What scandal?

Whitewater book blames media; plus, radio daze, Joe Fitz and gays

by Dan Kennedy

Gene Lyons doesn't think of himself as particularly enamored of Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton. He says his forthcoming book on Whitewater is simply an attempt to set the record straight, and to show how the national media created a scandal where none existed.

"I'm not romanticizing the Clintons," says the 52-year-old author, a columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. "But we've seen a complete misreading of who they are and what they're about."

Lyons's contrary view will soon get a national hearing. Some 20,000 to 25,000 copies of Fools for Scandal: How the Media Invented Whitewater (Franklin Square Press, 240 pages, $9.95) will hit the bookstores by mid July.

Sales aren't likely to challenge those of James B. Stewart's bestseller Blood Sport (Simon & Schuster, 1996), which portrays the Clintons as ethically sloppy, if not exactly criminal. But with Whitewater and its related stories likely to dominate the national political conversation this summer, and with several new anti-Clinton books on the way (including American Spectator muckraker David Brock's The Seduction of Hillary Rodham), Lyons's work may well emerge as the Clintons' best defense.

Fools for Scandal is an expansion of two pieces Lyons wrote for Harper's magazine: an October 1994 attack on the New York Times, and especially on staff reporter Jeff Gerth, who broke the Whitewater story during the 1992 campaign; and a July 1996 accounting of Stewart's alleged sins of omission and commission in Blood Sport. Lyons argues that both Gerth and Stewart relied on dubious witnesses, got many of their facts wrong, and ignored considerable evidence in the Clintons' favor in order to paint the Clintons -- and Arkansas -- in the worst possible light.

"It's just amazing. I've never seen anything like it," says Lyons of what he sees as the national media's scandal-mongering. "Local reporters, friends of mine, kept saying, `This is bullshit. This is wrong.' In terms of research, this is the easiest book I've ever written."

Certainly liberals who are disgusted with Clinton but appalled at the prospect of a Bob Dole presidency will be heartened by Lyons's conclusions. But is Lyons right and practically everyone else wrong? Like everything else about Whitewater, the truth is elusive.

"I think it's embarrassing at this point to say there's nothing to this when the president's business associates have been convicted," says Tim Graham, of the conservative Media Research Center.

Stewart could not be reached, and Gerth declined to comment on the record.

But Rex Nelson, the departing political editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, says Lyons is off-base. "I think there have been some excesses, but a large part of this has been borne out," Nelson says of the national media's Whitewater reporting. "I found Gerth's work to be pretty good." (Nelson does say he's less impressed with Stewart's work, which he found to be riddled with minor factual errors.)

"Every columnist needs a niche," Nelson adds. "Defending the Clintons and bashing the media has become Gene's niche."

Nelson isn't exactly nonpartisan. He's leaving the Democrat-Gazette to take a job with Arkansas's new Republican governor, Mike Huckabee, who ascended to the post after Democrat Jim Guy Tucker was convicted along with Whitewater principals Jim and Susan McDougal last month. But one of Lyons's principal arguments is that out-of-state reporters have been led astray by their ignorance of the Arkansas political scene. That's not something Nelson can be accused of.

In a telephone interview Lyons, a former English professor who raises hunting beagles as a hobby, comes across as thoughtful and engaging. And he's adamant that the Clintons have done little or nothing wrong, whether it be the Whitewater development itself, the collapse of McDougal's Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan, or Hillary's turning a $1000 investment in cattle futures into a $100,000 profit. Lyons argues that Jim McDougal, who suffered from a severe case of manic-depression, bamboozled a lot of people, the Clintons included. And though Lyons doesn't dispute the notion that Tyson Chicken lawyer Jim Blair did Hillary a big favor in cutting her in on cattle futures, he credits her with being smart enough to get out when she was ahead. Other investors, including Blair, got greedy and lost their money, Lyons says, which undercuts the accusation that Hillary was given a no-risk deal.

The only question on which Lyons falters concerns the FBI files of various Republican officials that were recently found in the White House. "It's not like Clinton to be malicious," he says, but adds he's surprised that Clinton didn't immediately fire everyone involved. If it became clear that Clinton knew about the files, he continues, "I wouldn't vote for the son of a bitch. I'd vote for Dole, even if it meant Newt would be king of the world."

Lyons is certainly right that Whitewater is hopelessly complex and arcane, and that even after four years of digging by the national media it's almost impossible to explain what it's about. No doubt that has a lot to do with why the affair hasn't seemed to hurt Clinton much in the polls.

Fools for Scandal, then, should be seen as a partisan but potentially valuable piece of the Whitewater puzzle, and as a welcome antidote to the almost pathological Clinton-bashing that infects segments of the national media.

What it should not be seen as is the ultimate answer.

Sex, lies, and Gary Aldrich

Ex-FBI agent Gary Aldrich's disastrous performance on This Week with David Brinkley may give his spectacular accusations of illicit sex and other wrongdoing at the Clinton White House -- detailed in his book, Unlimited Access -- an even shorter shelf life than you might expect.

