By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in Washington
IT was a media putsch that toppled President Nixon in the Watergate scandal. The elite press, overwhelmingly Democratic, forced the pace of the judicial inquiries with frenzied energy and relish.
This time the great metropolitan newspapers and the television networks have been dragged kicking and screaming to the story. Republican sin is fair game. Democratic sin is a "private matter".
In some cases the press has played an active role in suppressing the truth, arguably allowing themselves to become propaganda instruments for the Clinton White House.
Sidney Blumenthal, who wrote a scathing profile of Gennifer Flowers, the woman who nearly destroyed Mr Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign, has since joined the White House as a top aide and has
masterminded a "scorched earth" campaign against Mr Clinton's critics.
The double standards have been insidious. In Watergate, it was thought entirely proper that the special prosecutor, Archibald Cox, should be a Democratic opponent of the president. It was the insurance that he would not permit a cover-up.
But with Kenneth Starr, the word "partisan" or "Republican" is usually attached to his name, pejoratively,
in news stories.
A constitutional scholar of mild manners, he has been the victim of relentless vilification. No matter that he bent over backwards to appoint Democrats and liberals to the key positions in the Washington Office of the Independent Counsel - Mark Tuohey, John Bates, Miquel Rodriguez - the press has given credence to White House claims that he is conducting a witchhunt.
The New York Times has adopted a tone of lordly disdain for most of the scandal. Every now and then its ace reporter, Jeff Gerth, has dropped a bombshell. It was he who first revealed the Clintons' Whitewater property deal during the 1992 campaign, and who broke the story of Hillary Clinton's $100,000 profits on cattle futures. But the follow-up by the newspaper always lacked conviction.
However, it is the Washington Post that wins the prize for news suppression. In early 1994 it was offered the exclusive story on Paula Jones.
A team headed by Michael Isikoff was sent to interview corroborating sources. They concluded that her claims were credible. There was indeed evidence that Bill Clinton had summoned her to a hotel room,
pulled his trousers down to his ankles, and asked her for oral sex. Isikoff wanted to run the story. His editors baulked at the idea.
Paula Jones's lawyer, Danny Traylor, was incensed. "They can't find it within themselves to hurt their boy. They just don't have the backbone or the gumption to run the piece," he said at the time. The article was "spiked", although it did appear much later. Isikoff was suspended from the newspaper after a shouting match with the national news editor.
The consequence of the "spiking" was the decision by Paula Jones to file a lawsuit against President Clinton - the action that may lead to his impeachment.
Paula Jones has said that she would not have filed the suit if the Washington Post, and the mainstream media, had reported her story properly. She wanted America to know what he had done to her, but she
had no desire to fight a protracted battle in the courts. It could be said that after bringing down President Nixon with its "Deep Throat" source, the Washington Post has inadvertently acquired its second scalp by failing to report on the Jones case.
It was Jerry Seper from the up-and-coming Washington Times that broke many of the stories that led to the appointment of a special prosecutor for the Whitewater scandal.
The Wall Street Journal kept the momentum going with in-depth coverage on the editorial pages, though, oddly, not in its news pages.
It was Christopher Ruddy from the New York Post who broke the key stories that there had been a cover-up in the death of Vincent Foster, a White House aide, after the grander press had accepted the
official version of events without a murmur of dissent.
It was Bob Tyrrell, the editor of the American Spectator, who published the most withering expos‚s of the Clinton presidency and held his ground in the face of immense criticism. The press ridiculed his decision to run a scoop about Mr Clinton's bodyguards which first established his sex addiction.
George Stephanopoulos, formerly of the White House and now a defector at ABC television, famously called it "pulp fiction". Pulp truth, more like.
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