MEDIA STUDIES
Where were these grand papers when America needed them?
STEPHEN GLOVER
Strong words — but it was not ever so. Only since January, when Monica Lewin- sky's relationship with the President became known, have the Washington Post and the New York Times — America's grandest papers — worked up any kind of lather. Until then both titles had taken only a sporadic interest in the many Clinton scandals. In 1994 the Washington Post actu- ally suppressed a story about Paula Jones, who had alleged that Bill Clinton had sum- moned her to his hotel room and demand- ed oral sex. The reporter, Michael Isikoff, stomped off in fury to Newsweek. Mr Isikoff was first with the Lewinsky story in Jan- uary, but his Newsweek bosses delayed pub- lication and he was scooped with his own scoop by the Internet gossip columnist, Matt Drudge.
To be fair, the New York Times's ace reporter Jeff Gerth has unearthed some Clinton scandals, though they have not been followed up as they should have been. The Washington Post's Susan Schmidt wrote well about the Whitewater affair, and she was quick on the Lewinsky story after Newsweek had suspended publication. But the paper has shown none of the single-mindedness it demonstrated 25 years ago during Water- gate. When the weekly supermarket tabloid the Star revealed in 1992 that Mr Clinton had had a 12-year affair with Gennifer Flowers, the New York Times and the Wash- ington Post almost ignored the story. Both papers also stood aloof in December 1993 when the American Spectator and the Los Angeles Times published allegations by Arkansas state troopers about corruption and sexual shenanigans during Mr Clinton's governorship of that state.
What explains this lofty indifference? In part it is an aversion to sex stories. These have been designated as cheap tabloid fare. After the allegations of Arkansas state troopers, the Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen attacked the idea that adul- tery, even if proven, is a key to overall char- acter. Even now this is the standard view among American liberal media folk. In many cases they may be right. The trouble is that they were disastrously wrong with Mr Clinton. His serial infidelity has led him into a jungle of lies, and he lied about Gen- nifer Flowers as he has lied, under oath and to the American people, about Monica Lewinsky. His sexual betrayals are part of a web of congenital dishonesty. By turning a blind eye to a succession of sexual scandals, these high-minded newspapers spared the man.
One can't help feeling they might have got over their aversion if Mr Clinton had been a Republican. The liberal papers were reluctant to hammer their own man, and it is their misfortune that he is revealed as a crook. The most formidable assaults on him have been mounted by right-wing publica- tions: the American Spectator, the Washing- ton Times, the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal and, to a lesser extent, the New York Post. Clintonites would say that is because these titles are purveyors of politi- cally motivated lies, but as the mask slips from the President this is becoming an increasingly difficult line to take. It is prob- ably true, though, that right-wing publica- tions were originally drawn into the attack largely because Mr Clinton is a Democrat.
I don't mean to minimise the achieve- ments of those who took on Clinton and the White House. Actually they weren't all right-wing: Alexander Cockburn and Christopher Hitchens, both British, are among the handful of journalists who have regularly and often heroically sniped at Clinton from the Left. Most critics have been subjected to the most extraordinary vilification by the White House, Hillary Clinton and even some journalists. One of the chief vilifiers has been a Clinton adviser called Sidney Blumenthal, a former writer who beatified Mr Clinton in a piece for the New Republic in February 1992 and wrote a scathing profile of Gennifer Flowers. Mr Blumenthal also penned many tedious arti- cies for the New Yorker, which has probably been the most creepily pro-Clinton publica- tion of all.
These journalists, whether of Right or Left, stood outside the charmed circle, never receiving invitations to attend White House parties and enduring the vitupera- tion of the Clintonites. One of them is Bob Tyrrell, editor of the American Spectator. Another is Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, lat- terly of the Sunday Telegraph and now of the Daily Telegraph. Mr Evans-Pritchard is the first correspondent for a British news- paper in a generation to make a name for himself in the United States. In a just world he would be awarded a Pulitzer prize. He has been derided as a nutty obsessive, but his general view of Clinton appears to have been vindicated.
This, it seems to me, is the crux. I don't know whether all the anti-Clinton stories are well-founded. I don't know whether Vince Foster, the White House aide, com- mitted suicide or whether, as some have suggested, he was murdered. I don't know if it is true, as the American Spectator has alleged, that while he was governor of Arkansas in the mid-1980s Bill Clinton sanctioned the use of Mena airport for arms to be shipped out to the Contras and cocaine back into the United States. I don't even know whether in 1992 and 1996 the Clinton campaign broke fund-raising rules. Perhaps with their new-found zeal the New York Times and the Washington Post will devote some of their enormous resources to getting to the bottom of these stories.
What I do know is that Ambrose Evans- Pritchard, Bob Tyrrell, Christopher Hitchens and a few others have been right all along about Bill Clinton. They saw him for what he was — a liar and a chancer, a man who will stop at virtually nothing to save his own skin. For a variety of reasons, none of which was noble, mainstream liberal newspapers toler- ated Mr Clinton for too long, and failed to investigate scandals with the vigour that might have been expected of them. To quote that New York Times editorial, they utterly failed to grasp 'the completeness of Presi- dent Clinton's mendacity'. Now these papers are in a competitive frenzy to outdo one another, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if the New York Times or the Washington Post hammered the final nail into Mr Clinton's coffin. But they weren't there when it count- ed, and we won't forget it.
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