Sam Smith, 1998-In the beginning
there was just a governor from Arkansas. Elsewhere, hardly anyone knew much
about him.
The
few who did included those attending some of the nearly 100 meetings at Pam
Harriman's house moderated by Clark Clifford and Robert Strauss. The cover
charge for contributors was $1,000 a head and Harriman and her friends would
eventually raise about $12 million for a conservative Democratic agenda and
pick Bill Clinton to carry it out.
The
leap from secret salon to public media was not all that difficult.
After
all, there is nothing the Washington press corps does better than mimic the
nostrums of the mighty, and you couldn't get much mightier than Strauss, Clifford
and Harriman. At least when Kissinger wasn't in town.
When
journalists met the candidate, he fully confirmed the elders' wisdom for he was
charming, articulate, at ease with Beltway paradigms, and married to a woman
every bit as much of the right time and place.
Of
course, Clinton couldn't rely entirely on the media. He had to turn moments of
debate and interview and speech and walking through crowded rooms into magic
for the audience and the viewer. And he had to deal with those few reporters
who didn't go along with the program, those who asked for the wrong facts at
the wrong time.
Still,
near the time of the 1992 New Hampshire primary, Hendrick Hertzberg surveyed
several dozen campaign reporters and found that every one of them, if they had
been a New Hampshire voter, would have cast their ballot for Clinton. The
reason, said Hertzberg, was "simple, and surprisingly uncynical: they
think he would make a very good, perhaps a great, president. Several told me
they were convinced that Clinton is the most talented presidential candidate
they have ever encountered, JFK included." This conclusion had been
reached with only the vaguest notion of who Clinton was and what he had done
in, to, or for Arkansas. Accepting as adequate proof Clinton's popularity among
his fellow governors, most of the media overlooked other matters such as:
• Clinton's had really grown up not in halcyon
Hope but in Hot Springs, a town catering to gamblers and hoods, and a long-time
resort for the Chicago and New York mobs.
•
While infant mortality had declined during his terms as governor, the Center
for the Study of Social Policy rated the state only 41st on children's issue.
•
According to the Southern Regional Council, Arkansas was in the bottom ten
percent of all stales in average weekly wages, health insurance coverage, state
and local school revenue, unemployment, blacks and women in traditional white
male jobs, environmental policies and overall conditions for workers.
•
Clinton had experienced a rocky relationship with labor and environmentalists.
At the beginning of the campaign Clinton came under attack by his state's
AFL-CIO president who (before the national union ordered him to shut up) sent
around a highly critical report on Clinton's record. Labor, it said, should expect
Clinton's help only 25-30% of the time. And the League of Conservation Voters
ranked Clinton last among the Democratic candidates on conservation issues.
•
Arkansas was a major drug trafficking center. Well before the convention there
were strong indications that Clinton had followed a three-monkey policy on
illegal drugs. One of his close friends had served time on drug charges as had
his step-brother. While the story was not as fleshed out as it would later be,
there was more than enough shadows of the underworld to raise alarms.
•
There were serious questions as to just what part Clinton had played in the
central role of Arkansas as a jumping off point for illegal Contra support
operations.
•
And then there were the women. Plenty of them with plenty of stories.
Beyond
the void of mere facts was also a stunning lack of credible description of the
culture and values in which Clinton had thrived. The media failed to examine
Arkansas political, economic and social feudalism; its corruption; its drug culture;
its sexual mores and the cruelties of back country justice. One did not rise in
such a place by rejecting its rules.
There
were scores of stories that should have been covered during the primaries but
weren't. What really went on at Mena? Why was Clinton so disinterested? Did the
northern mobs still have influence in Arkansas? Where did the unmistakable
footprints of BCCI lead? Why was an immensely rich Indonesian, Mochtar Riady,
and other foreign financiers so interested in this tiny state? Who paid for
Bill Clinton's fancy hotel room in Moscow while he was a poor student abroad?
And so forth.
The
bulk of the media not only ignored such questions, they dismissed those who
went after any information that threatened the image of a brilliant, articulate,
Oxford and Yale-educated charismatic from Hope.
Only
a few times — such as when Gennifer Flowers and the draft board stories
surfaced — did reality rear its ugly head for any significant period.
Instead,
the media mostly just stood alongside the yellow brick road and handed out
green glasses.
The
result was one of America's great American political frauds.
Neither
in character nor in ideology did Clinton turn out to be the man described by
the media. Instead he would: help wreck major components of a social welfare
system painfully constructed over nearly seven decades.
