MediaWatch: May 1994

Amount, Tone of Scandal Coverage Markedly Different Than During the Reagan Era

Why Clinton Can't Complain

Clinton defenders have reviled the media "overplaying" of Whitewater revelations. At a National Press Club panel on April 19, former Wall Street Journal reporter Ellen Hume compared Whitewater coverage to "the hot wind of a mob all shouting into each other's faces."

To determine how much Clinton supporters have to complain about, MediaWatch analysts compared the news coverage of Whitewater with previous reporting on scandals and ethical problems, and discovered the networks have been much less aggressive in pursuing the many tentacles of the Whitewater story.

1. No "Sleaze Factor." Clinton has never been identified with the "sleaze factor." A survey through Nexis of the term in Time, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report, The New York Times, and The Washington Post found that since 1984, when the term was used by Walter Mondale, 114 news stories containing the term referred specifically to the Reagan administration or Republicans, and only eight times referred to Democrats.

2. Press Self-Criticism. When the Iran-Contra story broke on November 25, 1986, the networks dived into the story. ABC gave its entire World News Tonight that night to Iran-Contra, and expanded Nightline to 60 minutes. CBS aired a half-hour special, and NBC did an hour special. On December 18, ABC devoted an entire 20/20 to the story. Sam Donaldson proclaimed: "If Lt. Col. North is the evil genius of the present crisis, there stands behind him a framework of ideological zeal, frustration, inattention, and tone, that can be laid to only one doorstep -- the Oval Office." NBC aired two one-hour special reports on December 15 and January 6. After the Tower Commission report on February 26, CBS aired a special called "Judgment on the White House." Combined, that's at least seven hours of specials.

When the Whitewater story first broke on March 8, 1992, the networks barely touched it, with five stories on four networks in that month. When the Whitewater story gained steam after he became President, the only special was ABC's late-night Whitewater: Overplayed or Underplayed? The only magazine show segments on Whitewater have been an April 10 60 Minutes piece on the improbability of Mrs. Clinton's commodity trading success, and two ABC Prime Time Live segments, one an interview after Clinton's Whitewater press conference with Rep. Jim Leach (R-Iowa) and Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.V.), and the other on Garrison Keillor's attack on the media's Whitewater coverage.

By the time the Iran-Contra story turned to analysis, media writers defended the media frenzy and blamed the White House for its problems. Newsweek media critic Jonathan Alter described the ethos on December 15, 1986: "After six years of state-of-the-art White House media manipulation and large-scale public indifference to criticism of the President, reporting about his shortcomings finally had found an audience." Washington Post reporter Lou Cannon told Alter: "People are finally listening to what's wrong with him." A month later, an Alter media column asked "Was North pampered?"

"The American press can hardly be blamed for the Iran-Contra scandal, since it deserves so little credit for unearthing it," Time writer Thomas Griffith wrote in the March 30, 1987 issue. "The press was not so much overplaying the story as playing catch-up in doing its job." Griffith noted "some in the Washington press corps acknowledge that they had slacked off in frustration from pursuing stories of the Administration's bumbling and misdeeds. The public seemed either to ignore the stories or find them carping...In some of the comment and columns out of Washington there is now a patronizing note of we-tried-to- tell-you-but-you-wouldn't-listen." Once the Whitewater story achieved critical mass, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and CNN all ran stories on the "feeding frenzy."

3. Whitewater Tributaries. While Democrats complain the media have "overplayed" Whitewater, the Center for Media and Public Affairs has shown that Whitewater received one-third as much coverage as the early days of Iran-Contra or Watergate. Perhaps because of this smaller load of stories, network reports were often much less detailed than print stories. When the White House released its Whitewater tax documents, the April 15 Los Angeles Times found that while the Clintons claim they put $46,000 into Whitewater, "the tax records and supporting documents show only about $13,000 in such payments by the Clintons." None of the networks mentioned this.

The Washington Post reported on April 21 that the Clintons' company made $50,000 by repossessing lots from 16 Whitewater buyers without any return of equity, even if the buyers paid tens of thousands of dollars before defaulting. None of the networks followed up (although Terry Keenan's January 13 CNN report focused on foreclosures following Whitewater's forfeiture on the Lorance Heights development).

The May issue of Money magazine told the story of "midwestern ranchers who allege that manipulation of the futures market undermined the prices they got for their cattle...to this day the ranchers remain convinced that [Thomas] Dittmer [the sole owner of Mrs. Clinton's brokerage firm Refco] led to some of the financial hardships they suffered." The ranchers have sued in federal court, but the networks, usually so quick to do the hard-luck story in the Reagan era, never touched this angle.

In fact, the four networks have done only 18 stories between them on Mrs. Clinton's commodity trades. Despite The New York Times breaking the story on March 18, none of the Big Three evening newscasts reported the story until 11 days later. Twelve of the 18 stories appeared on the three days the White House released documents or met the press: March 29, April 11, and April 22, after Mrs. Clinton's press conference.

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