August 28, 2006
More About Whitewater Posted by Fredric Smoler at 03:05 PM EST John Steele Gordon wisely notes that the media love scandal, not least because it sells copy and attracts viewers, claims that the media are splendidly unbiased in their coverage of scandal—I’m not quite convinced of that claim—and thinks there was enough smoke around Whitewater to justify the assumption that there had to be a fire.
I think the first claim is true, although not necessarily a good thing. A constant drumbeat of scandal that conveys a false sense that all normal politics (and all politicians) are possibly odiously and at least ludicrously corrupt erodes indispensable trust in politics. One of the very likely preconditions for the triumph of anti-democratic politics is the broad conviction that democratic politics is inevitably a base and dishonest enterprise. When that happens, the allegedly incorruptible and avowedly anti-democratic counter-elite can start to look pretty good, precisely because democratic starts to be a synonym for corrupt. I do not think this is a probable danger to the United States, but it is something to bear in mind.
In terms of whether there was enough smoke around the serial allegations lumped together as “Whitewater” to generate a reasonable suspicion of a fire, I think the question is, how big a fire was it reasonable to suspect? Big enough to justify the duration and intensity of coverage those allegations received in papers like The New York Times? I think not; Mr. Gordon may think otherwise. I remember that during early but not first-blush Whitewater, a relative of mine ran into a pretty senior Times man and asked what was going on, since the likely fire didn’t seem big enough to justify the intensity and duration of the coverage. The senior Times man agreed that the coverage was peculiar and excessive, but denied that there was any authentic bias. He claimed that some younger reporters, knowing that a couple of very highly placed superiors had it in for Clinton, mistakenly believed that the way to advancement was to politicize your work and thus gratify your superiors’ political prejudices, since that was the way life was supposed to work, especially if you had recently graduated from one of our better universities. I think this is an amusing theory, but not necessarily a persuasive one.
Is media coverage of scandals splendidly unbiased, meaning, do left and right cover allegations of scandal by their own team as zealously as they cover allegations impugning the other team? Sometimes, but not, I think, too often. I remember being very impressed when some Second Amendment enthusiasts blogged about some possible fraud in scholarship by an academic on their side of the debate, after having covered in great detail the allegations of fraud in some scholarship on the other side. As it is supposed to have said beneath an eighteenth-century engraving of a French warship towing a defeated British warship into port as a prize, the sight was the more delightful for its rarity.
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