MediaWatch: July 1997
Table of Contents:
- MediaWatch: July 1997
- Gun Rights Forces Outgunned on TV
- NewsBites: Camel Canard
- Revolving Door: Sidney's Clinton-Loving Slant
- Hearings? What Hearings?
- They All Do It
- Nolanda's Non-Story, Religion and Rehabilitation
- Kurault as Liberal Advocate
- Janet Cooke Award: Another Frontal Assault on Objectivity
Revolving Door: Sidney's Clinton-Loving Slant
Sidney Blumenthal, the former Washington Post, New Republic and New Yorker reporter, started his new White House job on July 1. He was picked to "work on major speeches and serve as an all-purpose message-meister," noted the June 7 National Journal. Blumenthal insisted in the Feb. 17, 1992 New Republic: "While George Bush -- all whiteness -- talks about 'family values,' the Clintons demonstrate them by confessing to adultery."
Even his colleagues realized he's been a Clinton promoter. Observed the June 23 New Republic: "We are delighted to note that the noted Democratic journalist Sidney Blumenthal, having worked so long for the Clinton White House outside the Clinton White House, will now work for the Clinton White House inside the Clinton White House." The magazine quipped: "With any luck, one of his journalistic colleagues remarked, he'll get his back pay."
Indeed, Blumenthal told The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz: "This is a chance to help change the country. I was always in journalism because I thought I could help make a difference." A June 29 Post story reported that while at the New Yorker he began "brainstorming sessions" with Dick Morris. "Morris said Blumenthal recommended ideas for staging Clinton at the Democratic National Convention and for using Clinton's appearances at the Atlanta Olympics to boost him politically."
Kurtz's June 16 profile included some illuminating anecdotes about Blumenthal's journalism:
"During the 1992 campaign, says Julia Reed, a Vogue magazine reporter, Blumenthal urged her at a party not to write a piece questioning Clinton's character. But what, she shot back, if it were true? 'It doesn't matter,' she recalls him saying. 'This is too important.'"
"Peter Boyer, a New Yorker writer, says Blumenthal tried to sabotage his story about the Travelgate affair last year. Boyer says he mentioned the piece to his colleague after learning that Blumenthal had lunched with Clinton's friend Harry Thomason on the day the Hollywood producer pushed for the firing of the White House travel office employees....Boyer says he was later told...that Blumenthal had warned them Boyer was anti-Clinton and planned to smear them."
"Blumenthal shied away from writing about his friend Hillary Clinton. 'That's where [Editor] Tina [Brown] finally said, 'This is untenable,' says a New Yorker writer. By 1995, Blumenthal was no longer writing the Letter from Washington. He was replaced by Michael Kelly, a fierce Clinton critic. Kelly ordered Blumenthal to stay away from the magazine's downtown office. 'I did not trust him...I felt his relationship...with the President and First Lady was such that I was not sure I wanted him around the office as I was working on stories.'"
Blumenthal has a mean-spirited streak, offering this assessment in the April 16, 1993 Boston Phoenix: "Bill Bennett is basically a schismatic heretic practicing his own contrived lunatic version of the Latin Mass in the basement. That's what Buchanan is doing, only with Confederate flags flying. You have Phil Gramm of Texas, an incredibly mean-spirited right-wing character backed by big- oil money. He is the kind of perverse version of Lyndon Johnson whittled down to his vices and exaggerated. Then you have Bob Dole: when he's most sardonic and cruel is when he's most sincere. I think that's the Republican Party right now."
