Grilled Brill

The founder of the much-hyped media watchdog Content is hoist on his own ethical petard

Don't Quote Me by Dan Kennedy

After Steven Brill lost an internal battle at Time Warner last fall, landing on the sidewalks of New York with nothing but the clothes on his back and a $30 million settlement in his pocket, he announced an audacious new venture: a mass-circulation magazine intended to make bigtime journalists squirm.

The media elite have been buzzing ever since. Brill, after all, is the founder of American Lawyer magazine and Court TV, venues where he earned a reputation for smarts, tough-mindedness, and high ethical standards. Surely his media magazine, which he dubbed Content, would prove to be a big deal. Vanity Fair did a puff piece. 60 Minutes executive producer Don Hewitt hissed and growled. And Brill's every move was documented by the very media he would soon be skewering.

Which is why the Brill-authored cover story in the premiere issue -- a remarkably pro-Clinton screed about the media's coverage of the Monica Lewinsky scandal -- is such an enormous, and puzzling, letdown. Not that the 24,000-word article didn't get attention. Indeed, the piece, with its unsubstantiated allegation that independent counsel Ken Starr and his staff may have broken laws against leaking, has been the talk of Washington this week. And there is much in the article that is important and new. Unfortunately, to paraphrase Samuel Johnson, what's important isn't new, and what's new isn't important.

Far worse, even before the premiere issue of Brill's Content could hit the newsstands, Brill was caught in an ethical snare by one of his own writers. On Tuesday, Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz, a Content contributor, revealed that Brill and his wife had donated $2000 to the 1996 Clinton-Gore campaign and $4000 to three Democratic congressional candidates. "I should have disclosed it," Brill told Kurtz.

No kidding. Brill himself, in a message to readers at the front of the magazine, puts it this way: "We believe that the content of anything that sells itself as nonfiction media should be free of hidden motives. It should not be motivated, for example, by the desire to curry favor with an advertiser, or to advance a particular political interest -- unless those motives are clearly disclosed."

Now, it's unlikely that Brill's piece was motivated solely (to use a Clintonesque weasel word) by his desire to suck up to the White House. But being caught in the appearance of a conflict is the last thing he needs when his central premise -- that Starr and company may be guilty of "committing a felony" because they held background discussions with reporters -- is being taken seriously by few other than James Carville and Paul Begala.

The flaw is that Starr, in his on-the-record interview with Brill, vehemently denied that he and his staff ever discussed grand jury testimony -- something that would be a felony -- when they briefed reporters. Brill speculates that it happened anyway, but that doesn't make it so. What we're left with is Starr's admission that he does what virtually every prosecutor in America does. Indeed, on Larry King Live Monday evening, CNN's Jeff Greenfield -- singled out by Brill as "one of the smartest people in television," by the way -- compared Brill to the French prefect in Casablanca who is "shocked, shocked" to learn that customers are gambling at Rick's Café. Granted, Brill tells some ugly truths about the unholy alliance that prosecutors and reporters often make. But by suggesting there's anything unique about the way Starr has operated, Brill comes off as naive at best, and disingenuous at worst. By midweek, the "bombshell" that White House spinners were salivating over had blown up in Brill's face.

It was, to say the least, an inauspicious debut.

Brill is said to have a monumental arrogant streak, and it has been mainly that side of him that's been on display in recent months. He put out hysterical promotional material -- AT LAST, THE MEDIA'S FREE RIDE HAS COME TO A SCREECHING HALT screamed one flier -- and talked about a monthly circulation for Content of 500,000, some 20 times higher than that of the American Journalism Review and the Columbia Journalism Review and just a bit behind the New Yorker. He cut a deal with NBC's Dateline to feature selected stories from Content -- only to have to back down when USA Today questioned the propriety of his playing footsie with the very media he was promising to scrutinize. His ego was never more apparent than it was after the publisher of another magazine named Content threatened legal action -- and Brill got out of it by adding his name to the title.

If you can put aside the cover story, Brill's Content looks more promising. The aforementioned Kurtz weighs in with a first-rate dissection of 60 Minutes' squishy interview with alleged presidential groping victim Kathleen Willey. Roger Parloff has an in-depth piece on how the New York Times exposed wrongdoing at the nation's largest hospital chain. A particularly inspired idea is Rifka Rosenwein's profile of Barnes & Noble's chief book buyer, one of the most powerful, and anonymous, people in publishing. In a world increasingly glutted with media criticism (think Vanity Fair, the New Yorker, Salon, Slate, the New York Observer, the Nation, the newsweeklies on occasion, the journalism reviews, and many major metropolitan newspapers), there would appear to be a place for Brill's Content, even if it falls short of Brill's 500,000-circulation goal.

