More about Salon:
Salon's Spectator Project
The left-wing media food chain goes into action.
Bentonville, Ark. -- David Hale, the key witness against President Clinton in Kenneth
Starr's Whitewater investigation, received numerous cash payments from a clandestine
anti-Clinton campaign funded by conservative billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife....Hale's
payments came from representatives of the so-called Arkansas Project, a $2.4 million
campaign to investigate Clinton and his associates between 1993 and 1997.
-- Salon magazine
The American Spectator took that $2.4 million, they funneled it to David Hale, who's
[Starr's] chief witness.
-- Mark Geragos, Susan McDougal's lawyer, on CNN's "Crossfire"
David Hale...his chief witness in Whitewater, is now allegedly being, was part bankrolled by an agent of the prosecutor.
-- Al Hunt, on CNN's "Capital Gang"
"I think it must be pursued..."
-- Attorney General Janet Reno, replying to a question about whether the Justice
Department would investigate the charge that Hale had been paid
Pay attention now because this is important: David Hale is almost certainly not the chief witness against Bill Clinton, but whether he is or he isn't, his story has been consistent. He told the New York Times,Washington Post, and other news organizations that Clinton, as governor of Arkansas, had leaned onhim to make an illegal loan to Susan McDougal. Later he told Robert Fiske and Kenneth Starr the same thing. It follows, therefore, that if The American Spectator's Arkansas Project was going to bribe, suborn, or otherwise influence Hale it had to do it in the early summer of 1993, or before he started talking. The Arkansas Project, however, did not come into existence until several months after that. This means that no matter what the White House and its acolytes say, it had nothing to do with Hale's testimony against Clinton.
Now do keep paying attention because this is important, too: The Arkansas Project was financed with the $1.8 million two foundations controlled by Richard Mellon Scaife, the putative leader of the right-wing conspiracy, made available to the Spectator for its own journalistic purposes. (Mr. Scaife has since divorced himself from the Spectator, but more about that later.) In turn, R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., the Spectator's editor-in-chief, decided that the money would be used to finance an investigation into Whitewater and other Arkansas malfeasances. RET believed, with justification, that the big mainstream news organizations might allow Whitewater and related stories to die, and he was determined to keep them alive.
Nonetheless the funds for the Arkansas Project did not remain in the editorial offices of the Spectator. They were disbursed, in monthly increments, to Steve Boynton, a lawyer in Vienna, Virginia. Boynton and David Henderson, a member of the board of the American Spectator Educational Foundation, which owns the Spectator, then conducted much of the Whitewater research in Arkansas themselves. Among other places this took them to was the now famous Dozhier's Bait Shop in Hot Springs. The Washington Post reported that its owner, Parker Dozhier, lived in a trailer "set amid barrels of red worms, night crawlers, live crickets and other fish bait," but the on-line Salon magazine saw something more sinister. The bait shop might have seemed like "an unlikely headquarters for a sophisticated, well-financed operation aimed at discrediting the president of the United States," Salon said, "but behind the bait shop's doors sat a computer, a fax machine and two telephones." The red worms, night crawlers, and live crickets, it seems, were only a cover: "Burly, gravelly voiced outdoorsman" Dozhier was "running an intelligence-gathering and dirty tricks operation" out of the bait shop, and, with the help of Boynton and Henderson, "secretly funneling" money to "key Whitewater witness" Hale.
Salon was implying that Boynton and Henderson, and, by extension, The American Spectator and Richard Scaife, were paying Hale to lie about Clinton. It did not make the charge directly, of course. It operated under a journalistic pretense: It was simply laying out the facts. The facts, however, changed from one Salon story to another, and pungent details, once raised, never got raised again. The "two eyewitnesses" who allegedly saw the payoffs to Hale, for example, almost immediately shrank to one; the stacks of hundred-dollar bills, supposedly in the bait-shop safe, soon were forgotten. Meanwhile Salon kept making noises about its political independence, although, as the Washington Post eventually noticed, the two reporters on its big story were long-time friends of Sidney Blumenthal, and "White House allies sometimes tout Salon pieces to reporters before they are even posted on the Web."
That raises a reasonable question: Did Salon knowingly go into the tank for the White House, or did things just work out that way? In a wonderfully pompous editorial, David Talbot, Salon's editor, wrote about "Salon's demonstrably independent journalism," and said that criticism of its stories about the Spectator and Hale came only from suspect sources. Talbot singled out the Wall Street Journal in particular. The "far-right propagandists" who had "hijacked" its editorial page, he wrote, were desperate. That was because, "as a result of Salon's reporting," the Justice Department has opened an "investigation that could strike at the heart of Starr's massive Whitewater inquiry."
Talbot was right, at least, about Salon and the Justice Department; the investigation did come about as a result of Salon's reporting. Indeed Salon had announced the investigation in an "exclusive" story. Despite its "demonstrably independent journalism," though, it neglected to mention that the investigation had begun, with lightning speed, after its reporters had spoken to David Pryor, who directs Bill Clinton's legal defense fund. Actually the question of whether Salon went knowingly or unknowingly into the tank doesn't matter. Everyone knows that it's there.
