Conspiracy Commerce

Writers with a pro-White House history have recently been asking questions about The Wall Street Journal’s coverage of Arkansas housewife Linda Ives, whose crusade for answers to the unsolved deaths of her son Kevin and his friend Don Henry was detailed here April 18. Indeed, this editorial page first learned of the “conspiracy report” from Philip Weiss, a writer on assignment for the New York Times Magazine, who cheerfully acknowledged that he had discussed the Ives case with White House officials and had been given a report on “the conspiracy feeding frenzy.”

The Wall Street Journal (See Related Article Below, “White House Heat”)

On January 6. 1997, The Wall Street Journal broke the story that the White House counsel’s office had compiled a 331 page report which chronicled their analysis of how “fantasy becomes fact” as rumors are advanced through the “media food chain”. According to the report, well funded right wing extremists introduce conspiracy theories and innuendo which are then picked up by ideological journals and ultimately ends up in mainstream newspapers.

When White House Press Secretary, Mike McCurry, was questioned about the report at a White House press briefing, he stated that the report was compiled in an effort to protect reporters from “getting a bunch of bad stories In their papers” and “protect the American people from bad information”. He also stated that the taxpayers’ cost of compiling this report were minimal because they had relied on research by the Democratic National Committee. McCurry also denied that it was an enemies list even though (according to the Washington Times) “it shows that the administration conducted extensive surveillance of Mr. Clinton’s critics.”

Obviously, the White House never intended for the general press and public, or the targets in particular, to know about this list. The report, which strongly resembles a “hit list”, was given to a few select journalists who were considered friends of the White House who were encouraged to expose these “conspiracy nuts”.

As a result of being a target on the list, Linda Ives was contacted by Phillip Weiss who informed her that he had received a “packet of news clippings” from the White House and was writing a story for the New York Times Magazine about Clinton bashers. Linda was stunned that the White House had any interest her. Linda was reluctant to talk with him but agreed to an interview. Prior to their scheduled meeting, Linda called several people, including Micah Morrison with the WSJ, to ask if they knew Phillip and what his reputation as a journalist was. By all accounts, the opinions were that Phillip had an excellent reputation as a Journalist. Linda was comfortable with Phillip and felt like her story would be told fairly and accurately. (See Related Article Below, “The Clinton Haters”)

For Immediate Release
January 9, 1997

PRESS BRIEFING BY MIKE MCCURRY

The Briefing Room
2:53 P.M. EST

Q Mike, this 300-page report that Fabiani and DNC put together — what was the purpose of it? Why would the White House waste its time putting together this “media food chain” theory?

MR. MCCURRY: It’s not a waste of time. We were actually responding to requests. This is the document we gave, Wolf, CNN back in 1995, so you’ve had it for about over a year now.

(Laughter.) About every news organization in this room, in fact, we’ve provided these materials because we wanted to refute some of the very aggressive charges being made fallaciously against the President, most often on the Internet coming from a variety of kind of crazy, right-wing sources.

Now, what you’re talking about is, in fact, a two-and-a-half page cover sheet attached to about 300-plus pages of information, most of them news clips written by news organizations represented in this room, and also that the DNC research staff prepared and passed out at press conferences that most of your news organizations attended.

Q Let me see if I can clear something up. Does this purport to show a conspiracy on the part of the news media?

MR. MCCURRY: No, absolutely not. It purports to show that the conspiracy theorists who are very active on the subject of Whitewater and other subjects very often plant their stories, plant their information in various places, and then we kind of give you a theory of how things get picked up and translated and moved through what we call “the media food chain,” or what others have called “the media food chain.” A good example of this: the Wall Street editorial page carries a column that mentions this deep, dark secret 330-page report that then gets picked up by The Washington Times and written, and then gets asked here in the press briefing room. So, in other words, in this Fellini-like manner, what we are doing right now is proof positive of the kind of cycle that we’re talking about.

Q So you’re employing the very tactics that you say the right-wing think-tanks employ to get stories in the mainstream media?

MR. MCCURRY: You’re suggesting that we planted this in the Wall Street Journal editorial page so we could draw some attention to the material that we’re using to refute some of the fallacious charges. That’s an interesting theory. I don’t know that I buy that theory.

Q Like what, what particularly? What are the fallacious charges?

