Give the New York Times some credit: Its continuing efforts to pump up the Gingrich “scandals” verge on the heroic. Friday morning January 10, the Gray Lady greeted its readers with the headline “Gingrich Is Heard Urging Tactics in Ethics Case” over the byline of Adam Clymer, the paper’s designated Gingrich hound. All the non-verbal cues signaled a major revelation. There was a boxed three-column spread on the front page, with a large picture of Gingrich, and almost a full page on the inside, complete with side-bar. If only they’d had a story to go with it!
Apparently a Democratic congressman — “hostile to Mr. Gingrich,” as Clymer delicately put it — passed along to the Times a tape of a phone call between Gingrich and the House leadership, made on the day Gingrich arrived at his agreement with the ethics committee. The agreement stipulated in part that Gingrich would not orchestrate attacks on the ethics committee.
Clymer wrote the story so artfully that casual readers might conclude Gingrich could be heard violating the agreement. In fact, the transcript proved that Gingrich and his colleagues were quite meticulously observing the agreement’s jots and tittles. The story, in other words, was precisely the opposite of what the Times said. But the larger cause of toppling the speaker would have been ill served by an accurate headline: “Gingrich Heard Being Scrupulous in Not Violating Ethics Agreement.”
For that matter, in its huffing and puffing to inflate another Gingrich non- scandal, the Times may have missed an even juicier story — one that was literally handed to it. As Ohio congressman Mike Oxley, a former FBI agent, points out: “The 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act makes it illegal to intentionally intercept cellular phone calls and to possess or divulge the contents of any intercepted conversation. The act of forwarding a secretly taped private conversation to a news organization for publication is explicitly prohibited under federal law.”
Now here’s some news: That unnamed congressman — so friendly to Adam Clymer but so “hostile to Mr. Gingrich” — was very likely violating federal law, something only Gingrich’s frothiest critics accuse the speaker of doing. As a matter of fact, aides to Sen. Chuck Robb were actually convicted a few years back for disseminating a similarly taped conversation in hopes of damaging a political enemy. This could get interesting. Hearings, anyone? Or better yet, how about a special prosecutor?