Meanwhile it ought to be noted that since joining the Spectator in January, publisher Terry Eastland, assisted by independent auditors, has been conducting an internal review of the Arkansas Project. No evidence has been found, he says, that any money was paid to Hale by the Spectator, whether through Dozhier or anyone else.
This writer, however, will now act as Spectator ombudsman, a position for which he feels qualified because of some forty years in journalism. Even if the stories in Salon were junk, it must be admitted that the Arkansas Project was flawed. Boynton and Henderson, who is now the Spectator's vice president for program development, were diligent and hard working, but they left the Arkansas Project open to criticism. Journalism is best practiced by journalists, and neither man was a journalist. It is not that journalists have any particular moral claim, but it is assumed they follow certain professional rules; and it is this assumption, even when misplaced, which it quite often is, that gives their work credibility. Most damaging of all, the Arkansas Project hired a private investigator, and while he was hired because of his expertise in financial crime -- a ripe Whitewater area -- his presence was ill-advised. White House damage-control teams use gumshoes, but respectable magazines do not.
On the other hand, the stories that flowed from the Arkansas Project were sound, and many were ahead of the rest of the press. No one seems to have found factual errors or unfounded accusations in the Spectator's Whitewater coverage. Contrast this, however, with the coverage of the Arkansas Project and its connection to Hale. Bad things happen when a story enters the left-wing media food chain.
The first story, by Karen Gullo of the Associated Press, appeared on March 5. Parker Dozhier, it said, had allowed Hale free use of a fishing cabin and a car when he visited him at the bait shop. As the Washington Post later reported, the AP story was inspired by Caryn Mann, once Dozhier's live-in girl friend, who had gotten in touch with Richard Kelley, the fourth husband of the late Virginia Kelley, the president's mother, who had gotten in touch with local Democrats, who had gotten in touch with, who knows?
Gullo's story, though, quoted Mann only once, when she said Hale had discussed Starr's Whitewater investigation with Henderson and Boynton. Then, the day after the AP story appeared, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette did a follow-up. It said Mann "could not be reached for comment," but it noted, a little slyly, that she had given psychic readings and taught astrology at a Hot Springs bookstore, and had once worked for the private investigator who had tried, without success, to check out rumors of an affair between Starr and a woman in Little Rock. The Democrat-Gazette also pointed out, as had the AP, that Mann had been a 1992 Clinton delegate to the Florida state Democratic convention.
Salon published its first piece, by Jonathan Broder, its Washington bureau chief, and Murray Waas, a kind of free- lancer, eleven days later. The AP and Democrat-Gazette, it turned out, had missed the important things. Mann could barely shut up. The Arkansas Project had not only been financing Hale; it had given Dozhier enough money to pay off $60,000 in back taxes and between $90,000 to $120,000 on his credit cards. Once, after a visit by Boynton and Henderson, Mann said, she looked in the safe: "There were stacks of money -- one hundreds, fifties and twenties."
In interviews with other news organizations, however, Mann's story changed. For one thing, she had not actually seen Dozhier pass money to Hale; she had only heard about it from her son. She was also no longer sure about the payments to Dozhier for his credit cards and back taxes. But as she explained to the Washington Post, "I'm not an attorney -- I spent more than a year trying to forget this, and now I'm trying to remember it."
Broder and Waas may be of help. Salon seems dug in for the long haul, and there is no telling what it might turn up next. Also, Broder and Waas are now angry. As the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz wrote, in a very silly piece, conservative journalists are attacking them, Waas, in particular, and they want to strike back.
As proof of the conservative attack, Kurtz mentioned a Wall Street Journal editorial, a Weekly Standard editorial, and a Robert Novak column. The Journal editorial, however, never mentioned Broder or Waas, and while Waas did turn up by name in the Novak column he was characterized as "a free-lance journalist," and only the Weekly Standard editorial was personal. David Tell referred to Waas as a "free-lance conspiracy theorist."
But as personal attacks go, these were quite gentlemanly, and the conservatives should leave Broder and Waas, Waas, epecially, to the liberals. Mickey Kaus referred to him in the on-line magazine Slate as an "oddball investigative reporter," and Alexander Cockburn wrote in the New York Press that his "awful prose makes even Jeff Gerth read like Gibbon." There was also the 1996 piece in the New Republic by
Michael Lewis, who had gone to Arkansas for a story on right-wing conspiracy theorists, and encountered Waas. Lewis said there was no difference between Waas and the other conspiracy theorists.
Meanwhile, as promised, more about Scaife, the head of the vast right-wing conspiracy, and, according to many, many stories in the press, a supporter, defender, and dark influence on Starr (even if he has never met or talked to him). Scaife got angry at the Spectator after it ran a story that upheld Starr's verdict on Vincent Foster: Starr thought he really had committed suicide. Scaife, however, took exception, and said he would no longer support the Spectator. He did not seem to think much of Starr.
John Corry is The American Spectator's senior correspondent.
spectator.org |