MR. MCCURRY: They talk about stuff about some of the work of a couple of so-called “media centers,” a couple of wealthy philanthropists that subsidize the work of organizations that present themselves as news organizations — they write stories, they get picked up elsewhere on the Internet. Sometimes they get picked up overseas, typically in London, typically by one particular reporter, that stuff then gets fed back into news organizations here. There’s one news organization here in town that likes to — they won’t attach their own bylines and their own names of their own reporters to the stories they write, but they’ll pick up stories, they’ll put them in their pages here, and then that triggers additional inquiries.

So what they did was, they basically took — in response to inquiries we got — we got a lot of inquiries back in the summer of ’95 on the general subject of how does the Internet — the arrival of the Internet and discussions on the Internet, how does that fuel the Whitewater story. And, in fact, we used to get a lot of inquiries in Mark Fabiani’s shop from news organizations that heard this story that they really want to check out and want a White House response to. And we say, wait a minute, this is the same crazy rumor that’s now chased itself all the way around in a circle, and let us show you how this circle works so you can understand the genesis of some of these stories.

So this is an effort, I think, that dates back now almost July, August of 1995, an effort by Mark’s shop to really help journalists understand that they shouldn’t be used by those who are really concocting their own conspiracies and their own theories and then peddling them elsewhere.

Q Mike, let me see if I understand. You believe this is an accurate portrayal of the way the media food chain works? Is that correct? You believe this is an accurate description —

MR. MCCURRY: I think it is accurate to say that there area lot of groups that fund — groups that are positioned on the far right of the political spectrum that fund people who peddle conspiracy theories, and that those then sometimes show up in publications that represent themselves to be bonified sources of news; that those then get picked up on the Internet; people start recycling the material on the Internet; that sometimes we have instances — and we’ve had several just recently of one particular reporter, one particular paper in London who writes things that are just not true; in fact, in one case just recently who had to be formally retracted — that that then gets picked up and reprinted here in the United States and then becomes the basis of inquiries that some of you make here. So, in a sense, you get misled and misused by people who really start off as — with the goal of actually planting information to do political damage to the President.

Q With all due respect, I don’t think I got an answer to my question, which is, do you believe this is an accurate portrayal of —

MR. MCCURRY: Do I believe what I just said is an accurate portrayal of how this works? Yes.

Q No, no, do you believe this report prepared at taxpayer expense is an accurate portrayal of —

MR. MCCURRY: Whoa, whoa, this was not a report prepared at tax — this was a two-and-a-half page cover memo that went on DNC clippings. Most of this — if you take a look at it — and again, I think most of your news organizations have had this material for sometime now, but it’s basically a compilation of newspaper clippings that have appeared in the pages of many of the organizations represented here, other materials, other samples of materials that have existed on the Internet, plus materials that the DNC research staff prepared to refute some of the fallacious charges that have been made against the President.

Now, what we did — what the Counsel’s Office did here was to just put a little two-and-a-half page summary on the top of this thing so you could see how it worked.

Q Do you believe that summary is accurate?

MR. MCCURRY: I believe that summary provides — that’s the material — it supports the material — it explains and describes the material that is attached to it, sure. It’s a summary. I believe it’s a summary of the material that is attached to it.

Q Why wouldn’t you respond — you’re saying this is in response to news media inquiries in the summer of ’95 — whose idea was it to respond in this fashion, to compile it like this? Was it Fabiani? Was it somebody else?

MR. MCCURRY: Well, it was his shop that did this. He actually had one of his more junior staffers do this who was familiar with the Internet. What had happened at the time, we began to see a correlation between inquiries coming in from journalists and rumors that were being circulated on the Internet. And so the causal link, there was we’d better pay closer attention to stuff that’s creeping out on to the Internet because it’s beginning to seep into inquiries that are coming from legitimate news organizations. They hear something; they then ask what our response is. And then our concern was that the material was phony, that was showing up on the Internet was going to get recycled into stories that said White House denies x, and x was a rumor to begin with in some cases. And we document that in the material — material that came from the far right.

Your paper, in particular — and we gave the Washington Post this back in July of ’95. So you’ve had this same document now for some —

Q Is it the exact same document or just portions of the document?

MR. MCCURRY: Yes — no, the document.

Q All 331 pages?

MR. MCCURRY: Well, the 331 pages — again, I’ll tell you it’s this two-and-a-half page cover sheet attached to clips. Now, much of it is clippings that came from some of the same news organizations that we provided it to. But to show by the coverage — how the coverage of the Whitewater story itself unfolded and how that — how various news sources manipulated things.

