Four more US soldiers have died in Iraq. For what? These young men and women are dying, in a Mega-Mogdishu, for a neo-con wet dream and a Three Stooges Reich...How could this nightmare happen to America? It's the Media, Stupid.
Gene Lyons, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette: Now and then, something happens that causes our esteemed Washington press corps to exhibit its collective posterior to a wondering nation...
Every news article and TV feature I saw regarding
Clinton’s book featured the quote from Michiko
Kakutani’s frontpage New York Times review, "sloppy,
self-indulgent and often eye-crossingly dull."
Positive reviews by "Lonesome Dove" author Larry
McMurtry and Ben Franklin biographer Walter Isaacson
got little play...
Interestingly, the Times ’ review neglected to mention
that Clinton spent many pages deconstructing its own
dreadfully bad Whitewater reporting. Reading it, he
wrote, "felt like an outof-body experience." Regarding
the Times’ ? The Washington Post’s and everybody
else’s failure to disclose the contents of the
Pillsbury Report, the eight-volume study by a
Republican law firm that exonerated the Clintons of
Whitewater wrongdoing in December 1995—years before
independent counsel Kenneth Starr—Clinton quoted my
friend Lars-Erik Nelson, the late New York Daily News
columnist. Nelson spent years in Moscow covering the
Soviet Union. "The secret verdict is in," he wrote.
"There was nothing for the Clintons to hide.... [I] n
a bizarre reversal of those Stalin-era trials in which
innocent people were convicted in secret, the
President and the First Lady have been publicly
charged and secretly found innocent."
Break the Bush Cabal Stranglehold on the "US
Mainstream News Media," Show Up for Democracy in 2004:
Defeat Bush (again!)
http://www.nwanews.com/adg/story_Editorial.php?storyid=69194
Here’s the beef
Gene Lyons
Posted on Wednesday, June 30, 2004
Now and then, something happens that causes our
esteemed Washington press corps to exhibit its
collective posterior to a wondering nation. Such an
event was the publication of Bill Clinton’s
biographical memoir, "My Life." Following the extended
funeral rites for former President Ronald Reagan,
Clinton’s humongous Bildungsroman left pundits
scrambling madly to master a new collective script.
"Bildungsroman" is professor-speak for "10 pounds of
ego in a 5-pound sack." Nobody writes an autobiography
without a big ego. Not even St. Augustine. But what
was Clinton’s real motive? Speaking on "NBC Nightly
News," Andrea Mitchell (Mrs. Alan Greenspan) thought
she knew. "All Clinton may want to do," she opined,
"is outsell his wife’s book, which sold almost three
million copies worldwide." Time’s Margaret Carlson
echoed her on CNN’s "Capital Gang." Where do they find
them? Write a 972-page book to show up your wife? In
my experience, when people pontificate about the
motives of people they scarcely know, it’s their own
motives they display.
Apart from horses and high school guidance counselors,
it’d be hard to find an equivalent group as consumed
with status anxiety as the Washington punditocracy.
Every news article and TV feature I saw regarding
Clinton’s book featured the quote from Michiko
Kakutani’s frontpage New York Times review, "sloppy,
self-indulgent and often eye-crossingly dull."
Positive reviews by "Lonesome Dove" author Larry
McMurtry and Ben Franklin biographer Walter Isaacson
got little play.
Interestingly, the Times ’ review neglected to mention
that Clinton spent many pages deconstructing its own
dreadfully bad Whitewater reporting. Reading it, he
wrote, "felt like an outof-body experience." Regarding
the Times’ ? The Washington Post’s and everybody
else’s failure to disclose the contents of the
Pillsbury Report, the eight-volume study by a
Republican law firm that exonerated the Clintons of
Whitewater wrongdoing in December 1995—years before
independent counsel Kenneth Starr—Clinton quoted my
friend Lars-Erik Nelson, the late New York Daily News
columnist. Nelson spent years in Moscow covering the
Soviet Union. "The secret verdict is in," he wrote.
"There was nothing for the Clintons to hide.... [I] n
a bizarre reversal of those Stalin-era trials in which
innocent people were convicted in secret, the
President and the First Lady have been publicly
charged and secretly found innocent."
Yet Kakutani charges Clinton with "lies" about "real
estate." Challenged by Salon’s Eric Boehlert to
stipulate any, he says she never called back. Times
editor Bill Keller alibied that the independent
counsel’s Whitewater report mentioned "inaccurate
statements."
But if inaccurate statements are lies, the
Timesprinted even more lies about Whitewater than
"weapons of mass destruction." Indeed, had editors
heeded problems with its "investigative" reporting
during Clinton’s first term when some of us started
calling attention to them, they might have spared
themselves a lot of trouble. Judith Miller’s bad
reporting about Iraq and Jeff Gerth’s about Arkansas
had certain basic similarities: Both reporters went to
places they knew little about, put themselves into the
hands of con men with axes to grind and suppressed
dissenting voices eventually proved correct.
As George Seldes observed, however, "the most sacred
cow of the press is the press itself." Hence, The
Washington Post, too, editorialized that Clinton’s
memoir "veers from the nonfiction category" regarding
Whitewater, adding: "The tangled real estate
investments... merited investigation, and the inquiry
produced numerous convictions."
But in fact the Clintons made exactly one real estate
investment involving roughly $200,000, repaid the
loans in full and lost about $50,000. None of the
convictions Starr obtained involved transactions to
which they were a party.
Most had no relationship to their investment
whatsoever.
Starr himself, apparently one of the unreliable
sources from whom reporters took dictation, blandly
assured a PBS interviewer that "very few individuals
who are caught up in the process of criminal
justice... walk out saying how much I love the
prosecutor." Cute, but Clinton’s beef is more pointed.
He produces a list of persons, such as Kathleen
Willey, whom he says Starr rewarded for lying, and a
list of others like Susan Mc-Dougal who he says got
indicted for refusing to lie.
Self-serving? Maybe. But a Little Rock jury acquitted
McDougal, and a Virginia jury failed to convict Julie
Hiatt Steele on Willey’s say-so. Unfortunately,
Clinton’s book overlooks one of Starr’s most stunning
transgressions: convicting Arkansas Gov. Jim Guy
Tucker on the basis of a repealed statute. Yes, you
read correctly. Starr destroyed the career of Tucker
(a Clinton rival, incidentally, to whom he says he
apologized for not having pardoned him) by using an
expired tax law. It took Tucker five years of costly
appeals to prove it, and it opens to further appeal a
second conviction of Tucker that Starr obtained
through the testimony of convicted embezzler David
Hale. But the courtiers of the Washington press have
no time for such trivialities. Speculating about the
Clintons’ marriage makes better entertainment.
• Free-lance columnist Gene Lyons is a Little Rock
author and recipient of the National Magazine Award.