Following the money

Thank the press for keeping the campaign-finance scandal alive

The media are under fire as they haven't been since Richard Nixon was in the White House and his contemptible vice president, Spiro Agnew, was inveighing against the "nattering nabobs of negativism."

The public ultimately backed the press on Watergate. Today, though, Agnew's take on the media has become the majority view. And there's no doubt that journalists have given their audience plenty of reason to hate them. Yet as bad as the media often are, news organizations remain a crucial check on government and corporate excesses.

Nowhere has this been more apparent than in coverage of the campaign-finance scandal, a bipartisan mess encompassing everything from possible foreign influence-peddling to fundraising practices that, though legal, reek. It's not a sexy issue, and the public pays little attention to it. Had it not been for the media, Senator Fred Thompson's ineffective hearings last summer would have marked the end of this sordid episode. Instead, the story continues to develop, and is likely to afflict Washington's comfortable long after the last question about the possibly mythical semen-stained dress has been asked.

Particularly impressive has been the performance of the New York Times, led by editorial-page editor Howell Raines, who harbors a deep and persistent distrust of Bill Clinton, his generational and regional peer. Raines's strong stands demanding that Attorney General Janet Reno appoint an independent counsel to investigate the possible influence of foreign money on the Clinton White House, coupled with his frequent attacks on the Republican Congress for seeking to kill meaningful reform, add up to a principled and coherent stand. Times columnist William Safire, despite the wounds he received as a Nixon staffer (his tone often suggests that those wounds are still bleeding), has also advanced the story. The Times's news pages, too, have helped keep the issue alive -- not just the reports on disputes between Reno and FBI director Louis Freeh, but also the paper's Sunday story on how reform-minded Wisconsin has sunk into an ethical abyss at the hands of political activists who exploit perfectly legal loopholes.

The Times has not been alone. The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Wall Street Journal have all had teams of reporters investigating the scandal. PBS's Frontline has put together excellent programs on money and politics. The better regional papers, such as the Boston Globe, have also devoted resources to following the money: the Globe's Michael Kranish has broken a number of stories on attempts by Asian fundraisers to influence policy. Indeed, one of Kranish's stories was the subject of a frantic White House disinformation campaign, according to Post media reporter Howard Kurtz's book Spin Cycle.

The question, in the current climate, is whether anyone is paying attention. The new danger, as Dan Kennedy noted recently ("Don't Quote Me," News, July 24), is that anti-media sentiment -- and journalistic misdeeds -- make it easy for critics to dismiss serious stories. No doubt that's what politicians of both parties would like to see happen to the stories on the fundraising mess, which would have disappeared by now were it not for the press. Safire recently reported that Freeh told him: "You guys led the way."

The media are in a crisis -- a crisis that is likely to grow worse, given monopoly ownership patterns that increase the pressure for profits and decrease accountability. But if this is one of the media's worst hours, their dogged pursuit of corrupt political money can also help make it one of their best. The low regard in which the press is held should not obscure the good work it continues to perform.

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