MediaWatch: March 1998
Table of Contents:
- MediaWatch: March 1998
- TV Touts "Reform"
- NewsBites: no Label for Lois
- Willey -- Why a Seven-Month Stall?
- Turn Against the Right
- Only Clinton Pals Welcome
- Myers on Hubbell's Ties
Willey -- Why a Seven-Month Stall?
Just days after she first drew network attention by arriving with prosecutors to testify before the grand jury investigating the President, Kathleen Willey became an overnight media sensation. In a rare two-segment interview on the March 15 edition of 60 Minutes, Willey told her story of how President Clinton fondled her breasts and put her hand on his genitals in a study next to the Oval Office.
"Wow! That was something!" exclaimed NBC Today co-host Matt Lauer the next day. But why wasn’t the Willey story taken seriously when it first broke last summer?
On July 30, 1997, CBS Evening News aired a brief story (without naming Willey) on how Paula Jones’ lawyers had subpoenaed Willey to testify. Bill Plante warned: "But unless and until this case is settled, this is only the beginning of attempts by attorneys on both sides to damage the reputations and credibility of everyone involved."
That same day, CNN’s Inside Politics put a Willey brief at the end of the show and gave it 26 seconds on the evening newscast The World Today. The next day, CBS and NBC aired brief updates underlining Willey’s angry reaction to the Jones subpoena. ABC aired nothing.
On August 4, Newsweek’s new issue (dated the 11th) detailed how Willey had been a White House volunteer who asked the President for a paying job and was kissed and fondled. Newsweek quoted Linda Tripp saying Willey appeared "flustered, happy, and joyful." Network coverage? Zero.
But CNN’s Inside Politics devoted almost its entire show that day to unproven charges the GOP Mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani, had an affair with press secretary Cristyne Lategano. Bernard Shaw asked The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz and Newsday’s Leonard Levitt about how the Mayor’s sex life had been undercovered: "President Clinton’s private life versus Mayor Giuliani’s private life. Double standard on the part of the media?" Both guests agreed.
In an August 8 news conference, ABC reporter John Donvan asked Clinton about refusal to comment on Willey: "Even for those of us who don’t have much appetite for this entire subject, this particular answer in this particular category seems needlessly evasive. My question to you is: Is it your wish that it be answered this way, and is it consistent with your intention to run an open White House?" But ABC still spiked the story.
Clinton spokesman Mike McCurry shamed reporters out of looking into Willey, refusing to discuss her. In his new book Spin Cycle, Kurtz discovered: "Clinton pulled McCurry aside for a rare word of thanks. ‘I think you handled that correctly and I appreciate it,’ he said. ‘I know it’s not easy.’" Reporters should have been less red-faced about the subject than by how easily they were played by McCurry.
