The press hits rewind on the Clinton scandals

The press hits rewind on the Clinton scandals

By Eric Boehlert

Created Mar 27 2008 - 10:15am

How dreadful was the news coverage last week surrounding the official

release [1] of Hillary Clinton's public White House schedule from her eight

years as first lady? So bad that I found myself in rare (unprecedented?)

agreement with at least two prominent conservative bloggers who noticed the

same thing I did: The Beltway press corps is, at times, a national

embarrassment.

The unusual document dump came after professional Clinton snoops at The New

York Times filed a Freedom of Information Act request to see the voluminous

paperwork. That was followed by a lawsuit from the right-wing Judicial Watch

organization, which owes its fame to the Clinton scandals from the 1990s. As

Hillary Clinton noted last week, the highly unusual schedule release from

the National Archives likely confirms that she is "the most transparent

person in public life." (Former vice presidents Al Gore and Dan Quayle, for

instance, never released their old White House schedules while running for

president.)

After months of relentless media chatter and speculation about what sort of

investigative gold might be buried in the Clinton schedules, reporters, in

the end, were left with very little to write about. So they did what they

always did during the '90s, they fell back on worn-out sex and scandal

narratives and pretended it was news.

Surveying the news coverage, conservative blogger Rick Moran posed [2] the

same question I had last week, "Do we really need to know [3] where Hillary

was when Monica Lewinsky was with her husband? Or where she was when Vince

Foster committed suicide? [4] ... And does it deserve this feeding frenzy

from the media?"

It's true that the Clinton schedules did become a political issue within the

Democratic primary race with questions raised by Sen. Barack Obama's

campaign about whether the former first lady's itineraries sustained her

claims of White House experience. And in that context, the schedules were

certainly newsworthy and should have been reported on in order to inform

news consumers. In fact, The Politico deserves credit, since its news story

[5] on the topic, written by Kenneth Vogel and Andrew Glass, was the only

one I read or saw that focused entirely on the political ramifications of

the schedules without wandering into pointless rehashing of previous Clinton

scandals.

On the opposite end of the spectrum though, was some awful journalism,

including failing efforts from The Washington Post and The Wall Street

Journal -- the Post's because it was built around the childish notion that

the schedules should have revealed more about Clinton's emotions -- her

feelings -- during the '90s, and the Journal's for obsessing over what the

schedules told us about the death of Vince Foster. (Hint: absolutely

nothing.)

But of course what really got journalists excited about the document dump

was the fact that it allowed them to talk about White House sex. ABC News,

which earned some place in journalism purgatory for its hellacious [6]

Clinton impeachment coverage, couldn't wait to dish the dirt in a highly

inappropriate way.

This was the breathless lede [7] of the abcnews.com story that came complete

with a photo of Lewinsky's semen-stained blue dress: "Hillary Clinton spent

the night in the White House on the day her husband had oral sex with Monica

Lewinsky, and may have actually been in the White House when it happened."

Ah, oral sex in the White House. Doesn't that make you nostalgic for the Gin

Blossoms, Seinfeld, and everything '90s? I have no idea what the news value

was of ABC arousing itself in public that way, but apparently 10 years after

the fact Americans needed to be informed.

Also, a quick question for ABC's Brian Ross, whose ABC News Investigative

Unit hyped the big blow job scoop: How exactly did he get access to "17,481

pages of Sen. Hillary Clinton's schedule as first lady" when virtually every

other news organization in the country (CNN, New York Times, Washington

Post, Washington Times, Los Angeles Times, etc.) referred to the 11,000

pages that were released by the National Archives? Did Ross really uncover

an additional 6,000 pages that no other reporter knew about? Just asking.

