MediaWatch: January 1998
Table of Contents:
Revolving Dooor: Kaplan's Clinton World
CNN’s new President once hired Hillary Clinton to work for ABC News 12 years after he toiled as an operative for a Democratic presidential candidate. Those are just two of the revelations from a January Vanity Fair profile of Rick Kaplan, a Clinton friend. Here are some excerpts from David Margolick’s piece:
Conservatives are Liars: "Right-wing critics such as Reed Irvine of Accuracy in Media and columnist Brent Bozell have charged that Kaplan let his friendship with the President cloud his news judgment at ABC, and will now turn CNN into the ‘Clinton News Network.’ Kaplan brushes Irvine and Bozell aside contemptuously. ‘If they weren’t such liars they wouldn’t make whatever money they make,’ he said. ‘There’d be no purpose for them on the planet’..."
Rescued from Boring ‘88 Speech: "When, in the 1980s, Clinton considered trading politics for a million-dollar job on Wall Street, he sought out Kaplan’s advice. It was Kaplan’s shoulder Clinton cried on, over Chinese takeout in Nightline’s New York studio, following his much-ridiculed 32-minute speech-a-thon at the 1988 Democratic convention in Atlanta. ‘He was sitting there saying, ‘My career is over. I’ll never be anything,’ Kaplan recalled. ‘And we all said, ‘You know, have a sense of humor about it. If you joke about it first, everyone else will joke about it.’ Then he ended up going on The Tonight Show, and, by being great, he actually vindicated himself.’"
Hired Hillary for ABC: "If anything, Kaplan was at least as close to Hillary, who shares his Chicago roots; he even hired her to work on coverage of the 1980 Democratic convention. When Chelsea Clinton was searching for a 49th-birthday present for her dad, Kaplan sent along a titanium golf club fashioned from a melted down Soviet missile."
Promoted McCarthy: "Kaplan was born in the Rogers Park section of Chicago. His childhood was filled with friends and Democratic politics; Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley and John F. Kennedy were icons in his home. He envisioned a life of political activism and joined the 1968 presidential campaign of Senator Eugene McCarthy as an advance man. A week later, when Bobby Kennedy won the California primary, Kaplan prepared to switch sides, and headed to Kennedy’s hotel to meet him. He ended up that night alone on a Santa Monica beach, watching the waves, listening to radio reports about Kennedy’s slow death. He contemplated a radically altered future outside politics."
Spiked Anti-Clinton Stories at ABC: "In late October 1994 [while Executive Producer of World News Tonight], Kaplan killed Jim Wooten’s exclusive interview with an Arkansas state trooper who claimed a Clinton aide had tried to muzzle him; after that, Wooten refused to do any more pieces on Whitewater. Wooten clearly likes his former boss, whom he called ‘a character in an age without them.’ But on Clinton, he said, Kaplan had ‘a blind spot.’ "Also convinced that ‘the bar kept getting higher’ for putting Whitewater stories on the program, Chris Vlasto, World News Tonight’s investigative producer for Clinton-related stories, would sometimes shop them around to other ABC News shows. True, in February 1994, World News Tonight devoted an extraordinary 18 of its 22 minutes to a primer on Whitewater. But that segment had been held for a month, and ran only after Nightline tried to run it first."
