Last month, the son of a senior Clinton administration official was suspended from one ofWashington’s toniest private high schools after teachers caught the boy and a few of his friends drinking vodka and smoking dope at a school dance. Despite efforts to keep the embarrassing event secret, it didn’t take long for just about every major news outlet in town to find out — including the city’s two daily newspapers and at least one national newsweekly.
Yet nobody ran the story. The boy’s well-known father, it turns out, had called various editors and asked them to keep his son’s name out of print. Which may account for the curious silence on the matter. Or perhaps the press decided in this case to exhibit a little restraint, maybe even some manners and consideration for the private lives of others. Either way, let’s hope the next time the child of a prominent Republican finds himself in the dean’s offce, reporters remember the new precedent they’ve set.
The same principle holds with any conceivable Republican scandal in the next administration, considering the extraordinary way the press is covering the Whitewater hijinks on Capitol Hill.
Did you know that Democratic senators are filibustering Republican efforts to continue investigating Whitewater? You may not, because this obstructionism is going mostly unremarked in the press. Can you doubt that if Republicans ever attempted to block an investigation into a Republican White House it would be front-page news daily until they relented? The mainstream media seem to have conjured up a nifty defense for themselves: Nobody’s interested in Whitewater, so we’re not covering it. What’s more, there’s nothing there.
This magazine is hardly a fan of senatorial inquisitions, but we have to say that the behavior of the White House in the past few months — with all those documents under subpoena suddenly popping up in boxes, on desks, in other offces — is an object lesson in why congressional oversight exists in the first place.
In the past 20 years we have come to expect press oversight as well, but if a new standard is being set, the press should apply it fairly in the next few years, or there will be yet another outbreak of that talk about “liberal media bias” they hate so much.