Q And James Carville was the one who first spoke of this — at least publicly — of this media food chain a year earlier.

MR. MCCURRY: Back in April of ’94, right.

Q So he came up with this theory by himself? Carville?

MR. MCCURRY: He — there are a lot of people who have talked about this, a lot of people who have written about it. In fact, there’s now been a couple of scholars who have done papers on how this all works. There’s a scholarly paper I read not too long ago that was done at some conference, as journalists look into how these things have been covered.

Warren.

Q You folks have always denied that there’s a bunker

mentality here, paranoia regarding Whitewater and these other issues. Isn’t that exactly what this looks like — here are our enemies who are out to get us?

MR. MCCURRY: No. This doesn’t say enemies, it says –it describes, Warren, pretty accurately how things were, of which, admittedly, your news organization plays a role.

Q Well, how would you suggest a reporter find out about, or pursue a rumor or a report, even if it comes from the Internet, if not asking it here?

MR. MCCURRY: Well, in this case they call the Counsel’s Office; the Counsel’s Office says, hey, wait a minute, before you legitimize this rumor by putting it in print in your paper, take a look at how this information circles, chases itself around in a circle; so let us show you how these things spill over and become stories before you write. And in many cases, I think it’s fair to say we prevented erroneous information from being reported and we saved some journalists from not putting a lot of crazy stuff —

Q That’s why the journalists ask. And if they get a denial here —

MR. MCCURRY: And that’s — and we help them understand it. I mean, the notion that it’s a bunker mentality is — basically, we’re responding to inquiries we’re getting with the information that refutes the charges and answers the charges that have been made.

Q Mike, in a cover story this week, Newsweek suggests that the White House employed those tactics you describe, too, in the other direction, in its favor, to discourage reporters from covering what was a legitimate story — the Paula Jones lawsuit. In this case, you had Carville go out with statements about trailer parks, then friendly reporters picked it up, then you sent reporters those statements. And their suggestion is that then they were steered away from stories that probably were legitimate. Do you think that’s —

MR. MCCURRY: Quote, unquote “legitimacy” of that story will depend, of course, on what happens in a court of law.

Q Well, it’s before the Supreme Court tomorrow. I mean —

MR. MCCURRY: What happens in a court of law if and when the case goes to trial.

Q But we normally cover cases that are heard before the Supreme Court. My question is, do you think that piece in Newsweek is accurate, that the White House used these tactics that you’re describing in the other direction?

MR. MCCURRY: I think that it’s certainly true that the White House was aggressive in responding to false, fallacious, damaging and politically motivated attacks on the President. And we should be. We have a responsibility to the President to do that.

Q Mike, was the only purpose of this document to advise news organizations, or was it provided to anyone else — staffers? Was it provided to contributors?

MR. MCCURRY: Look, the people who are most familiar with it and who used it to respond to journalists recall using it mostly with journalists. I don’t know — a lot of the material was material that originated from the DNC, and it was used at the DNC and no doubt given to people who were out in the public defending the President from some of the charges he faced. They were pretty aggressive about getting people out particularly on talk radio and others to respond to some of the charges that the President was using. I’m sure the material circulated in that fashion, too. But it was used here and, frankly, with the Counsel’s Office, it was to put a little summary sheet on the front so, knowing how busy all of you are, we thought we ought to make it a little easier for you to understand the big batch of clips that were provided.

Q Why didn’t you provide it to everyone? Why wasn’t it released as a White House document?

MR. MCCURRY: It may very well have been.

Q No, it wasn’t.

MR. MCCURRY: It may very well have been provided to people — I mean, it was provided to people who were working on the Whitewater story. I don’t have a full list of every news organization that got it.

Q It was not made available to everyone who covered the White House on a daily basis.

MR. MCCURRY: Well, it was used in response to inquiries. I mean, we didn’t do a formal release of this. We were trying to help people who were asking about stories that they had heard or rumors that they were checking out, and that’s basically what it was. I’m told that anyone who asked about this stuff, we put the material together and sent it over to them. So maybe if you didn’t ask about it, you didn’t get it, but frankly, we weren’t worried that you were then going to take a poisonous report and repeat it. Q Mike, going back to Fabiani, is this the only time

where we have had the taxpayer-funded Counsel’s Office working with the DNC, and can you address the propriety of that?