And assault
constitutional protections, particularly those limiting search and seizure.
And accelerate the incarceration large numbers of
minorities for such sins as preferring marijuana to daiquiris.
And greatly solidify corporatist hegemony over
the political system, spurred on by record-breaking illegal campaign
contributions and corrupt lobbying.
And do more damage to the electoral prospects of
other Democrats than any president of his party since Grover Cleveland.
And
engage with his associates in an unprecedented series of corrupt acts that
discredited his office, his party and the nation.
The
media's role would be more excusable if after all this time it had at least
admitted that something truly had gone amiss. Instead it has been busy creating
yet another fantasy, namely that if it weren't for sex, haste, and the Internet
everything in journalism would still be fine This is certainly the theory put
forth by the Columbia Journalism Review, formerly an interesting trade
publication, but lately a sort of Modern Maturity for prematurely aging
journalists. In the most recent issue it turned over six pages so Jules
Witcover could ruminate on "Where We Went Wrong." Which sounds hopeful
until you discover that Witcover, like many of his colleagues, thinks the
Clinton scandal story began this January. He wrote, "Unlike the Watergate
scandal . . .this scandal broke like a thunderclap. . . " For the rest of
the article — whether out of ignorance or denial -- Witcover continues to act
as though there had not been three dozen Clintonista indictments, convictions
or guilty pleas; as if Kenneth Starr had done nothing prior to the arrival of
Monica Lewinsky; as though Arkansas doesn't exist and as though nothing was at
issue but sex and not telling the truth about it.
This
is an extraordinary distortion of the matter. In fact, over the past six years,
issues raised by special prosecutors, members of Congress and/or investigative
reporters have include alleged bank and mail fraud, violations of campaign
finance laws, illegal foreign campaign funding, improper exports of sensitive
technology, physical violence and threats of violence, solicitation of perjury,
intimidation of witnesses, bribery of witnesses, attempted intimidation of
prosecutors, perjury before congressional committees, lying in statements to
federal investigators and regulatory officials, flight of witnesses,
obstruction of justice, bribery of cabinet members, real estate fraud, tax
fraud, securities fraud, drug trafficking, failure to investigate drug
trafficking, bribery of state officials, use of state police for personal
purposes, exchange of promotions or benefits for sexual favors, using state
police to provide false court testimony, laundering of drug money through a
state agency, false reports by medical examiners and others investigating
suspicious deaths, the firing of the RTC and FBI director when these agencies
were investigating Clinton and his associates, failure to conduct autopsies in
suspicious deaths, providing jobs in return for silence by witnesses, drug
abuse, illegal acquisition and use of 900 FBI files, illegal futures trading,
murder, sexual abuse of employees, false testimony before a federal judge, shredding
of documents, withholding and concealment of subpoenaed documents, fabricated
charges against (and improper firing of) White House employees, as well as
providing access to the White House to drug traffickers, foreign agents and
participants in organized crime.
Witcover,
to be sure, does sense that something is wrong, but in searching for it he
either engages in manic scab-picking of ephemeral details (similar to that of
the cable faces he detests so much) or he launches into pompous tantrums:
Like
proven professional practitioners everywhere, Witcover believes God is in the
process rather than in the results. For this reason, he fails to notice that he
and his colleagues have, for six long and sorry years, simply missed the story.
Witcover
implies that everything would regain its balance if weren't for the likes of
the egregious Matt Drudge, "a reckless trader in rumor and gossip who
makes no pretense of checking on the accuracy of what he reports."
Witcover would have us believe that there was a time — before Drudge and the
Internet - when journalism was a honorable activity in which no one went
looking for a restroom without first asking directions from at least two
sources (unless, of course, one of the sources was a government official), in
which every word was checked for fairness, and in which nothing made the prints
without being thoroughly verified.
There
may have been such a time but it wasn't, for example, on January 20, 1925, when
the Wall Street Journal ran an editorial declaring that: “A newspaper is
a private enterprise, owing nothing whatever to the public, which grants it no
franchise. It is therefore affected with no public interest. It is emphatically
the property of the owner who is selling a manufactured product at his own
risk.”
Nor
was it a decade or so later when a Washington correspondent admitted: “Policy
orders? I never get them; but I don’t need them. The make-up of the paper is a
policy order.. I can tell what they want by watching the play they give to my
stories.”
