By Mary Mostert, Analyst, Original Sources
August 6, 1998
It was only a week ago on July 29, 1998 that it was announced by Monica Lewinsky's attorney that an agreement had been reached for transactional immunity for Monica Lewinsky and her mother. Every since we have watched the most extraordinary behavior on the part of the nation's media.
Most of the national working press, including national news magazines, either would not report news that challenged Clinton's views. Or, if they did report such a story, they featured statements by White House spin doctors to discredit his opposition. Paula Jones was "trailer park trash." Kenneth Starr as "out of control" and a tool of the Right Wing Conspiracy. Linda Tripp and Lucienne Goldberg were liars, Republican operatives, pushing a book deal and intent on bringing down the president, and worse.
The day Lewinsky was granted transactional immunity, a column by a Clinton apologist appeared in my local paper, the Placerville, California Mountain Democrat, by Ron Goben, a weekly columnist. His column, entitled "The Prosecutor and the Press" wrote of the much discussed "Brill's Content" magazine in which he accused "Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr of leaking damaging information from the grand jury to the Washington Press Corps." He calls Brill's "Pressgate" article "an extremely well-documented article, 20,000 words long - it becomes clear that between 80 and 90 percent of the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky stories were either total fabrications or the product of some really shaky connections.
"Take the famous semen-stained dress, for example. That turns out to have been something simply made up by Lucianne Goldberg, the famous right-wing agent and Linda Tripp benefactress. It was a flat-out lie, yet it was repeated as fact or near-fact for a week or more by almost every news outlet in the country."
Goben observed in his column, "If I were a suspicious, paranoid type, I might think the media were part of a right-wing conspiracy to get Clinton. I don't think that, though, because I know enough about the journalistic personality to realize that all those reporters were after a scoop. (I don't doubt the existence of a right-wing conspiracy, however. Anytime you've got a hot-eyed zealot like Richard Mellon Scaife spreading his millions around, you've got prima facie evidence of a right-wing conspiracy."
A week ago Steven Brill was praised, largely by Brill himself, of course, as "exposing" the incompetence of the "media" that reported Goldberg's comment about the dress. In a week's time the very premise of his new little kingdom was demolished by Monica Lewinsky turned the supposedly non-existent dress over to the FBI.
Yesterday it was announced that this mythical dress does contain biological material and further tests are being done.
This has prompted a deluge of discussion and advice for the President as to how he should handle this situation. On Wednesday the Wall Street Journal published an Editorial entitled "Mea Culpa" beginning with the statement "Everyone from Dick Morris to Orrin Hatch suggests that all will be forgiven if President Clinton confesses and apologizes."
Actually, Orrin Hatch did not suggest that "all would be forgiven if President Clinton confesses and apologizes" but that is what the media interpreted his comment to mean. That was the lead-in for the writer to give of a tongue-in-cheek "Clinton apology" to the people including "Yes, I lied about Monica, and now that the evidence is growing incontrovertible, I have to admit it. I did that to protect my innocent wife and child, and am sure they will forgive me."
Arianna Huffington wrote a similar "apology" and appeal to the voters for forgiveness which was broadcast on the Rivera show.
The Wall Street Journal editorial expanded the "apology" to having the President apologize for asking Monica and Linda Tripp to lie, putting Craig Livingston up to ransacking FBI files, having "my good friend Vincent Foster sign a fraudulent tax return for 1992, omitting the gift I received from Jim McDougal when he assumed the Whitewater debts. I sincerely hope this didn't have anything to do with Vince's suicide. I apologize to the IRS, and will send a check for the taxes owed.
"I want to apologize to Paula Jones for all the loose talk about trailer trash and $100 bills. That's not right. I guess Kathleen Willey's life is ruined too. Kathy, seriously, I do apologize.
"I want to apologize to the staff of workers that Hillary and I fired from the White House Travel Office. I shouldn't have let my good friend Harry Thomason talk me into that..."
The editorial ended with the following, "So now I can say that I sit before you tonight with a clean conscience. I ask the American people who elected me to forgive me for misleading them for five years, and I promise never again to tell a lie, engage in illicit sex, obstruct justice or abuse the powers invested in my high office."
We appear to now have two main schools of thought on this. One is being put forth by the President and his followers: (1)The American people don't care. What the American people REALLY care about is saving social security and the President's program and the media should just drop all this reporting about Clinton and Lewinsky.
The other school of thought, coming from the media, is that somehow an apology from the president would "fix" everything. Rumors from some advisors in the White House are reported to favor just such a scenario.
Actually, everyone is guessing. No one knows what Bill Clinton is going to do. Furthermore, I don't really think anyone knows what the American people will do once they have access to the information that will be in Ken Starr's report.
The media, which has been reporting opinion as fact for months on this issue, cannot, this time, effectively control what the people will know. Undoubtedly I, and others, will make the entire Starr report in full available on the Internet, if we as members of the media have access to it. There are millions of Americans online today - who were not online just two years ago.
Once the people have the facts, they can decide whether or not the facts require impeachment or whether the American people should just forget the whole thing.
What I am seeing already is a massive thoughtfulness taking place where people really want to know. Some of them will be forced by information in the Starr report to struggle with their current opinion of the president. That process is already taking place and we are watching people in political life handle it in different ways.
While the issue the media seems to hammer at constantly is the public's opinion of who is telling the truth in this situation, they are studiously avoiding facing up to the fact that most Americans do not believe the media is telling them truth in this or other stories. People are not ready to "kick the president out of office" based on ANYTHING the media is telling them at this point.
However, that does not mean, as Democrat apologists keep telling us, that Americans are not INTERESTED in what the president has done while in office. People are getting very interested in the subject. The American people are not stupid and they are not sheep. They care.
But, they don't know what is true at this point. A week ago columnists were saying the story about Monica's stained dress was proof that the President's critics were lying. A week later, it is announced that the dress, now in the hands of the FBI, contains biological material and further testing is taking place.
Has any of the media apologized to the American people for lying to them about the dress in the meanwhile? Is it time for the main sources of news most Americans rely on to apologize to Rush Limbaugh, Mike Reagan, Matt Drudge, Ollie North and others who have reported stories months or years ago that the dominant media labeled "lies" or "right wing extremism" - but which they are just beginning to report as "news?"
If Ken Starr's report provides strong evidence of sex, obstruction of justice, misuse of political power, illegal campaign funds, misuse of FBI files of his political opponents, wrecking the lives of loyal people in the White House Travel Office, or giving supercomputers to China so they can aim missiles more accurately at American cities, the majority of the people will realize they have been deceived. And, it will make them mad. It will make them VERY mad if the stock market continues to fall, the currency becomes unstable or jobs start disappearing.
And when Americans get mad, no Hollywood or spin-doctor "apology" will save the president or, probably, the dominant media, from their wrath.
To comment: mmostert@originalsources.com