MR. MCCURRY: That is thoroughly appropriate for the White House Legal Counsel’s Office to provide information in response to press inquiries, to use as the source of the information provided material that comes from whatever source it comes from. In this case, the bulk of the material comes from news reports, and that’s thoroughly appropriate, and they’ve got a DNC clipping service that clips newspapers up there and they sent a batch of newspaper clips over to us, plus materials that they had used, and it’s perfectly appropriate for the Legal Counsel’s Office to use that in response to media inquiries.

Q Is that a unique instance —

MR. MCCURRY: The — quote, unquote — “taxpayer expense” — here was a younger guy in the Legal Counsel’s Office who took the time to put a two-and-a-half page cover memo on the clips. So there wasn’t a lot of taxpayer expense involved. But, yes, it is appropriate to do that.

Q Did that package go to the President at the time?

MR. MCCURRY: No, because the President doesn’t have the time to read — look, this is basically the information that refutes a lot of trash that was out in the semi-public domain about Whitewater, and the President doesn’t waste his time getting mesmerized by that kind of information.

Q Was he aware of that project?

MR. MCCURRY: He was certainly aware that the Legal Counsel’s Office was making sure that people — that we steer people away from bad information. You know, he would expect us to do that, and he has certainly expected us to respond to media inquiries.

Q He did not see the specific package?

MR. MCCURRY: I have no idea. There were a lot of — look, there was a lot of material — you could go to a press conference that Chairman Don Fowler or someone would have in which this issue would get raised, and they would pass this stuff out. You could occasionally get it here when we wanted to save you folks time and say, we don’t have time to go up to the Hill or, we can’t get this stuff from the DNC, we sometimes hope you get it here through that office. That, I hope, has happened on numerous occasions over the past couple of years.

Q Mike, but is there another instance you can think of where the Counsel’s Office has worked on a project with the DNC which is obviously political —

MR. MCCURRY: They can work — we’re working on one right now in responding to the questions about financial contributions, because sometimes there are issues in which there is a DNC event, that there’s White House participation and we have to make sure that —

Q That’s a little bit different because that involves activities, whether things —

MR. MCCURRY: Well, it’s in this case exactly the same thing. It’s responding to press inquiries and how do you make sure that they’re getting the answers to one part of a story that involves them and we’re getting the answers to stuff that involves us. So they coordinate the effort to respond to press inquiries —

Q I don’t think it is the same thing. You were using the DNC basically as a research tool in the instance of this report, and in the instance of the campaign finance stuff, they are intimately involved.

MR. MCCURRY: Bill, the issue here is that we are responding — the DNC is using its research capacity to respond to political attacks on the President. Now, it is more appropriate for the DNC research division, paid for by the party’s political funding, to do that type of work to respond to political charges to the President than it would have been for the Legal Counsel’s Office to do it. Now, the Legal Counsel has every right to have access to that information and to help use that in responding to press inquiries. Your suggestion by — the implication of the question is somehow or other we should have used taxpayer resources to assemble the research material to be used. That would not have been proper.

Q No, the implication of the question was that your previous answer was disingenuous when you compared the two things and said that they were essentially the same.

MR. MCCURRY: I was trying to describe — the question was, are there instances in which there is cooperation in something like this, and I said, yes, when you’re responding to media inquiries. The DNC and the Legal Counsel’s Office have been in contact. That’s been happening regularly, and most of your news organizations have been pursuing the story know that.

Q — talk about the false and fallacious charges in regard to Paula Jones, does the President believe that the media

should not be reporting about the Paula Jones story, or —

MR. MCCURRY: No. Look, the Constitution of the United States is called into question in one respect in regards to that case, and it’s going to be argued in front of the United States Supreme Court, and coming pretty soon. That’s obviously a news story, and it’s going to be covered, and no one would suggest otherwise. That is a legitimate story, of course, because of the constitutional issues that are involved, that the Court has decided to hear.

But what we’re talking about is — look, everyone in here knows there’s a fair amount of nut-case material that floats around with respect to Whitewater, and some of it, unfortunately and tragically and very, very painfully, has to do with the death of a former White House staffer. And that stuff gets peddled, and sometimes — in fact, in the summer of 1995, all too often was coming back at us from a lot of news organizations that, frankly, should have known better. So we would say, wait a minute, you guys are chasing a story that has very, very suspicious roots and let us document for you how this stuff gets out into the news flow, so that we can protect you and protect your readers and protect the American people from bad information.

