Presswatch: Clinton Bites
Corry, John
PRESSWATCH by John Corry Clinton Bites So why didn't the media when Juanita Broaddrick spoke? W ords fail. Things fall apart. The president's apologists made the expected denials, but no one...
...It should be obvious by now that Bill Clinton suffers from not merely reckless but clearly compulsive behavior, and that he will, as always, do anything to save himself when he gets in trouble...
...Alter concluded, as had Time the week before, that the public is "disgusted and bored—with all of them...
...Some things are almost too painful to talk about, and the Times, and all the rest of the press, was having a problem...
...In its next issue, however, Newsweek was more expansive...
...Measured by any reasonable standard, Mrs...
...Then she made the covers of Newsweek and Time...
...The New York Times, for one, tried to ignore it, although later it tried to make amends...
...On the big Hillary weekend, Newsweek disgraced itself by treating the rape charge as a joke...
...The usual rationale is already forming...
...JOHN CORRY is The American Spectator's senior correspondent and regular Presswatch columnist...
...A few days later, WETA, the Washington PBS station that produces the program, fired Bode...
...Broaddrick told Ms...
...It said in an editorial that Bill Clinton in his past confessions had presented himself as a "recreational philanderer," but now it seemed he might be "a serial masher or worse...
...It really should have been "What, Me Worry...
...Time used a lovely painting: a sedate but glamorous Mrs...
...In 1978, while running for governor, then-Attorney General Clinton had raped her at the Camelot Hotel in Little Rock...
...It mentioned it only in its Conventional Wisdom watch, where a supposedly funny item referred to "Jane Doe 5," and said, in its entirety, "Should have leveled (unproven) assault charge in '72 or '92...
...Rabinowitz, "the way he put on his sunglasses...
...Nonetheless, Time did report on the rape charge in a one-page story...
...On the day the Broaddrick story broke in the Journal, the most interesting, and appalling, item on the evening news broadcasts was a report by David Martin, the CBS Pentagon correspondent...
...And perhaps it will go away, at least in terms of press coverage...
...The Wall Street Journal story, for example, appeared on a Friday, and while the network news broadcasts ignored it, it was mentioned that night on "Washington Week in Review...
...The wording was close to whimsical—masher had a quaint ring to it—but you could excuse the Times for that...
...The American Spectator • April 1999 53...
...A woman of a kind people like and warm to...
...Besides, even in the absence of eyewitnesses, virtually every fact in Broaddrick's account of the rape that could be verified was verified, most thoroughly by NBC...
...Meanwhile, the press had its big Hillary Clinton weekend...
...But sounds like our guy...
...Who could possibly believe that, either...
...The headline on the cover was a sly question: "Senator Clinton...
...Jonathan Alter wrote a column that compared Clinton with the Republicans...
...Juanita Broaddrick had caused a problem...
...Then he looked at me and said, `You'd better put some ice on that.' And then he left...
...How do you deal with the idea of having a rapist in the White House...
...t was all very ugly, and few in the press I knew how to react, other than to talk about themselves and journalistic ethics...
...It had long been the subject of political and media gossip, and millions had read about it on the Internet...
...Or must you deal with it at all...
...The president's apologists made the expected denials, but no one believed them, and even Geraldo Rivera had the grace to look embarrassed...
...Her possible, but highly unlikely, senatorial candidacy was discussed on all the Sunday talk shows...
...None of this is promising...
...The White House, he said, wanted to bomb Serbia, even though our NATO allies opposed it...
...But it is also unthinkable that we have a rapist in the White House...
...Moral equivalence was back again...
...Broaddrick was telling the truth...
...The rape story, of course, was not new...
...He also bit her so savagely on the lips and mouth that her face began to swell...
...But what was new was Broaddrick telling the story herself, and allowing herself to be quoted—first in the Wall Street Journal, and then in the Washington Post, and eventually, and most prominently, on NBC's "Dateline!' At the same time it was apparent that the reporters she spoke to believed her...
...As Dorothy Rabinowitz wrote in the Wall Street Journal, Broaddrick was "a woman of accomplishment, prosperous, successful in her field, serious: a woman seeking no profit, no book, no lawsuit...
...It is to think the unthinkable that the proposed bombing had anything to do with diverting attention from Juanita Broaddrick, of course...
...None answered directly, although all agreed that journalists had to have high standards...
...WETA's president, Sharon Rockefeller, is married to Democratic Senator Jay Rockefeller, but presumably Bode's mentioning the unmentionable had nothing to do with that...
...Clinton with cute chipmunk cheeks and beatific smile...
...This is the part that always stays in my mind," Mrs...
...Its last sentence said a "weary nation" no doubt hoped it would go away...
...The thought is too overwhelming...
...Ken Bode, the moderator of the PBS program, bravely asked his panel of journalists what they thought of it...
Vol. 32 • April 1999 • No. 4
