The Press Hates Democrats

Last week, Media Matters wrote:

At this point, you'd have to be blind to miss the pattern. Every prominent progressive leader who comes along is openly derided in the media as fake, dishonest, conniving, out-of-the-mainstream, and weak. We simply can't continue to chalk this up to shortcomings on the part of Democratic candidates or their staff and consultants. It's all too clear that this will happen regardless of who the candidate or leader is; regardless of who works for him or her. The smearing of Jack Murtha should prove that to anyone who still doubts it.

The recent media treatment of Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.), Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) illustrate this point: No matter who emerges as a progressive leader, or a high-profile Democrat, they're in for the same flood of conservative misinformation in the media. Too many people chalk up outrageous media treatment of, say, Al Gore or John Kerry to the men's own flaws, pretending that if they were better candidates, they'd have gotten better press coverage. That's naïve. The Democratic Party could nominate Superman to be their next presidential candidate, and two things would happen: conservatives would smear him, and the media would join in. To illustrate this, we look back over the last dozen or so years.

By the mid-1990s, after several years of obsessive media coverage of the non-scandal known as "Whitewater" -- but with several more still to come -- some journalists recognized that they (or their colleagues) had gone overboard. Miami Herald reporter Tom Fiedler -- who broke the Gary Hart-Donna Rice affair in 1987 and, thus, can hardly be considered overly kind to Democrats -- wrote on August 4, 1996:

Listen closely and you'll hear the sound of what's happening to the Whitewater investigations: Pffffssssssst![...] The fact is, no matter how much Rush Limbaugh and the conspiracy theorists who bottom-feed on the Internet wish otherwise, none of the remaining matters raise legal questions of the sort that lead to indictments of the president's inner circle, including Mrs. Clinton.[...]

All of which should raise this question in the public's mind: How could such a nothing loom so large for so long over the national scene? Two things: superheated partisan politics and lousy journalism.[...] For me, the more troubling part of Whitewater is what it says about the state of American journalism. Many scholars and fellow journalists have documented well in recent years the danger of a national news media that practices a sort of ready- fire-aim sort of journalism.[...]

Reporting on Whitewater and all its aspects is beginning to become a textbook example of ready-fire-aim journalism run amok. Ironically, about the only place in America that wasn't sucked in on all the alleged misdeeds has been Little Rock, where the local news media -- even the newspaper long dedicated to trashing the Clintons -- has pooh-poohed Whitewater as a non- story concocted by Arkansas Republicans that only the most gullible outsiders would swallow.

And we almost did.

The first reporter to fall for the tale was The New York Times' Jeff Gerth, an investigative reporter. He produced an almost incomprehensible report on the Clintons' Whitewater land investments in early 1992. But incomprehensible or not, the fact that it appeared in so prestigious a paper as The New York Times insinuated that something must have been wrong. And that meant that every other baying hound in the pack had to give chase.

If anything, Fiedler was too kind to his colleagues. Writing at Salon.com, journalists Joe Conason and Gene Lyons offered an example of the media's dishonest Whitewater reporting:

Even more damning was a "Nightline" report broadcast that same evening. The segment came very close to branding Hillary Clinton a perjurer. In his introduction, host Ted Koppel spoke pointedly about "the reluctance of the Clinton White House to be as forthcoming with documents as it promised to be." He then turned to correspondent Jeff Greenfield, who posed a rhetorical question: "Hillary Clinton did some legal work for Madison Guaranty at the Rose Law Firm, at a time when her husband was governor of Arkansas. How much work? Not much at all, she has said."

Up came a video clip from Hillary's April 22, 1994, Whitewater press conference. "The young attorney, the young bank officer, did all the work," she said. "It was not an area that I practiced in. It was not an area that I know anything, to speak of, about." Next the screen filled with handwritten notes taken by White House aide Susan Thomases during the 1992 campaign. "She [Hillary] did all the billing," the notes said. Greenfield quipped that it was no wonder "the White House was so worried about what was in Vince Foster's office when he killed himself."

What the audience didn't know was that the ABC videotape had been edited so as to create an inaccurate impression.[...]

ABC News had seamlessly omitted thirty-nine words from her actual answer, as well as the cut, by interposing a cutaway shot of reporters taking notes. The press conference transcript shows that she actually answered as follows: "The young attorney [and] the young bank officer did all the work and the letter was sent. But because I was what we called the billing attorney -- in other words, I had to send the bill to get the payment sent -- my name was put on the bottom of the letter. It was not an area that I practiced in. It was not an area that I know anything, to speak of, about."

ABC News had taken a video clip out of context, and then accused the first lady of prevaricating about the very material it had removed. Within days, the doctored quotation popped up elsewhere. ABC used the identical clip on its evening news broadcast; so did CNN. The New York Times editorial page used it to scold Mrs. Clinton, as did columnist Maureen Dowd. Her colleague William Safire weighed in with an accusatory column of his own.

There's simply no other way to describe the Nightline report: it was dishonest.