Q Mike, so to make sure that I understand — the use of the term “conspiracy” —

MR. MCCURRY: Yes, these are conspiracy theorists. These are the conspiracy — it’s called in the document “the conspiracy commerce.” These are the guys who are the conspiracy nuts who have been peddling this stuff for years and years.

Q That refers to the initial — the nut cases, to use your term, and not the process —

MR. MCCURRY: That’s the reference — have you read this little cover that I’m talking about?

Q Yes. And not the process by —

MR. MCCURRY: That’s what it is.

Q — which it reaches the bulk of the American public.

MR. MCCURRY: The process by which — that’s called really more kind of the — what did he call it “the food chain,” It’s called more “the media food chain” than that.

Q I just want to make sure that the food chain itself is not a part of a conspiracy in the belief of the White House. (Laughter.)

MR. MCCURRY: No, but there are plenty of examples of how this stuff gets fed back in to news organization and then sort of gets picked up. Look, you all have written about this, and this has been written about over and over again. You can pick up every other issue of The Columbia Journalism Review and see exactly the same subject covered. I just read a pretty interesting academic paper on this that’s been done by a scholar. You know, this is part of it.

Warren, equal time for The Washington Times.

Q Thank you. About six months ago, Hazel O’Leary spent a bunch of taxpayers’ money to rate how reporters covered her department, whether they were favorable or unfavorable. At the time, you were quite clear in saying that was inappropriate use. Can you explain to me what the difference is between that and this?

MR. MCCURRY: The difference here is we’re trying to protect reporters, not rate them. We’re trying to protect people from getting a bunch of bad stories in their papers.

Q Does that include The New York Post, The Washington Times and The Wall Street Journal?

MR. MCCURRY: Look, the New York Post and The Washington Times are specifically identified as two news organizations that pick up some of these erroneous reports, very often coming from London, and reprint them without having the courage of putting their own bylines on them. And I believe — certainly it has happened in the case of The Washington Times.

Q — my paper has broken a lot of stories, important stories, on all these subjects we’re talking about, Mike.

MR. MCCURRY: Right. But you’ve also — that was a story that you had to retract because it was then retracted by the paper in question.

Q I wonder if I could read you something by Steve Hess, who I think we all agree is a respected presidential scholar and not a nut case. He said that this thing is the sort of stuff the Christic Society used to put out, that if Ronald Reagan had talked about a liberal media conspiracy like this it would have been laughed at on the front pages of major news — let me just finish.

MR. MCCURRY: Deborah, I read this quote.

Q — of paranoia, if not dementia in the White House.

MR. MCCURRY: I read his quote. You send him my transcript from this briefing and ask him if he wants to revise and amend those remarks. And just ask him. And then if he stands by the remarks at that point call me back and I’ll answer you.

Q Mike, you referred before on this report that a younger guy in Fabiani’s shop did the two-and-a-half pages. Can you tell us who it was?

MR. MCCURRY: I can check for you, yes.

Thank you. See you all tomorrow.

END 3:33 P.M. EST

#294-01/09       Top↑

By Micah Morrison

Bill Clinton’s Whitewater problems are due to a “media food chain” through which conservative philanthropist Richard Scaife engineers a “media frenzy”–at least according to a White House report running 331 pages. The notion: Mr. Scaife’s funding of the Western Journalism Center and publication of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review introduces “conspiracy theories and innuendo,” which are then picked up by the likes of the American Spectator magazine and London’s Sunday Telegraph. From there they enter the “right-of-center mainstream media,” such as the Washington Times and this editorial page. Then Congress looks into the matter and “the story now has the legitimacy to be covered by the remainder of the American mainstream press as a ‘real’ story.”

Chortling over his newly disclosed power, Mr. Scaife asks, “Now that George Stephanopoulos is going to ABC, does that mean he’ll be working for me?” Yet the report from the White House counsel’s office–entitled “Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce” and coupling a series of brief analyses with a large package of press clips and Internet gleanings–demonstrates the extremes of White House press management. Lanny Davis, the new White House special counsel for scandals, says the report was created “in response to press inquiries and provided to journalists who asked.” Mr. Davis complied with this newspaper’s request for a copy, but declined to respond to questions.

A version of the report was posted on the Internet by an ostensibly independent group of Clinton defenders, the Back to Business Committee. The committee, chaired by former Democratic National Committee vice-chairwoman Lynn Cutler, lists a board of advisers that includes former Reps. Tony Coelho and Robert Drinan, S.J.; Dukakis campaign manager Susan Estrich; Carter administration officials Jody Powell, Anne Wexler and Andrew Young; as well as Arthur Coia, president of the court-supervised Laborer’s International Union.

