The Jones Case: Media’s Worst Hour

“Nattering nabobs of negativism” is how the great Greek philosopher-statesman Spiro Agnew once defined the media, which accurately defines the reaction of many commentators to the dismissal of the Paula Corbin Jones lawsuit. The ruling of a judge who until now had been admired as fair to both sides is suddenly treated as yet another duplicitous trick of the president.

Clinton is the only person in the country who is judged even by the respectable media as morally guilty until proved innocent. Reading the editorial page of the New York Times, you could have thought that Judge Susan Webber Wright ruled against Clinton. The editors who have led the pack in attacking Clinton now called upon the president to adopt “standards of behavior, leadership and association that are not merely legal, but also worthy of emulation.” If this is not an assumption of wrongdoing, when nothing of the sort has been proved, what is it?

And when will the New York Times and virtually every other news outlet examine their own standards of behavior that allowed them to print as plausible the most despicable smears against the president? In the current issue of the Columbia Journalism Review, Jules Witcover, perhaps the most experienced of Washington reporters, refers to “all manner of rumor, gossip, and especially, hollow sourcing, making the reports of some mainstream outlets scarcely distinguishable from supermarket tabloids. The rush to be first or to be more sensational created a picture of irresponsibility seldom seen in the reporting of presidential affairs.”

Most of those rumors, like any scurrilous claim against the president, including that totally groundless charge of rape reported by the Washington Post, were dug out of the mud and passed on as truth by the Paula Jones team. Yet nothing in that horrid concoction of lies and innuendo proved legally supportive of Paula Jones’ claim. It is a fitting retribution that the so-called legal team of Paula Jones will be stuck with the bills.

How about a bit of honesty from the media? They got the Jones case wrong from the get-go and should now apologize. There never was a valid claim against Clinton of sexual harassment, and the only justification for the past four years of dirt digging was to sell newspapers and increase television ratings.

Which explains why the media was disappointed that the president’s anatomy would not be the basis of an international show trial. The hotel rooms in Little Rock were booked, the equipment shipped and obviously the media are chagrined by the loss of what was to be a ratings and circulation bonanza maybe bigger than OJ. CNN alone was poised to dispatch 80 staffers to Little Rock for this circus.

“Lowest common denominator journalism is now the norm,” Larry Sabato, professor of political science at University of Virginia, told the American Society of Newspaper Editors last week, and now it will remain for Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr to provide the required grist for the media mill.

The morning after Clinton’s sweeping exoneration in this case, the New York Times featured a huge front page photo of a smiling Starr saying the investigation would continue, as if this wannabe Grand Inquisitor has somehow been validated by the court’s reversal of a case that provided the underpinnings for his own witch hunt. Or was he simply in a state of shock when he compared himself to Sgt. Joe Friday in the old television series “Dragnet”? Is that what it’s come to in his mind: a beat cop busting the president of the United States on a trumped up sex charge?

Can Starr honestly believe that a president should be impeached for his behavior in a civil case that turned out to be a nuisance suit pushed forward by a well-financed movement of cranks?

Cut the charade; not even Newt Gingrich’s House of Representatives would dare show such contempt for the voters who happened to make a choice in two presidential elections that the right-wing can’t abide. With Gingrich battling Starr for the lowest public approval ratings, they are already pathetic characters in this disgraceful farce.

The clear implication of Judge Wright’s ruling is that it is the president who has been the victim of harassment at the hands of political opponents bent on destroying him. “You cannot defile the temple of justice,” Starr thunders, as if he has not done just that with his partisan crusade that systematically ignores the manipulation of facts and witnesses by his fellow right-wingers, led by his benefactor billionaire Richard Mellon Scaiffe. That’s the real scandal to this story, and it is unfortunate that most of the top dogs in the media have chosen to ignore it.