Still, the buzz over his collection of unsubstantiated rumors, intensified by the banner, page-one treatment in the Unification Church's Washington Times and Rupert Murdoch's New York Post last Friday, is a telling commentary on the overheated media.

Before the Miami Herald brought down Gary Hart in 1987, and before the tabloids made Gennifer Flowers a household name in 1992, mainstream news organizations rarely deigned to cover stories such as Aldrich's. But that's no longer the case. With outlets such as the tabloid and right-wing media, Rush Limbaugh's radio show, and even Pat Robertson's 700 Club acting without restraint, the days when large media organizations could play gatekeeper and shut certain topics out of the public discourse are over. ABC News's first-day coverage of Aldrich's charges may have been too wide-eyed, but the network eviscerated him on Brinkley, with George Will, Sam Donaldson, and company putting to Aldrich simple questions to which he had no credible answers.

The White House had tried to persuade ABC not to provide Aldrich with a forum in the first place, but he would have caused damage for months if he hadn't been exposed.

Radio killed the radio stars

Radio stations will do whatever it takes for high ratings, right? Well, yes. But profits are even more important than ratings. And the recently announced $3.9 billion acquisition of Infinity Broadcasting by Westinghouse Electric raises the possibility that sheer bigness (the new conglomerate would own 83 stations nationally) could warp the traditional formula equating big audiences with big bucks.

The danger, says Brad Stillman, telecommunications-policy analyst for the Consumer Federation of America, is that Westinghouse-Infinity could slash costs by foisting the same programming on stations in all of its markets. And if some listeners tune out, so be it.

"Even if it harms your ratings," says Stillman, "the cost savings may indicate that you're better off."

In Boston, the new combine will own six radio stations and a TV station (WBZ, Channel 4). Those radio stations control more than 40 percent of the advertising market, which raises questions about the fate of smaller radio chains and of independent stations.

The megamerger was no surprise. After all, the Telecommunications Act of 1996 raised from four to eight the number of stations that any one company can own in a particular market, and eliminated the national cap of 40 stations. Yet few people spoke out against the radio provisions of the bill, which attracted little attention compared to such high-profile provisions as cable and telephone deregulation and Internet censorship.

A well-placed congressional source says the Justice Department's antitrust lawyers are taking a close look at the deal. But this source adds that though Westinghouse-Infinity will be compelled to sell off a few stations, the deal is almost certain to pass muster both with Justice and with the Federal Communications Commission.

Johns Hopkins University media critic Mark Crispin Miller, who wrote the cover piece for a recent Nation special issue on media conglomerates, is calling for a re-examination not just of the 1996 law, but also of the Communications Act of 1934, which established radio as an essentially commercial medium.

At a minimum, Miller proposes a tax on use of the broadcast spectrum and on mass advertising to support a revitalized public broadcasting system that would no longer be dependent on corporate largess.

"Why on earth should these corporations have the right to use these resources for nothing, pollute the culture in countless ways, and contribute nothing to the maintenance of a noncommercial alternative?" Miller asks. "It's just completely uncivilized."

Queer crusade redux

Two months ago I received a poignant e-mail from an African-American gay man, a successful athlete "who spent too many years being afraid and ashamed." His subject: Boston Herald columnist Joe Fitzgerald.

"You once wrote a piece about Joe Fitzgerald that indicated he was a good guy, except for . . . having `a problem' with gay people," he said, referring to a "Don't Quote Me" column I wrote last August 25. "Well, a man with `a problem' with gays is not, in my opinion, a good guy. It was your piece that prompted me to read this man's columns, and it's clear now that this is a man on a mission, or maybe just a sad, sick man. What's his problem? And what's your problem?"

I remembered that letter on June 24, when Boston Globe ombudsman Mark Jurkowitz wrote about his paper's coverage of lewd behavior at the recent Gay Pride parade. Among other things, Jurkowitz observed -- accurately -- that Fitzgerald "writes obsessively about his distaste for open homosexuality." Fitzgerald erupted in anger the following day, chastising "the aptly named Mark Jurkowitz" (now there's some witty repartee) for failing to see that the parade "thumbed its nose at common decency."

Yes, by most accounts, several people who crashed the June 8 event did indeed engage in offensive behavior. And yes, the media, in a bow to political correctness, reported almost nothing about it until Fitzgerald weighed in three days later.

But Fitzgerald is obsessed with homosexuality. Last August, I wrote that Fitzgerald's rants against gays and lesbians were out of sync with his heartfelt defense of poor welfare mothers and his courage in standing up to insult-spewing Herald columnist Howie Carr. If anything, Fitzgerald's problem with gays has become more obvious since then.

In his June 11 column on the parade, for instance, he refers to "that 8-year-old girl and others like her who were shamelessly used as political props, some by their `two moms.' " If Fitzgerald were truly concerned only about lewd public conduct, why would he wax sarcastic about an attempt by two women to create a loving family?

In a follow-up note, my correspondent wrote, "Something for you to think about: you state that Joe Fitzgerald has shown humanity on other issues. I was not aware that humanity is selective. You either have it or you don't."

He's right, of course. What can I say? Except this: thank you for reminding me.

Check out the Don't Quote Me archive.