Presswatch / The Elves of Whitewater

...This is demagogic...

...Indeed, the week before it had been the first to report that Hillary Rodham Clinton had made $100,000 in commodities trading...

...At a meeting with the editors of the Minneapolis Star Tribune in April, he ruminated about Whitewater and the press: I think the national press—at least the capital press corps—is under enormous commercial pressures in some ways that they weren't under several years ago...

...Two things are interesting here...

...More important, he found that documents had been removed from Vince Foster's office...

...It is aware of the moral vacuum at the White House, but it is uncomfortable with the knowledge, and often wishes it would go away...

...The American Society of Newspaper Editors, temporarily suspending its usualbrooding about diversity in the newsroom, fretted at its meeting in Washington over whether the press was becoming too mean...

...In a single week in March, however, feeding frenzy and Whitewater turn up in forty-two separate articles...

...The corruptions of Whitewater are like the fruit of a richly bearing tree," the novelist Mark Helprin wrote on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal, "and it seems that every day a new dead hand rises from a misty Arkansas lake...

...Clearly, Whitewater is taxing...

...So many dead hands have risen, however, that the press has grown confused...

...Editor Hilliard, according to the Times, said this showed "cold contempt" for Clinton's sincere commitment to end discrimination...

...What ought to have been the lead paragraph, or somewhere close to it, in the Times's coverage of Mrs...

...Time magazine summed this up nicely: "The confiding tone and relaxed body language, which was seen live on four netJohn Corry is The American Spectator's regular Presswatch columnist and author of the new book, My Times: Adventures in the News Trade (Grosset/Putnam's...

...well, actually, Blair, counsel for the largest agribusiness in Arkansas, placed thirty of her thirty-two trading orders—have brought forth Clinton's elves in the media...

...The New York Times, Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, and other news organizations may have been late coming to the table, but now they are looking at Whitewater...

...Kilpatrick had written that Clinton, bound by his "vows before the gods of diversity," could not have named a whitemale to the Supreme Court at the time he chose Ruth Bader Ginsburg...

...works, immediately drew approving reviews...

...he disclosed Hillary Clinton's 10,000-percent profit in commodities trading...

...Carville, however, also brought to the breakfast meeting a chart labeled "Media Food Chain...

...The problem is, this is not likely to happen...

...Television is not a player on Whitewater...

...It is just possible that an investigation into ancient history in Arkansas really could, and should, bring down the administration...

...Nevertheless, none of the other editors hooted Hilliard off the podium, or broke out in loud guffaws...

...b) he was almost certainly right in what he did say...

...When Mrs...

...It is appropriate for the press to show deference to a first lady, but not when this means critical faculties must lapse...

...The New York Times now reminds readers that it published the first story about Whitewater—in March 1992—although it neglects to mention that for two years afterward it did its best to ignore it...

...Nina Totenberg has called this a non-story...

...This is a different time...

...Indeed, for a long while, no newspaper 38 The American Spectator June 1994 other than the Washington Times paid much attention to Whitewater...

...The Wall Street Journal was interested, but only on its editorial page...

...Pulitzer juries are non-biased and non-partisan, of course, but the Washington Times is a conservative paper...

...the elf had given it the place of honor, in the box in the middle, with two other boxes on either side...

...Ellen Goodman has written that "if the Clintons made money on beef 15 years ago, it wasn't a character flaw—making a profit doesn't make a hypocrite...

...Surely that had to make the press think: How could Mrs...

...After he wrote about that, the White House was forced to accept the appointment of a special counsel...

...the story is too complex for the evening news...

...We don't have anything like that...

...The Washington Post reported that Carville said the "media frenzy" over Whitewater had gotten "completely out of hand," and that the press should back off before it was "discredited...

...Clinton poked through only timidly in the twenty-fifth paragraph of a sidebar on page ten: Despite a demeanor that suggested infinite patience and openness, she never fully resolved the central question of Whitewater and the commodities trade: whether powerful friends had given the Clintons favorable treatment and had opened doors not accessible to ordinary Arkansans...

...Seper also wrote the first story about the shredding of documents from the Rose Law Firm...

...Seper ought to have won a Pulitzer Prize this year for investigative reporting, but never had much of a chance...

...Jeff Gerth, who wrote that first story, was bad-mouthed by James Carville and Clinton's other dark elves as an irresponsible reporter...

...The radical right have their own set of press organs...

...Also, there's something that those of us who are Democrats have to contend with...

...Anthony Lewis has said the commodities trading shows only that the Clintons "wanted to make some money, too...

...The press conference, artfully staged and carefully timed—on a Friday afternoon while Richard Nixon was dying, and the Serbs were doing their best to invite bombing—became not the vehicle for making news, but rather the news itself...

...It looked like a corporate flow chart, with boxes connected by lines and arrows...

...Hooray for The American Spectator, of course...

...The Times reported that the editors were worried "about criticism that they may be overemphasizing Mr...

...He warned the more than 800 editors about what he called "a cancer of mean-spiritedness festering in the journalistic gut," and as an example of mean-spiritedness cited a column by James J. Kilpatrick...

