Media bias? What media bias???
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Saturday, Aug. 18, 2001 10:02 p.m. EDT
CNN Revisits Bush Cocaine Rumors
Four days after Los Angeles attorney Mark Geragos confirmed that his client, former first brother Roger Clinton, had a "frightening" daily cocaine habit at the time his brother pardoned him for two mid-1980s cocaine convictions, CNN resumed its first-family cocaine watch - for President Bush!
In a segment "Capital Gang" host Mark Shields headlined "The George W. Bush Cocaine Watch," panelists Margaret Carlson and Al Hunt continued to suggest there was something to the rumors that Bush had used the drug - more than two years after several major media investigations failed to turn up a single witness who would support the story.
CNN has never covered eyewitness accounts from Gennifer Flowers, Sally Perdue, Sharlene Wilson and others who said they had firsthand knowledge of former president Clinton's cocaine use as governor of Arkansas.
But the lack of any similar evidence against President Bush didn't stop Wall Street Journal columnist Al Hunt from suggesting that he was a heavy drug user throughout the 1980s.
"I think George Bush was heavy into booze and probably drugs well into his 30s," he told "Capital Gang."
Time magazine's Margaret Carlson echoed Hunt's sentiments, bristling over criticism that the Bush cocaine story was nonsense.
"It wasn't nonsense, because he got into that back and forth and that was what was hurting him," Carlson contended. "I think the cocaine would have gone away if he hadn't played the game."
And in comments rebroadcast from a two-year-old "Capital Gang" clip, USA Today reporter Susan Page argued, "We haven't seen the end [of the cocaine story] and neither has George W. Bush. And he's not going to be able to talk about other issues until this question gets settled."
Neither CNN, Time, USA Today nor the Wall Street Journal have reported the now confirmed news that Roger Clinton entered an Arizona drug rehab clinic just six months after accepting his brother's presidential pardon for possession and distribution of cocaine.
According to a report that Clinton attorney Geragos declined to challenge, the former first brother had been a heavy cocaine addict for most of the Clinton administration. |