Anyway, soon lots of news outlets joined in and stressed how the big news

was that Hillary was in the White House while her husband fooled around:

a.. "Sen. Hillary Clinton was in the White House on multiple occasions

when her husband had sexual encounters with Monica Lewinsky, according to

newly released documents." -- CNN.com [8]

a.. "Hillary Rodham Clinton was home in the White House on a half dozen

days when her husband had sexual encounters there with intern Monica

Lewinsky." -- Associated Press [9]

a.. "A shameless President Bill Clinton had secret Oval Office sex eight

times with Monica Lewinsky when his wife was under the same roof, Hillary

Clinton's private records reveal." -- New York Daily News [10]

Here's the thing, though: We already knew that. The media's big scoop last

week about Hillary's whereabouts during the Lewinsky episodes has been

public knowledge for nearly a decade, thanks to independent counsel Kenneth

Starr. Or did you really think that during his relentless, $70 million

investigation into the president's sex life that Starr and his team of

obsessive vice cops never answered the simple question regarding Hillary's

whereabouts during the trysts?

The Washington Post's Peter Baker let the truth slip out while appearing

[11] on MSNBC and discussing the fact that Hillary Clinton "was in the

building" when Lewinsky fooled around with her husband. Noted Baker, "That's

not entirely new [information], we sort of knew that, but it sort of

reinforces what we learned at the time the Starr Report came out in 1998."

In other words, the scoop last week had been hiding in plain sight for

nearly a decade.

More dumb and dumber? Read the following nugget from The New York Times'

coverage [12] and then decide whether to laugh or cry. It came as the

Times tried to squeeze some nonexistent excitement out of the schedule

release by tying it to the Lewinsky story:

On Wednesday, Jan. 21, 1998, the day the Lewinsky scandal exploded into

public view, Mrs. Clinton held meetings and discussions between 7:25 a.m.

and 7:50 a.m. with people whose names are redacted from her schedule.

So, on the day the Lewinsky scandal broke, the first lady met with somebody

that morning for 25 minutes. The Times had no idea who she met with or what

was discussed, yet the meeting deserved mention 10 years later because it

represented "a small window into Mrs. Clinton's activities after revelations

of the Monica Lewinsky affair in early 1998."

I suppose the emphasis should be placed on "small."

Truth is, we actually know that the 25-minute meeting the Times highlighted

had nothing to do with the Lewinsky scandal because, as the National

Archives made clear, the schedules released only reflected the first lady's

public meetings, which meant any face-to-face that had to do with Clinton's

personal affairs -- including various scandals and legal problems -- was

omitted.

Of course, that didn't stop reporters from pretending to be surprised that

non-public meetings were missing from the released schedules. At Newsweek,

that's what former Starr ally Michael Isikoff, along with Mark Hosenball,

did, noting that all kinds of scandal-related meetings were not part of the

public schedules released. As part of their "web exclusive [13]," the duo --

bringing back that beloved Clinton-era narrative where any innocuous fact

can be wrapped in ominous overtones -- reported that "anybody looking

through Hillary Clinton's newly released White House records for clues as to

how she handled this personal crisis will find ... absolutely nothing." Of

course, both reporters knew those meetings were never going to be included,

but they acted shocked just the same. (Ross at ABC played up the same

nonsense.)

Note that Isikoff and Hosenball also complained that for the month of August

1998, there is no reference in the first lady's public itinerary regarding

the fact that Al Qaeda forces bombed two U.S. Embassies in Africa. I kid you

not.

The Post and the Journal win for worst coverage

Some in the press also appeared to have been expecting Clinton's personal

diaries, not her public schedules, to be released. Acting the most confused

was Libby Copeland at The Washington Post, who wrote up an entire report

[14] about how the schedules didn't reveal anything about Clinton's

emotions. The documents were "all mechanics and no feeling."

Copeland wrote that "any insights here into the presidential candidate's

interior life ... are between the typewritten lines and the reader's

imagination." We know what Clinton "did on any particular day," Copeland

complained, "but not what she felt," not what "she thought about."

Honestly, what kind of fool turns to a government-issued public schedule to

try to divine "insights" into somebody's "interior life," into how they

"felt" or what they "thought about"?

Copeland, who works for the largest newspaper in the nation's capital, which

prides itself on its political sophistication and understanding of how the

federal government truly operates, was apparently bewildered at what the

schedule showed. Na