...The articles by Daniel Wattenberg and James Ring Adams lastmonth did that, too...

...Whitewater has also offered the press an excuse for the secret pleasures of self-flagellation...

...no, she consulted with James Blair...

...Clinton's commodities trades—she did all the trading herself...

...Just so, and the same day Helprin's essay was published, Bill Clinton told a somnolent Washington press corps that he had lost some $22,000 less than he previously had said he had lost on his now famous real-estate venture...

...Clinton had received a $2,000 monthly retainer from Madison Savings and Loan...

...First, Seper discovered that Mrs...

...T he truth is that the press was drawn into Whitewater only reluctantly...

...Clinton himself is a participant...

...Clinton held a press conference, news stories stressed not so much what she said about Whitewater, but the poise she showed when she said it...

...In fact, he may have been getting to the heart of the issue, even if he did not mean to...

...71 The American Spectator June 1994 39...

...It must also be noted that, other than the New Republic, the publications Carville cited were more or less conservative, or what the president might call radical right...

...It is also unsuitable coming from a man who, while defending his wife at a recent news conference, said that if "everybody in the country had a Character half as strong as hers, we wouldn't have half the problemswe've got today...

...They make their own news, and then try to force it into the mainstream media...

...Moreover, it set a bad example for young journalists...

...Reading from left to right on the chart, the five news entities were the Washington Times, New York Post, American Spectator, New Republic, and Wall Street Journal editorial page...

...Clinton's role in the Whitewater affair...

...then he found that, rather than being a passive investor in Whitewater, she had sought power of attorney...

...The New York Post disgraced itself with irresponsible reporting on the death of Vincent Foster, but it is hard to find anything even remotely similar to that in the pages of the Washington Times, American Spectator, or Wall Street Journal...

...Gerth eventually got his revenge...

...On the other hand, if the elves have their way, Whitewater will be left to the poets...

...Clinton itemized $1 income-tax deductions when she gave away pairs of Bill and Chelsea's worn underwear...

...And so on, and so on, even on to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s stern warning to the New York Times, quixotically delivered on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal...

...T here is something else interesting, too...

...The White House knows how that game is played...

...Clinton, however, cannot acknowledge this, and if he has a problem with big media, he says, it is only because of the "enormous commercial pressures" they face...

...Why do Times editors think that putting more resources into an investigation of ancient history in Arkansas is so vital for the future of the republic as to justify bringing down an administration that the Times generally supports . . . ?" Schlesinger wanted to know...

...He sounded like Juan Peron, who really was the radical right, praising Eva...

...In his keynote address, the ASNE president, William A. Hilliard, the editor of the Oregonian in Portland, obviously had Whitewater in mind...

...and (c) whether Clinton is sincerely committed to anything at all is really an unanswered question...

...By berating itself for imagined misdeeds the press confirms its own sense of importance...

...What was lost in the twenty-eighth paragraph of the Times story that day was treated more appropriately with a page-one headline in the Washington Post...

...The gingerly approach is widespread...

...Carville was playing a political-cultural card: liberal good, conservative bad, journalism irrelevant...

...There is no profit for him in attacking what is called the mainstream press...

...The first is the obvious: that Clinton has characterized the Washington Times, American Spectator et al., not as conservative, cranky, idiosyncratic, or even merely the right, but as the wicked and probably fascist "radical right...

...The lowest level of the food chain was made up mostly of bimbos and Arkansas state troopers...

...M eanwhile, the steadily widening disclosures about Mrs...

...The Times was not attempting to cover up malfeasance...

...This was standard elf talk, often heard on "Crossfire," "Nightline," and the Sunday morning news shows, and unlikely to be taken seriously by anyone other than the members of the ASNE...

...We don't have a Washington Times, or an American Spectator, or a Christian Broadcasting Network or a Rush Limbaugh, any of that stuff...

...it forced the press to confront the moral and ethical standards that now guide the White House...

...The Washington Times seized Whitewater during the 1992 campaign and made it its own, and has not surrendered it since, mostly because of a reporter named Jerry Seper...

...they fed into Republican politicians and other soreheads, who fed into various tabloids and Rush Limbaugh and G. Gordon Liddy, who fed into the five news entities that fed into, and presumably manipulated, what Carville had labeled the "Mainstream American Press...

...Possibly he had David Brock's celebrated article in mind...

...Then again, Carville may have been thinking of the delicious disclosure by Lisa Schiffren that Mrs...

...Clinton keep track of so many old T-shirts and drawers, and forget the second commodities account at Stephens...

...and as the story grows, so does the flagellation...

...Presumably, Hilliard was serious, even though (a) Kilpatrick, as a columnist, could say anything he pleased...

...A Nexis search for February finds no more than four stories in major publications in which the phrase "feeding frenzy" appears with the word "Whitewater...

...This is best left to the elves, and, as it happens, two days before Clinton spoke in Minneapolis, James Carville did just that at a breakfast meeting of bureau chiefs and columnists in Washington...

...The New York Times nodded agreeably, and reported this in the twenty-eighth paragraph of its story...