Investigating the old media

July 17, 2000

WASHINGTON — As I approached the E. Barrett Prettyman United States
Court House steps Thursday, I was taken aback by the gaggle of network
TV cameras staked out there.

Could it be that the White House e-mail scandal was finally getting
some traction in the TV news cycle? I asked a cameraman if he was there
for the e-mail hearings in U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth’s
courtroom.

“Huh? Nah, we’re covering the Bakaly trial,” he said.

That would be Charles Bakaly, former Independent Counsel Kenneth
Starr’s spokesman who’s on trial on a criminal contempt charge stemming
from news leaks during President Clinton’s impeachment case.

Figures, I muttered. (Tom Brokaw turned down a credible story about
Clinton raping a woman. Why would I think he’d talk about him possibly
hiding his e-mail from investigators?)

Then I saw a lone TV cameraman staked out under a tree, away from the
herd of a dozen or so other cameramen.

I walked over and asked him which story he’d been assigned to cover.
“Some hearing on missing White House e-mail,” he said.

Who are you with? “Fox,” he replied.

Figures, I muttered.

What a snapshot of old-media bias. Two trials, same building. In one
trial, an aide to the poster boy of the “vast right-wing conspiracy,”
the veritable bull’s-eye of all Clinton-hater haters, is accused of
obstructing justice. In the other, the White House is accused of
obstructing justice.

One creates a frenzy of coverage. The other a whisper.

But evidence of pro-White House bias only got thicker inside
courtroom 21, where the White House was forced to explain five months of
delays in producing e-mail evidence to the court.

The White House’s army of defense lawyers grasped at straws
throughout the hearing. It even tried to smear a plaintiff’s witness by
pointing out she’d had a nervous breakdown.

Of course, the tactic backfired when the former White House computer
manager testified she’d only broken down after Clinton appointees
ordered her to do illegal acts.

But here’s the behind-the-scenes media maneuvering that the public
never sees.

As lawyer Elizabeth Shapiro lit into the witness about her mental
health, reporters flipped open their notebooks and began scribbling
furiously. Up to that point, the press had barely stirred.

I sat on the back row of the spectator’s gallery, behind a CNN
correspondent. He had been sitting with his buddy from AP. His buddy
left for a potty break and missed Shapiro’s ad hominem attack.

When he returned, the CNN guy, grinning, leaned over and filled him
in about the breakdown. “She had had one, or she just had one?”
whispered the AP reporter excitedly. “She’d had one,” the CNN reporter
answered. More note scribbling.

After the hearing, the CNN guy scoffed at plaintiff’s lawyer Larry
Klayman’s chances of turning up any incriminating evidence against the
White House.

“You still don’t have a smoking gun,” he said, almost wishfully.

This is a common line among the mainstream media. Whatever the
Clinton scandal, they pooh-pooh the investigation as futile. No smoking
gun’s been found, so there probably isn’t one, so what’s the point of
searching?

I don’t recall any reporters copping that attitude during the
Watergate probe. Hope sprung eternal then.

Let’s revisit how a smoking gun emerged: Washington Post reporting
forced congressional hearings; hearings revealed the existence of Oval
Office tapes; and a U.S. District judge, after hearings, seized the
tapes, which produced the smoking gun.

Did Woodward and Bernstein know there was a smoking gun? No, but Ben
Bradlee still gave them the green light to keep digging. Did Sam Ervin
know there were tapes? No, but he still held hearings. Did Judge John
Sirica know Nixon would OK a cover-up? No, but he still went ahead with
his ruling.

This White House e-mail case, which is looking more and more like a
major cover-up, has similar earmarks. Yet the old media gatekeepers
can’t stop whining.

Luckily, Fox News also is covering the hearing. It’ll balance out
CNN’s coverage, assuming CNN even runs a story (it still hasn’t rolled
tape of interviews with e-mail whistle-blowers).

Or so I thought.

The next day, as the hearing recessed for lunch, I came upon a Fox
News reporter hanging out near the Bakaly stakeout. I’d recognized her
from the hearing.

