisal from his old political machine...

...By contrast, consider the press coverage of the Republican Party's "Contract With America...

...A poll by the Times-Mirror Center for the People and the Press finds that 71 percent of Americans believe the press "gets in the way of society solving its problems...

...The Book Review upgraded itself...

...Charlie Rose, the PBS talk-show blabbermouth, recently raised them again in an interview with Barbara Bush...

...treated women as one of the perks of high office...

...Late night comedians are closer to the truth here than Beltway thinkers on the Sunday morning talk shows...

...demonstrated compulsive and even uncontrollable behavior...

...They are also stricken by fear they might seem to be racist...

...We are talking now about real journalists and not the pseudo kind, like the gasbags on television or the harpies hovering around the trial of O.J...

...Myers was editorializing, which you expect from, say, NPR's Nina Totenberg ("Contract With America is nothing but gimmicks and silly stuff," she declared), but not from an NBC reporter...

...Meanwhile, Brock was back in the Spectator reexamining the White House Travel Office scandal and discovering that it was far more serious than either the press or the General Accounting Office had reported...

...Granted that when 300 Republican congressional candidates stand on the steps of the Capitol and wave little American flags while a band plays John Philip Sousa, it is hard to escape all mirth...

...Shortly afterwards, the New York Times reports that "criticism of the press is in vogue again," and that a consensus is growing among media scholars: Journalism is undermining its own credibility by cynically insisting that even good guys must somehow be bad...

...Sure...

...John Corry, a former New York Times media critic, is the author of My Times: Adventures in the News Trade (Grosset/G.P...

...They did not say the bills would all pass, but they did raise important questions...

...Indeed, after Brown was quoted in the Spectator, the Arkansas state police demoted him from a special investigations unit in charge ofwhite-collar crime to uniform duty on the highway patrol...

...The government or society that persists in sweeping their subject matter under the rug will do so at its peril," Browne wrote about the three books, and concluded his lengthy and highly respectful review with a plea for further rational discourse on the subject of intelligence...

...Frank Rich wrote in the Times that the survey of Americans' sexual habits by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago found that "somewhere between 3 and 10 percent of the population is gay...

...Honest skepticism gave way to derision...

...The point is that the Post, in what is supposed to be a straight news story, is suggesting that voters should be grateful to Bill Clinton, whether they want to be or not...

...Wattenberg got in touch with Brown, who did not recall the English instructor, although he did say he had propositioned women for Clinton "so many times" he could no longer remember each one...

...But many Americans are still in a slump"—which denies that the tide is rising...

...Uh-huh...

...The candidates looked like the Mormon Tabernacle choir...

...Brown...

...In fact, only 2.8percent of the men and 1.4 percent of the women in the survey said they were homosexual or bisexual...

...Still, they deserved better treatment than they got...

...They decline to recognize that a political point of view has become part of the newsroom norm...

...Journalists who followed up David Brock's story on the Arkansas state troopers believed their allegations...

...Jim Guy Tucker of Arkansas, charging that the demotion was caused by the Spectator article...

...Conventional media wisdom is formed when the press talks only to itself...

...held himself above the normal rules of social and political conduct...

...Sabato, who also wrote Feeding Frenzy, and Lichter, co-author of The Media Elite, offer some reasons...

...She still had a card with the trooper's name on it: L.D...

...The study quotes an unidentified national reporter who says: "I think Clinton may have opened himself to blackmail...