Since you appreciated the last article I shipped to you, I just knew you'd love this; take a gander:
<<<<Starr troopers
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STEVEN BRILL'S STORY REVEALED WHAT THE PUBLIC KNOWS
BUT THE ELITE MEDIA REFUSES TO ADMIT: THE NATIONAL
PRESS HAS DEBASED ITSELF BY ROLLING OVER FOR THE
INDEPENDENT COUNSEL.
What began for Steven Brill as a devastating
review of the American media's Lewinsky orgy has
devolved into a nit-picking contest -- to the relief of
a press anxious to hide its dirty laundry. The editor
in chief and publisher of Brill's Content now stands
accused of committing journalistic sins --
misquoting sources, misusing facts, concealing his
own bias and violating off-the-record confidences --
not so different from those he found in the scandal
coverage by the mainstream press. As he
presumably realizes, such harsh scrutiny is always
the price of massive publicity (and a sold-out
printing of a hot first issue).
But if Brill's targets believe they can rehabilitate
themselves by finding fault with various aspects of
his 25,000-word "Pressgate" opus, they're wrong:
The broader meaning of his indictment still stands.
His case study of the symbiotic relationship
between independent counsel Kenneth Starr and
the most prominent organs of the national press is
definitive proof, if any more were needed, that the
major media's pious claim to be "objective" in its
coverage of the Clinton scandals is at best one part
delusion and two parts fraud. Although that
observation is scarcely new, it is rare to have the
proof laid out in such copious and damning detail.
That's why discrediting Brill is so urgent not only
for Starr -- who dubiously insists his leaks to
favored reporters didn't violate grand jury secrecy
laws and laughably justifies them by saying, "We
have a duty to promote confidence in the work of
this office" -- but for mainstream journalists and
organizations who benefited from Starr's strategic
garrulousness.
The heart of Brill's complaint is that the press has
failed in its First Amendment responsibility to
provide "a check on the abuse of power,"
specifically the power of the independent counsel.
He is dead right about where the press went wrong,
but the reasons for this dereliction are more
complex than he seems to imagine. He believes
certain reporters were simply captured by their best
source in the tumult of a competitive breaking
story. Yet other motivations are equally important.
At the Washington Post, for instance, there is a
palpable desire to relive the glorious Watergate
experience of deposing a president. At the New
York Times, there is an equally powerful impulse
to even the old score with the Post, which beat the
paper of record badly during Nixon's final days.
And at both papers, there exists a feeling of
indebtedness to Starr, who helped the Times and
the Post escape libel judgments in the not-so-distant
past. Insofar as those two newspapers shape
coverage of every important story, especially in
Washington, their biases are reproduced on
television and in other media across the country.
To those few journalists who regard Whitewater
and the other "Clinton scandals" with doubt, it was
evident long before anyone heard of Monica
Lewinsky that Starr enjoyed undue influence at the
commanding heights of the news industry. I learned
that firsthand in April 1996, after Murray Waas and
I published an article in the Nation about Starr's
conflicts of interest. Among the most hostile
responses was a telephone call from ABC producer
Chris Vlasto, who has worked the Clinton scandal
beat at the network for several years. After swiftly
dismissing our story, Vlasto proceeded to berate me
for criticizing Starr, and condescended to inform
me that the corrupt liars were in the White House,
not the independent counsel's office.
The possibility that Clinton and Starr both might
need skeptical interrogation evidently didn't occur
to Vlasto, who works closely with ABC White
House correspondent Jackie Judd. Two years later,
as Brill notes witheringly in "Pressgate," it was Judd
who became one of the most eager purveyors of
Starr-inspired leaks and anti-Clinton rumors,
including the now-legendary "semen-stained dress"
fiasco. But to the extent that Judd and her producer
were vulnerable to manipulation by Starr, these
people were hardly alone. As Howard Kurtz makes
clear in his account of the White House press corps
in "Spin Cycle," frustration about Clinton's seeming
invulnerability to scandal was growing for months
and years before it finally exploded in the Lewinsky
blowup. So the press's outraged reaction to Brill's
challenge is hardly surprising; they were hoping to
bring down the president, a goal so evidently noble
that any and all means were justified -- including
taking dictation from the independent counsel.
Nor is it surprising that many, if not most,
journalists are unable to endure the kind of criticism
they routinely dish out. Last year, the Washington
Post's editors were predictably furious when they
learned that Hillary Rodham Clinton had once
commissioned an analysis of flaws in the scandal
reporting of Susan Schmidt, a Post reporter she felt
was biased against the White House. That project
was swiftly killed by Press Secretary Mike
McCurry because he understood, quite correctly,
that to question the fairness of an elite news
organization would be "crazy," tantamount to
public relations suicide.
Brill, with his flair for marketing, has proved that
the public knows better -- and that it has grown
weary of the pious, self-serving rhetoric of
"objectivity" too many in the press use to conceal
their sins. He has articulated the doubts of
news-consuming Americans, whose confidence in
the information they receive has dropped so
precipitously since last January. Whether he can
shake the elite media out of its fatuous torpor is
another story.
SALON | June 22, 1998
Left Hook by Joe Conason appears every other Monday in
Salon. >>> |