White House attempts to manage press coverage of “Whitewater” are especially interesting now, because a new round of press skepticism about the administration is clearly under way, propelled by the controversy over Indonesian campaign contributions and the abrupt departures of a slew of administration officials responsible for damage control. There has also been increased attention to the relative lack of press coverage of the scandals, most prominently in a November article on the Paula Jones case by Stuart Taylor Jr. of American Lawyer magazine and in a Dec. 16 New Republic cover story, “Scandal-shy,” by William Powers. But these articles only scratched the surface of the Clinton administration’s extraordinary efforts to block, blunt and beat down reporters on the scandal beat.

One of the striking things about press coverage of Whitewater is the number of star reporters who, for one reason or another, are no longer on the beat. Investigative reporter Douglas Frantz quit the Los Angeles Times over its handling of a December 1993 Troopergate story that he co-authored with Bill Rempel. ABC’s Jim Wooten took himself off the scandal beat after the network killed a Troopergate-related story, Mr. Powers reported. Washington Post reporter Michael Isikoff left the paper after a bitter internal dispute over the Paula Jones story; he continues to report scandal stories for Newsweek, a sister publication.

At Time magazine, investigative journalist Richard Behar was involved in a dispute with Arkansas powerhouse Tyson Foods over a report linking the company to cash payments allegedly destined for then-Gov. Clinton. Mr. Behar eventually left for sister publication Fortune, though he reports that Time stood behind him even when Tyson yanked a large advertising contract. Even the tabloid New York Post let reporter Christopher Ruddy go; he now details discrepancies in the investigation of Vincent Foster’s death for Mr. Scaife’s Tribune-Review.

Survivors on the Whitewater beat report, both on and off the record, that life is uncomfortable. Surrogates for the president–including White House spokesman Mike McCurry, ABC-bound presidential aide George Stephanopoulos, and private attorney David Kendall–complain to news executives and lobby to kill stories. And in what Mr. Powers called a chilling “divide-and-conquer approach,” whispering campaigns about allegedly shoddy work are launched in an effort to convince reporters to ignore the work of their colleagues. The New Republic story added that a particular target has been Susan Schmidt, a widely admired reporter for the Washington Post.

Jeff Gerth of the New York Times, who broke the original Whitewater story in 1992 and who, along with other Times reporters, revealed Hillary Clinton’s now famous commodities trades, has been an abiding White House target. “For a long time, the White House thought if they could just neutralize Gerth, the whole scandal thing would go away,” says a White House reporter from a rival newspaper. “In private, they would just savage the guy.” By contrast, Jerry Seper of the Washington Times, who also provided early ground-breaking coverage of the scandals, says he escapes pressure because the White House strategy is to ignore him.

Recently, Mr. Gerth and fellow Timesman Stephen Labaton reported on White House visits by Lippo Group scion James Riady. They wrote that presidential aide Bruce Lindsey “was the central figure behind the White House’s decision to call the meetings social calls, ignoring the counsel of two White House lawyers.” The White House explanation was false; after the election, it emerged that Mr. Riady had discussed trade policy toward Indonesia and China with Mr. Clinton at these meetings, and on one occasion had successfully lobbied for the transfer of now-suspect fund-raiser John Huang from a post at the Commerce Department to the Democratic National Committee.

The Times story directly quoted former White House lawyer Jane Sherburne as warning against the false description of the meetings. According to reporters and others, White House aides immediately launched personal assaults on the two Times reporters in off-record remarks. Then pro-Clinton TV talking head and Time magazine columnist Margaret Carlson attacked Messrs. Gerth and Labaton by name in the Dec. 16 Time, linked reporting on the Indonesia controversy to liberal bete noir Rush Limbaugh, and cited anonymous sources “close to Sherburne” saying that the White House lawyer “felt she had never been overruled or lied to by Lindsey and that the Times had torqued up a conflict.”

Actually, the meticulous Gerth-Labaton report had not used the words “lied” or “overruled.” (The latter was used in a Times editorial, and certainly seems a legitimate opinion to draw from the facts of the case.) Time then ran a letter from New York Times Washington bureau chief Andrew Rosenthal and an editor’s note setting the record straight. While such sniping may seem minor, reporters view attacks like Ms. Carlson’s as a kind of drip-drip water torture to try to undermine the credibility of journalists working the story.

