The Media’s Whitewater Ride Sinks : Television: As the press weighs in on coverage of the scandal, more pizazz than truth emerges. ABC’s ‘Viewpoint’ turned out to be a fiasco.

And the Lord said, “Forget light. Let there be pizazz.”

The mainstream media often operate like a daytime talk show that devotes 75% of an hour to exposing and slopping around in the dysfunction of its guests, then brings on an advice-giving therapist to clean up the mess.

When it comes to Whitewater coverage, this is now the mess-cleaning phase.

Coverage of the Whitewater hubbub is now getting to be almost as controversial and is receiving almost as much attention as Whitewater itself. Has there been too much? Too little? Has the reporting been fair or unfair? You know the terrain.

On Tuesday, C-SPAN carried a Washington print journalists’ forum on the topic, moderated by Steve Roberts of U.S. News & World Report. With him were Washington Post columnist Mary McGrory, Alan Murray of the Wall Street Journal, Francis Coombs of the Washington Times, Stan Crock of Business Week, Ellen Hume of the Annenberg School of Communications, media specialist Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia and Jody Powell, who was press secretary under President Jimmy Carter. A pretty fair mix, though Powell’s credentials as an objective observer wobble like gelatin.

You get the impression that journalists who participate in these televised self-awareness clinics--offering occasional mea culpas and nodding knowingly about the foibles of media--afterward return to their jobs and robotically get back to business as usual. Yet this one was reasoned and informative, all in all a relatively calm, introspective and arresting session that may have given viewers some insight into the process of spectacle.

Media coverage of it, media making of it.

The verdict on Whitewater coverage was sort of split down the middle, with the media-attacking Powell making an especially valid point about the press being much less diligent about regularly covering its own missteps than those of other great and powerful institutions. Fascinating.

Speaking of missteps, though, later that same evening ABC News weighed in on Whitewater coverage, with Ted Koppel chairing a wee-hours “Viewpoint” discussion at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa. On paper, it was a good idea. As information, though, it turned out to be a fiasco.

The panel (whose initial salvos were later followed by mostly partisan questions from the studio audience) included ABC News correspondent Brit Hume; Bob Bartley, editorial page editor of the Wall Street Journal; Geneva Overholser, editor of the Des Moines Register; attorney and First Amendment specialist Floyd Abrams and Max Frankel, outgoing executive editor of the New York Times. Reasonable choices, though heavily tilted in support of aggressive Whitewater coverage, with the exception of Abrams.

Deployed as centerpieces of this round-table, however, were shrill, knee-jerk, hyperbolizing political partisans James Carville and Rush Limbaugh, the latter participating by satellite. Sweet, lovable guys? Of course. Do you even have to ask?

Except that Carville is the Democratic Party eel who steered President Clinton’s White House campaign and who now functions as a presidential adviser. Whatever his boss and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton do, he publicly endorses. Bank on it.

And Limbaugh is the conservative comedian/radio and TV personality who never met an anti-Clinton slur he didn’t like. Whatever the President and First Lady do, he publicly opposes. Bank on it.

Yes, what great choices to headline a dispassionate, illuminating tour of the ins and outs of Whitewater coverage. Inevitably, “Viewpoint” essentially became a partisan war between the predictable Carville and Limbaugh--including a shrill fight about Clinton policy--with ABC at times seeking to maximize its two stars by presenting them on split screen.

What did all of this point/counterpoint burlesque have to do with media coverage? Often times nothing, unless you count what it said about the way some in the media examine media coverage.

That included Overholser concluding, in effect, that the studio audience’s interest in Whitewater exemplified the general public’s curiosity about the subject, which, in turn, validated the intensity of Whitewater reporting.

That’s a classic. In other words, it goes this way: The press creates and nourishes a story. Once in the public arena, that story proceeds to take on a life of its own. Then the press uses the controversy it created as justification for its coverage, regardless of the story’s disputed news value.

If that has the ring of exotic doublespeak, then consider Limbaugh’s “Viewpoint” denial of any responsibility for helping spread wild rumors concerning the suicide of White House attorney Vincent Foster. It was on March 10 that Limbaugh told his millions of listeners to “brace yourselves” for the contents of a fax he’d received saying a Washington consultant firm was about to charge that Foster “was murdered in an apartment owned by Hillary Clinton, and the body was then taken to Fort Mercy Park.”

Following a commercial break, Limbaugh repeated what he now said was “rumor,” that a report would be published saying Foster’s “suicide was not a suicide.”

Much later in his broadcast, he attributed the “rumor” to an item in a newsletter from the Washington firm of Johnson Smick, which he said claimed that Foster had taken his life in an apartment owned by White House associates, and that his body was later moved to the park where it was discovered. Thus, the newsletter had not mentioned an alleged murder or the First Lady. And what it did charge--a body-moving conspiracy--has never been substantiated.

Even giving Limbaugh the benefit of the doubt and crediting him for ultimately moderating the various versions of his “brace yourselves” bulletin, sending such wild speculation across the airwaves under any label was reckless. After all, many of his listeners accept everything that comes from his lips as fact.

More importantly, meanwhile, was “Viewpoint” throbbing, electrifying television or what? “One of the reasons we asked you on,” Koppel acknowledged good-naturedly to Carville and Limbaugh during a break in the din, “was that we knew you’d bring a little pizazz to the program.”

Compared with C-SPAN, much pizazz, little light.