I asked what she’d thought of the testimony so far. She whipped out
her reporter’s notepad and replayed the proceedings for me, adding her
spin. It was all White House.

I know, Fox is supposed to have Clinton’s number. Not this reporter.

She carried on about Klayman’s witness suffering a nervous breakdown,
while slamming Klayman’s own tactics and lines of questioning. All
suspicion rested with Judicial Watch, not the White House.

This woman’s job is to observe the hearings (which continue today),
take notes and jump on her cell phone and report newsworthy items back
to her producer. She’s not the on-air talent and doesn’t correspond with
Washington managing editor Brit Hume.

But her influence is just as great, if not greater. Thursday’s Fox
Special Report with Brit Hume bears that out:

Fox News’ Colin Spencer has the story.

COLIN SPENCER, FOX CORRESPONDENT: According to testimony given by the
White House tape restoration manager, they have already started copying
tapes, and since they are dealing with over 3,000 tapes, they say the
process could take up to a year to finish.

Then he brought up the witness having a nervous breakdown, and
added how the White House’s lawyers accused her of being “bitter” and
“disgruntled.”

You see, the White House spin got through even on Fox, and Hume
wasn’t the wiser.

Hume knows this president’s MO. He left ABC News after Clinton gave
him a dressing down in front of his press corps colleagues for asking a
legitimate question of Clinton’s Supreme Court nominee Ruth Bader
Ginsburg during a press conference.

Here’s my point: Hume, no real fault of his own, relied on a field
reporter who relied on her preconceived notion that the White House’s
motives for losing the e-mail and dragging its feet in finding it are
somehow purer than Judicial Watch’s motives for questioning the White
House’s story and the court’s motives for demanding the evidence now.

That led to her missing the story. It wasn’t the nervous breakdown.
Not because it’s not newsworthy, but because there was bigger news than
what that witness had to say.

On cross examination, the White House’s star witness, no less than
the project manager on the job, confessed that the lead contractor the
White House insisted on hiring has little, if any, experience retrieving
lost computer data. And he wanted to hire a more experienced contractor,
but his White House superiors vetoed him. It was a bombshell. Both Fox
and AP missed it.

Meanwhile, the rest of the gang who completely missed the e-mail
story are having to rationalize committing major resources to covering a
trial in which the defense is motioning to dismiss based on the
prosecution introducing not a single shred of proof against Bakaly.

If you think this coverage is bad, wait till the conventions.

In 1992, I witnessed something I’ll never forget covering the GOP
convention at Houston’s Astrodome. BellSouth sponsored a lounge for the
media in the Astrohall, replete with TV monitors, tables and chairs,
cold cuts, chips and the main attraction for reporters: beer kegs. All
free.

The long, raised platform of seats reserved for the press next to the
dais where Republican speakers spoke was only speckled with reporters
for most of the convention. Most camped out in the lounge and in their
tent-like workspaces nearby.

But it was an absolute ghost town during Pat Buchanan’s “hate”
speech. Before covering it, I went to the lounge to grab a sandwich. The
place was wall-to-wall reporters. And unusually loud.

Reporters had just gotten copies of Buchanan’s embargoed speech and
were reading it as Buchanan spoke on the TV monitors.

Nazi salutes went up. Epithets such as “fascist” were hurled. Beer
cups bounced off the TVs and walls. I stood there slack-jawed, not
because I was a big Buchanan fan, but because I was seeing up close the
visceral manifestation of the media groupthink I’d up to that point only
sensed from a distance.

Folks, there were media personalities you’d all recognize in that
lounge. Whatever you think of Buchanan, it was a shameful display.

Is it any wonder the speech was so quickly condemned as
“mean-spirited” and “extremist”? They panned it before it was delivered.
They didn’t cover it live, in the Astrodome, to gauge the audience’s
response, to watch Buchanan’s body language up close. Yet it’s their job
to absorb that color and nuance to tell a fuller, richer story.

The failure of the Fourth Estate to do its job — to tell the
unvarnished truth and put aside political agendas — is the real scandal
in this town.