Media Fall for a Sorry Tale of Leaks and Lies

It’s sick. There was no blue dress and no semen stain, but America’s mass media fell for the lurid tales of two political hustlers out to humiliate the president of the United States.

“The dress story?” Lucianne S. Goldberg exulted to a New York Daily News reporter. “I think I leaked that--I had to do something to get their [the media’s] attention--I’ve done it. And I’m not unproud of it.” But the media, mainstream and tabloid--in this post-O.J. world, there is scant distinction--should be deeply “unproud.”

Whatever Bill Clinton’s errors, they are nothing compared with the unsavory and desperate zeal of the media to judge and convict our highest elected official on the basis of the most dubious evidence.

Goldberg’s admission came before Monica Lewinsky’s attorney, William H. Ginsburg, announced last week that none of the clothes seized by the FBI contained a stain. The media knew that the stained dress story came from Goldberg, an admitted Nixon dirty-trickster who in 1972 had been a paid fake reporter who spied on the McGovern campaign and who was the book agent for racist perjurer Mark Fuhrman, yet they widely reported the dress story as fact.

Goldberg’s boasting of her influence over her client Linda Tripp--”Linda wouldn’t have taped her if I hadn’t told her; she wouldn’t have gone to Starr without me”--betrays an obsession with destroying the man whom a majority of voters had elected president. “I’m glad he’s getting caught at something,” Goldberg said.

Why, then, did the media give credence to one so obviously biased? Why not allow time for the facts to be sorted, the legal process to work and for the president to be presumed innocent until he has his day in court? The same as was done for Richard Nixon, who was treated with kid gloves for a year before his incomparably more serious abuses of power made major news.

You’ll hear that independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr made the sex story plausible. The media have gotten into the bad habit of reporting as true the most outrageous lies if they are leaked by an official source. And Starr’s camp, acting like a wing of the Republican Party, has obviously been leaking like mad.

Starr’s 3 1/2-year witch hunt, which has cost at least $30 million, should have been closed long ago for failing, by Starr’s own admission, to link the Clintons to any purported Whitewater crimes. Instead, Starr was allowed to broaden his crusade to destroy Clinton, thereby justifying Jesse Helms’ prescience in promoting Starr for the job. It was the far-right senator who lobbied the three-judge panel, the head of which is a Helms protege, to appoint Starr. That same panel, dominated by anti-Clinton conservatives, granted Starr the power to bug the president using leads developed in the Paula Jones civil suit.

Before he was appointed independent counsel, Starr had agreed to file a brief supporting Paula Jones. Now, he has a sexy angle for commanding media attention.

Leading commentators have seized upon each sexual tidbit, claiming to be shocked. Most outraged has been George Will, syndicated columnist and ABC TV news star, who labeled the president a “sociopath” and has led the charge for his impeachment as “morally incapacitated.” Will has been particularly exercised about the old news of the Gennifer Flowers affair. What arrogance to hear pundits, few of whom sport spotless marriage records--Will divorced the mother of his three children--lecture the Clintons about the proper conduct of a marriage.

As for shading the truth, this is the same George Will who secretly prepped Ronald Reagan for a presidential campaign debate, which involved a stolen Carter briefing book, and then wrote favorably about Reagan’s performance.

Will criticized Clinton in the last presidential campaign while his second wife, Mari Maseng Will, worked as communications director for Dole. Mari Will met with Washington Post editors in a successful behind-the-scenes campaign to get the Post, where George Will works, to suppress a well-documented story about a 1960s Dole mistress.

While quick to convict the Clintons on Whitewater, Will has enjoyed media tolerance of his own family’s dubious financial dealings. Will wrote a column blasting Clinton for proposing tariffs on Japanese luxury cars without revealing that his wife’s public relations firm received almost $200,000 from the Japanese Automobile Manufacturers Assn.

Will may now be getting revenge for Dole’s inglorious defeat. But what is the rest of the media’s excuse for abandoning all journalistic standards? Are they just out to make a buck by peddling sex?