The Columbia Journalism Review conceded in another editor’s note that an attack it had made on Mr. Gerth had also been in error, inaccurately describing how he obtained one of the first interviews with Whitewater witness David Hale. That mistake occurred in a May-June 1994 article by Trudy Lieberman. (Just recently, the magazine has named a high-powered new editor, Marshall Loeb, formerly of Fortune.) Ms. Lieberman’s article, “Churning Whitewater,” closely parallels parts of the White House “conspiracy report.”

In particular, Ms. Lieberman breathlessly flayed “the frenzied media” for listening to information from partisan sources such as Citizens United, and its one-time Whitewater investigator, David Bossie. Of course reporters listen to such sources, and then seek independent confirmation before passing stories up the “food chain.” Mr. Bossie’s information, much of it in documents, checked out so often he moved on to become a congressional investigator, though still frequently under attack. In the same recent issue that defended Mr. Powers against a White House attack on his article, the New Republic also demanded that Mr. Bossie, in a new position with a House oversight committee, be fired for news leaks–perhaps the only known example of a publication demanding that someone be fired for telling the truth to journalists.

Writers with a pro-White House history have recently been asking questions about The Wall Street Journal’s coverage of Arkansas housewife Linda Ives, whose crusade for answers to the unsolved deaths of her son Kevin and his friend Don Henry was detailed here April 18. Indeed, this editorial page first learned of the “conspiracy report” from Philip Weiss, a writer on assignment for the New York Times Magazine, who cheerfully acknowledged that he had discussed the Ives case with White House officials and had been given a report on “the conspiracy feeding frenzy.”

Mrs. Ives alerted this page that Mr. Weiss had called, asking “what journalists I was talking to. Mark Fabiani, the White House spokesman, had sicced him on me, he said. I found that curious. What would the White House want with me?” Mrs. Ives had gone through essentially the same experience several months earlier with a producer from CBS’s “60 Minutes.” When her teenage son and his friend were run over by a train in August 1987, the state medical examiner ruled the death “accidental,” saying the boys had fallen asleep on the tracks after smoking marijuana. A second autopsy called it murder; one local prosecutor who developed information suggesting air-drops of drugs might be involved was run out of the state, while a second prosecutor is now himself the subject of a federal drug-corruption probe. Mrs. Ives says that “60 Minutes” had been interested in the story as an example of “Clinton bashing,” but killed the report after listening to her account.

New Yorker writer David Remnick, on assignment for a forthcoming PBS documentary segment on this page and The Wall Street Journal Editor Robert L. Bartley, also asked about the Ives case. His question concerned the relevance of the story to Bill Clinton–the answer to which is that Gov. Clinton’s support of state medical examiner Fahmy Malak was highly controversial, and that President Clinton’s hand-picked U.S. attorney in Little Rock, Paula Casey, now has authority over the drug-corruption probe involving public officials entangled in the case. Although the Little Rock FBI forwarded Ms. Casey the train deaths file 18 months ago, she has taken no action on it.

ABC News also has had a series of battles with the White House over the Clinton scandals. In 1994, when the network was set to run a story about Gov. Clinton’s use of state troopers to procure women, Mr. Clinton’s private attorney David Kendall flew to New York to lobby against the piece. White House officials suggested that ABC correspondents look into reports that the main source for the story, Arkansas State Trooper L.D. Brown, had murdered his mother. The ugly allegation was false, but the ABC story never ran.

In June, the White House launched a furious blitz at ABC executives to block former FBI agent Gary Aldrich from appearing on “This Week With David Brinkley” to discuss his book on White House mores. ABC didn’t back down, but NBC’s “Dateline” and CNN’s “Larry King Live” caved to White House pressure, canceling plans to interview Mr. Aldrich. “We killed it,” Mr. Stephanopoulos later boasted.

Last January, ABC correspondent Jackie Judd and investigative producer Chris Vlasto were working on a story about the political nature of Sen. Alfonse D’Amato’s Whitewater Committee. The White House, Ms. Judd recalled, “instantaneously produced a D’Amato packet.” The D’Amato “Ethics Sampler” recounted allegations of the senator’s influence peddling and supposed mob ties. “The packet was given to us without any conditions,” Ms. Judd said, “so it became part of the story.” White House spokesman Mike McCurry was furious that the derogatory information was attributed to the White House. According to several people familiar with the incident, Mr. McCurry complained to network executives, and in an angry call to Mr. Vlasto, he screamed: “You’re never going to work in this town again!”