Nor
when George Seldes testified before the National Labor Relations Board on
behalf of the Newspaper Guild which was then trying to organize the New York
Times. The managing editor of the Times came up to Seldes afterwards
and said, "Well, George, I guess your name will never again be mentioned
in the Times."
Nor
when William Randolph Hearst, according to his biographer David Nasaw,
"sent undercover reporters onto the nation's campuses to identify the
'pinko academics' who were aiding and abetting the 'communistic' New Deal.
During the election campaign of 1936, he accused Roosevelt of being Stalin's
chosen candidate."
There
was, too be sure, a better side, including those who hewed to the standard
described recently by William Safire in a talk at Harvard: “I hold that what
used to be the crime of sedition — the deliberate bringing of the government
into disrepute, the divisive undermining of public confidence in our leaders,
the outrageous assaulting of our most revered institutions -- is a glorious
part of the American democratic heritage."
In
either case, though, Adam Goodheart, of Civilization magazine wrote
recently: Journalism didn't truly become a respectable profession until after
World War II, when political journalism came to be dominated by a few big newspapers,
networks and news services. These outlets cultivated an impartiality that, in a
market with few rivals, makes sense. They also cultivated the myth that the
American press had always (with a few deplorable exceptions, of course) been a
model of decorum. But it wasn't this sort of press that the framers of the Bill
of Rights set out to protect. It was, rather, a press that called Washington an
incompetent, Adams a tyrant and Jefferson a fornicator. And it was that
rambunctious sort of press that, in contrast to the more genteel European
periodicals of the day, came to be seen as proof of America's republican
vitality." In the late 1930s a survey asked Washington journalists for
their reaction to the following statement:
“It is almost impossible to be objective.”
Sixty
percent of the respondents agreed. Today's journalists are taught instead to
perpetuate a lie: that through alleged professional mysteries you can achieve
an objectivity that not even a Graham, Murdoch, or Turner can sway. Well, most
of the time it doesn't work, if for no other reason than in the end someone
else picks what gets covered and how the paper is laid out. In truth the days
for which Witcover yearns never existed. What did exist was much more
competition in the news industry. If you didn't like the Washington Post, for
example, you could read the Times Herald, the Daily News or the Star.
While the number of radio stations in my town has remained fairly steady,
it has been only recently that 21 local outlets have been owned by just five
corporations.
By
the 1980s, most of what Americans saw, read, or heard was controlled by fewer
than two dozen corporations. By the 1990s just five corporations controlled all
or part of 26 cable channels. Some 75% of all dailies are now in the hands of
chains and just four of these chains own 21% of all the country's daily papers.
Today's
diuretic discourse over journalistic values largely reflects an attempt to
justify the unjustifiable, namely the rapid decline of independent sources of
information and the monopolization of the vaunted "market place of
ideas." In the end, the hated Internet is a far better heir of Peter
Zenger, Thomas Paine,
There
were other differences 60 years ago. Nearly 40% of the Washington
correspondents surveyed were bom in towns of less than 2500 population, and
only 16% came from towns of 100,000 or more. In 1936, the Socialist candidate
for president was supported by 5% of the Washington journalists polled and one
even cast a ballot for the Communists.
One
third of Washington correspondents, the cream of the trade, lacked a college
degree in 1937. Even when I entered journalism in the 1950s, over half of all
reporters in the country still had less than a college degree.
And
H.L. Mencken would infinitely prefer a drink with Matt Drudge than with Ted
Koppel.
The
basic rules of good journalism in any time are fairly simple: tell the story
right, tell it well and, in the words of the late New Yorker editor,
Harold Ross, "if you can't be funny, be interesting." The idea that
the journalist is engaged in a professional procedure like surgery or a lawsuit
leads to little but tedium, distortion, and delusion.
Far
better to risk imperfection than to have quality so carefully controlled that
only banality and official truths are permitted.
In
the end journalism tends to be either an art or just one more technocratic
mechanism for restraining, ritualizing, and ultimately destroying thought and
reality.
If
it is the latter, the media will take its polls and all it will hear is its own
echo. If it is the former, journalist listens for truth rather than to rules —
and reality, democracy, and decency are all better for it.
Which
may be one reason that it was a novelist who scooped us all in explaining
Clinton and his crowd: It was all very careless and confused:
They were careless people — they smashed up
things and creatures and then retreated into their money or their vast
carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people
clean up the mess they had made.
But
then F. Scott Fitzsgerald would never have made it in contemporary journalism.
For him, the real story was too important. — Sam Smith
