Reproduced with permission of The Progressive Review, 1739 Connecticut Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20009, 202-232-5544, Fax: 202-234-6222. Editor: Sam Smith, ssmith@igc.org.

The Final Days II: Privatizing propaganda

Bob Woodward, a leading damage control officer at the Washington Post and ex-military spook, gave Larry King's viewers his phone number the other night and said he would be glad to talk to any reliable sources about Whitewater. Of course, Woodward is one of those who has been responsible for the Post's censorship and manipulation of Clinton scandal stories over the past four years, including spiking at the last minute an important piece on the Mena drug trade.

Of course, the Post is not alone. All the major TV networks and the New York Times have consistently misinformed viewers and readers as to what this story is about. As recently as this week, the Times buried major details of the Filegate story. The Boston Globe's Tom Oliphant has been outspinning the White House press office. Even C-SPAN has handled the matter with considerable fear and timidity.

Books critical of the Clintons' character have been aggressively ignored, blacklisted or back-paged. Your editor, in 1994, wrote the first such book and while it received uniformly favorable reviews, virtually none appeared in pro-Clinton media, whether leftist or mainstream. Roger Morris' Partners in Power -- must reading for anyone who professes to write or talk about politics -- has been given a similar cold shoulder while safe books such as Blood Sport or Woodward's latest are massively and gratuitously promoted. As a sign of the gaping divide between public and media opinion, the Morris book has still managed to make it to the bestseller list.

When the story of Whitewater finally drifts out of the news columns and into history, the role of most media will seem more akin to Hearst's handling of the Spanish-American War than to diligent reporting. Seldom in American history have so many reporters acted with such craven disregard of the evidence and leads available to them. What has happened has been a privatization of propaganda. The major media have cloned themselves to the institutions and people they are covering and can no longer distinguish between a fact and what they wish to be true. It's bad enough when the Craig Livingstones of the world do it, but when the bulk of the Gridiron Club can't tell the difference between White House news and a White House news release, you have problems that extend far beyond those of the present occupant.

Spiked: Here are just a few of the things the pro-Clinton media has recently either obscured or not reported concerning the growing Clinton scandals:

The White House was not only digging into FBI files, but personal tax returns as well.
The White House kept computer dossiers on some 200,000 persons in whom it was interested for one reason or another.
When the White House did background checks on supposedly non-political civil servants the workers were given questionnaires asking about political activities and group memberships. Said one former White House usher, "We were all convinced that this was a political witch hunt."
Bill Clinton, according to Morris in his new book, was a CIA informer during his days at Oxford.
Publicly available court filings in the Paul Jones sexual assault case have been ignored, with the exception of the Wall Street Journal.

Not just a dirty data digger: White House operative Craig Livingstone didn't just keep his nose pasted to the computer terminal. On the night Vince Foster died he joined William Kennedy in identifying the body and is one of the few Clinton officials who was physically near Foster during a period considered critical by some investigators attempting to explain evidence anomalies in the case. The morning after Foster's death, a Secret Service agent says he saw Livingstone and another man get off a West Wing elevator just below Foster's office carrying a box and briefcase. Livingstone says he didn't remove anything.

Now hear this. This is not a drill: The media is beginning to look for where the life jackets are stowed. On the June 18 Charlie Rose show, NBC's Tim Russert said, "This city is on fire today, with people saying, 'God, this really could be it. . .'" Asked Rose: "Really could be it? Meaning what?" Russert: "Well, if in fact the president, the first lady, any senior official in the White House authorized or condoned the accepting and looking into and perhaps circulating of information on political opponents, that is devastating. I believe it could bring down any administration."

ABC's Cokie Roberts lost a bit of her normal self-assurance as she backed up Russert with this remarkable confession: "I think it does come, as Tim says, on top of this 'Oh, Whitewater's nothing' and all of us buying into that in a way. I mean this has been a very clever thing that the Clinton campaign has done on everything from '92 on, which is to say, A, it's old news, and B, it's politically motivated. And to be very aggressive -- you've got to give them credit -- to be very aggressive in going after the people who are reporting it or the people who are leaking it, so there's a backing off."

Roberts didn't explain how come she was so easily intimidated while, say, the wheel-chair bound and ancient Sarah McClendon has been able to function for the past four years as a real reporter.