Mr. Vlasto, still employed by ABC and still working on Whitewater stories, confirmed the incident in a brief phone call, but declined to be interviewed. Mr. McCurry denied that he threatened Mr. Vlasto, but said he sometimes criticizes stories.

Apparently not everyone is as fortunate as Mr. Vlasto. New York Daily News reporter David Eisenstadt was fired Nov. 11 after filing a story linking top Clinton fund-raiser Terry McAuliffe to Asian fund-raising and Mr. Huang. Mr. Eisenstadt’s attorney sent the Daily News a letter saying he would file a lawsuit because the paper had “improperly thwarted the truth and succumbed to political pressure” in terminating the reporter. James Ledbetter of the Village Voice reported that Mr. Eisenstadt was fired “after the Clinton campaign reportedly complained to News co-publisher Mort Zuckerman,” a frequent White House guest. Another Daily News reporter, Ying Chan, has been charged with criminal libel in Taiwan after co-authoring with a Taiwanese magazine writer an article reporting that a top official of the island nation’s ruling party had offered an Arkansas operative $15 million for the Clinton campaign. While several media organizations and New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis have protested Ms. Chan’s treatment, the Daily News has remained silent.

In an interview, Mr. Zuckerman indicated he was not aware of Ms. Chan’s plight, but rejected suggestions Mr. Eisenstadt had been fired due to political pressure. “We will publish and have published critical reports on the Clinton administration,” Mr. Zuckerman said.

With revelations continuing to unfold in the myriad Clinton scandals, it seems unlikely the White House effort to intimidate the press will end anytime soon. “The White House views this as a war,” says ABC’s Jackie Judd, “and they’re going to use whatever they can to win it.”

Mr. Morrison is a Journal editorial page writer.

Reprinted with Permission
Copyright © 1997 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpt

By Philip Weiss

The notion of a Body Count list apparently began with an Indianapolis lawyer named Linda Thompson, a feverish woman who was incited by the 1993 burning of the Branch-Davidian compound outside Waco, Tex.

“Linda [Thompson] first announced that list on my program,” says Stan Solomon, a right-wing talk-show host. “It was very early in the Clinton Presidency that she started connecting these deaths. She is a very analytical person, although I think she has succumbed to a great deal of pressure. She later sent me letters every day on my being a Government agent.”

The lists make sad reading, and ridiculous reading, but not entirely and here one can glimpse how a legitimate question gets spun into a conspiracy. Notable on all the lists are “the boys on the tracks.” This is the case of two small-town teen-agers in Saline County, just outside Little Rock, who were killed late one night in August 1987. They were clubbed and stabbed and their unconscious bodies were laid on the railroad tracks to be mutilated by a train. Their murders have never been solved. One theory given a lot of credence by those who have looked into the case is that “the boys on the tracks” had wandered in on a drug drop.

The medical examiner under Governor Clinton, Fahmy Malak, did a terrible disservice in the matter. He said that the boys’ deaths were accidental, that they lay down on the tracks in a marijuana stupor. It took years for the families to undo this ruling.

Clinton’s own connection to the murders in Saline County is plainly indirect. But he did stand by Malak, even as The Arkansas Democrat and a group of enraged citizens called for his dismissal. (Malak left the job for a state health department position in 1991.) Linda Ives, the mother of one of the boys, says: “My agenda is not Bill Clinton. The only goal I have is arrest and conviction in my son’s case.”

Still, the deaths of the boys have taken on huge emblematic significance to the far right, people who believe that government regularly covers up brutalities. The legend of the boys is reminiscent of the legend surrounding the 1992 killing by an F.B.I. sharpshooter of Vicki Weaver, a white supremacist, as she held her baby in her arms in northern Idaho. Ives told me that she has heard of highway overpasses in the Middle West painted with the message “Bill Clinton Knows Who Killed Kevin Ives.”

The Wall Street Journal attacked me twice on its editorial page as a White House dupe and said I was planning to undermine its coverage of the Linda Ives case. The Journal said Ives said the White House had “sicced” me on her. But the former Whitewater counsel, Mark Fabiani, had spoken of her case to me in rather neutral terms, and as I told Ives, I thought official inaction in her son’s case merited further investigation. I had told the Journal reporter, Micah Morrison, that I admired his coverage of the boys on the tracks.

Copyright 1997 The New York Times