It is a common right-wing plaint that the prestige media are reluctant to report on the Clinton scandals. Is it true? Well, on June 5, the House committee looking into Travelgate released documents showing that the White House had requested and received confidential FBI background materials on travel-office martyr Billy Dale . . . a full seven months after he was fired.
The midday news shook Washington, because the request form bore the name of ex-counsel Bernard Nussbaum. And the form featured a false claim, also illegal, that the information was needed because Dale was being considered for “access” to the White House. Clearly and unquestionably, someone at the White House was digging for dirt on Dale in order to justify what the administration had done to him. Either it was Nussbaum, in which case the White House counsel broke the law, or it was somebody who used Nussbaum’s name, in which case somebody in the White House was using Nussbaum’s name illegally. FBI director Louis Freeh quickly vowed a “thorough inquiry.”
So what did the New York Times and the Washington Post put on their front pages the next morning? Oh, the Times had an article on a French colonial fort in South Carolina and one on a gadget that is supposed to track political advertising on television. It also published an FBI story — on the bureau’s strategy in the Montana-ranch case. And two local New York stories. There were a lot more articles, too, between page one and page 24. It was on page 24 that a brief account of the travel-office revelation finally appeared.
How about the Post, watchdog of the nation’s capital and proud linchpin of Watergate? It ran page-one stories on “infant TV actors” and a species of shrimp found off the coast of Belize. It, too, had an FBI story: about the bureau’s Internet home page. And it even had an independent-counsel story: on the expense of the four counsels now investigating the Clinton administration. The paper’s travel-office report appeared on page four.
The world wearies of conservative carping about press bias. But sometimes carpers have a point. Travelgate did not get the attention it deserved, surely, because the editors at these papers thought they had done enough scandal coverage with the Whitewater guilty verdicts the week before. That mindset — that inclination to give Clinton an easier time of it than the mainstream media would a politician with whom they are out of sympathy — is what press bias is all about. And why those who deny its existence, and pooh- pooh the recent report that 89 percent of the American press voted for Bill Clinton in 1992, are being deliberately obtuse, or dishonest, or merely stupid.
