FORMER FBI AGENT Gary Aldrich’s scheduled appearance on the June 30 This Week with David Brinkley drove White House officials to the phones. Leon Panetta, the chief of staff, called Robert Murphy, vice president for news coverage at ABC, and urged him to cancel Aldrich. George Stephanopoulos conveyed the same message to Murphy and, in a separate call, to Virginia Moseley, the associate producer of the show. Ex-congressman Tony Coelho, an unpaid political adviser to the White House, also called Moseley. John Emerson, a deputy assistant to President Clinton for intergovernmental affairs, got in touch with Robert Iger, the president of Capital Cities/ABC in Los Angeles. Another Clinton aide called Michael Ovitz, the president of Disney, ABC’s parent company. Democratic national chairman Chris Dodd called Dorrance Smith, the Brinkley show’s executive producer. And in Lyon, France, where the president was participating in the G-7 summit, press secretary Michael McCurry pulled aside Robin Sproul, ABC’s Washington bureau chief, for a closed-door meeting and declared it outrageous and unacceptable for the Brinkley show to put Aldrich on the air.
Though you’d hardly know it from the press coverage, this was an unprecedented effort by the White House — any White House — to exert pressure on a news organization to keep a critic of the president off television. Not since the Nixon administration tried unsuccessfully to block publication of the Pentagon Papers twenty-five years ago has a White House leaned so aggressively on the media to alter a news decision. And the remarkable thing is the heavy-handed pressure may have paid off.
