August 28, 2006
The Whitewater Scandal Posted by John Steele Gordon at 12:00 AM EST It seems to me that much of what Fred Smoler calls medias bias in his most recent post is instead simply scandal-mongering.
The media love scandal in high places—the higher the place and the more sordid the scandal the better—for the simple reason that it sells newspapers and gets eyeballs firmly planted in front of television sets. They are, I think, splendidly unbiased in their coverage of it. And there was more than enough smoke in the various aspects of the Whitewater scandal to make it reasonable to assume that there was a fire somewhere, and the media ran with it. Just consider:
1) One of the principal witnesses went to jail for contempt for a considerable period rather than testify before a grand jury. Those who have nothing of interest to say don’t do that very often.
2) The Rose Law Firm billing records went missing for several years and then suddenly appeared—like a mushroom after a rain—in a third-floor room in the White House. No one knows how they got there, or at least no one admits to knowing.
3) Mrs. Clinton made $100,000 speculating in cattle futures, having never speculated in commodities before and never having done so since. Anyone who thinks that was merely beginner’s luck doesn’t know much about trading commodities.
Any journalist worth his ink-stained fingers would be pursuing those stories.
My favorite example of the media’s wholly apolitical passion for scandal came at the very beginning of the Monica Lewinsky uproar. Pope John Paul II was scheduled to visit Cuba. The late pope was always a major story, and his visit to a once-Catholic country so officially atheist that it outlaws Christmas was bigger than usual. So all three broadcast networks sent their anchors to cover the event.
Suddenly the Monica story broke. What to do? Should the anchors continue to cover the pope’s visit to Cuba or hightail it home to cover a major White House sex scandal?
It wasn’t even close. Dan, Peter, and Tom were all on the plane to Washington before you could say pax vobiscum.
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