But the good stuff is undone by Brill's "Pressgate" article. Poorly written, disorganized, and entirely over the top in its denunciation of Starr and the media, much of it plows exceedingly familiar ground: the elusive semen-stained dress, which grew from a rumor passed on by Linda Tripp into -- in some reports, at least -- an established fact. The eyewitnesses to presidential sex, shot onto the Web by the Dallas Morning News and the Wall Street Journal, only to be quickly retracted. The "Clinton will resign" statements blurted out by the likes of Sam Donaldson, Wolf Blitzer, and George Stephanopoulos. The lightly sourced stories, the unnamed sources, the speculation masquerading as news. Brill makes a few good points, especially about the talk shows on cable outlets such as CNN, MSNBC, and CNBC, whose endless appetite for scandal has seduced some journalist-guests into blabbing more than they actually know. But others in the media -- from the journalism reviews to the New York Times, the Washington Post, and CNN, in a special hosted by Greenfield -- made the same points much earlier and more coherently.

And even that is so much padding. The crux of Brill's article, and its weakest point by far, is that Starr and his staff committed serious ethical violations, and possibly broke the law, by talking with reporters about the Lewinsky case. From that central premise flows an additional, equally important (and equally weak) point: that the media, rather than expose Starr's abuse of power, instead formed a corrupt alliance with him and his staff in order to drive a juicy sex-scandal story.

The Starr-as-leaker angle can be dismissed fairly easily. In his ill-considered on-the-record interview with Brill, Starr admitted to talking on background with reporters about some aspects of the case, but he flatly denied that he or any member of his staff discussed matters before the grand jury. Brill attributes Starr's admission to "hubris," which is silly. Rather, Starr was admitting to doing what virtually all prosecutors do, while defending himself against charges that he or his staff broke the law. (Indeed, on Larry King Live Monday, CBS's Scott Pelley noted that Iran-contra independent counsel Lawrence Walsh used to schedule weekly background briefings on that case. And Newsweek's Evan Thomas, whose magazine presumably has been a major beneficiary of Starr's loose lips, asserted that Starr's office does not leak about grand-jury matters -- period. Was Thomas covering for a valued source? Even if he is, Brill has no information with which to contradict him.) Starr should have kept his mouth shut, and he didn't help by issuing a 19-page letter of complaint on Tuesday. But possessing an uncanny instinct for doing the wrong thing in the public-relations game does not make him a felon.

Brill's brief against the press -- that it has enabled Starr's abuse of power rather than exposing it for what it is -- appears more troubling on the surface, but that's only because of Brill's one-sided, pro-Clinton spin.

First, though Brill doesn't acknowledge it, Starr's behavior has been the principal issue in the media's ongoing coverage of the scandal, at least since the initial wave of Monicamania began to ebb. Clinton lawyer David Kendall's well-covered denunciation of Starr's leaks was perhaps the turning point in the scandal. Time did a cover story on "trial by leak," which Brill himself praises. And Starr's prosecutorial excesses -- grilling Lewinsky's mother about her daughter's sex life, subpoenaing Lewinsky's reading list, and the like -- have been documented in great detail by the media, helping to push Clinton's job-approval ratings through the roof.

Second, by focusing entirely on Starr's abuses of power, Brill ignores serious unanswered questions about Clinton's role in the Lewinsky affair. Perhaps the two most important: why did Clinton's friend Vernon Jordan go to such lengths to find employment for Lewinsky? (That question is crucial in light of the financial help Jordan also gave Whitewater felon Webb Hubbell, who subsequently reneged on a plea-bargain agreement he'd reportedly made with Starr to talk about Clinton's misdeeds.) And who wrote the sophisticated "talking points" memo Lewinsky gave to Linda Tripp, which was aimed at persuading Tripp to change her story -- that is, to perjure herself -- regarding Kathleen Willey? Indeed, Brill's article doesn't even mention the talking points, which, because they appear to have been written by a lawyer close to Clinton, could eventually lead to explosive new charges. (On Tuesday, Larry King asked Brill why he hadn't written about the talking points. Brill blandly replied that he had. He hadn't.)

A final sour note to Brill's sorry debut is his much-hyped plan to have New York Times alumnus Bill Kovach, curator of the Nieman Foundation and the respected former editor of the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, serve as his ombudsman. Curious to know what Kovach thought of the undisclosed two grand Brill had bestowed upon Bill Clinton and Al Gore, I called his office Tuesday. A spokeswoman said he was away on personal business for most of this week and hadn't even seen Content.

Well, Steve. Just wait till Dad gets home.

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Dan Kennedy's work can be accessed from his Web site: http://www.shore.net/~dkennedy

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Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com

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Articles from July 24, 1997 & before can be accessed here

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