Show "13 57 iftr'W a S-- AT ? r""gS nftttWMMiaw fPirffi OPINION Tuesday January The Salt Lake Tribune M fftiiiTOlW A9 27 1998 This Time Americans May See in Clinton What the Media Always Has BY HOWARD KURTZ THE WASHINGTON POST WASHINGTON After Gen-nifFlowers after Faula Jones scanafter the campaign-financ- e dal after five years of White House damage control just about fvery journalist in Washington was prepared to believe the worst about President Clinton and the Intern The carefully hedged denials the dribble of information the art all this is strikingly of the spin familiar to the reporters who cover the Clinton presidency And in interviews with me over the past year most of them have expressed the belief that the nations leader has difficulty telling thte unvarnished truth while the public has proven tolerant of a president who seems constantly mired in the muck of scandal the prevailing view from the Fourth Estate is that this is one slippery character Indeed the cultural gap between the constant press pounding of Clinton and his consistently high approval ratings is baffling and frustrating to many reporters Year after year the White House has managed to neutralize negative stories contain their impact or somehow relegate them to the fringes of the media world Jf&is relentless effort has served ktq shield the president from an avalanche of bad publicity Until now The allegations that Tlinton had an affair with Monica Lewinsky lied about it under oath and urged her all of which reto lie about it are so stunning main unproven that the usual spin operation is hqpelessly ineffective The story is so dominant across the media ll nalandscape that its ture lends it credibility or at least makes it almost impossible to anything else And if early polls and random interviews are any indication the tawdry tale Sgems to be sinking in with the public too Mnln short the administrations standard tool kit chiding the press browbeating reporters referring inquiries to lawyers who i will not comment just plain will not changing the subject wash this time around With this story unlike some of -- the others press behavior is not really at issue The allegations didnt surface in a supermarket tabloid or a staunchly conserva er ld wall-to-wa- dis-qu- tive magazine but in a criminal investigation by independent counsel Kenneth Starr That fits anyones definition of news Still the press has the power to legitimize scandalous charges or keep them off the national agenda It is worth recalling that when Gennifer Flowers alleged an affair with Clinton in 1992 the networks initially ignored the charges except for a couple of references on NBC The New York Times ran only a few paragraphs on the bottom of an inside page I am ashamed for Max Frankel my profession then the Times editor said of other editors who decided to give the We dont story more attention want to report on the candidates sex lives Two years later when Paula Jones charged at a conservative political conference that Clinton had crudely pressed her for sex in a Little Rock Ark hotel room almost none of the reporters at the gathering bothered to report it Nearly three months passed before Jones subsequent suit became front-pag- e news in The Washington Post and other papers Most journalists still felt squeamish about such charges That reticence seems almost quaint these days with embarrassing allegations about Clintons personal life and references to his anatomy all over the front pages and the evening news In the age of Marv Albert stories about presidential sex no longer form some distant tributary of the journalistic waters they are the mainstream And perhaps because this is the politician who famously insisted he didnt inhale journalists have long since come to view him as a master of lawyerly evasion When Clinton told PBS Jim Lehrer that there is no improper relation- Jones lawsuit McCurry dodged the question 11 times Thursday saying only that Clinton had been truthful on both occasions In 1993 when the American Spectator reported charges by several Arkansas troopers that Clinton had used them to arrange liaisons with women White House officials dismissed the story as a partisan attack and sought then-govern- ship with Lewinsky White House aides were deluged with calls from reporters questioning his verb tenses By saying there is no relationship was Clinton leaving open the possibility of a past relationship? Was he in other words fudging once again? Watching the usually smooth White House spokesman Mike McCurry testily refuse to elaborate on Clintons denial of an im- proper relationship with Lewinsky underscored just how radically the climate has changed But it is important to understand that most of the correspondents in to discredit the troopers But other journalists later reported similar charges The following year when Jones charged that Clinton had asked her for oral sex Clinton said he didnt remember meeting her His friend James Carville dismissed the former Arkansas state emtrash ployee as trailer-par- k In early 1997 the Spectator reported an allegation by former White House aide David Watkins and his wife that Clinton had had an affair with Marsha Scott an Arkansan on the White House staff The article by a woman who had collaborated with Watwas kins on a proposed book picked up by the London Sunday Telegraph the Washington Times and the New York Post But McCurry refused to comment on the charge and most of the mainstream press steered clear of it Its not what it seems' that briefing room feel they have been stiffed by the administration on stories from Whitewater to Travelgate to the travails of John Huang and Webb Hubbell In the Lewinsky saga reporters are customarily careful to couch the sordid charges in terms of al- and legations investigators Yet every scandal has a subtext and the journalistic take here is clear: Clintons history of reckless disregard for the truth has finally caught up with him Certainly White House officials are grappling with the same dilemma they faced in the camg probe Even paign those who favor full disclosure must assemble the relevant documents check peoples memories and piece together answers for investigators as well as the press If they make a mistake they may be accused of covering up There is thus a natural tension between the need to answer questions and say fund-raisin- concern about triple-checkin- g each detail In this case however Bill Clinton knows the answers about what happened between him and Moni- ca Lewinsky Journalists are skeptical about McCurrys insistence on sticking to the narrow language of a denial crafted by three lawyers White House officials strongly believe that many journalists and have been scandal-obsesse- d personally hostile to Clinton since the day he arrived in Washington But even they are not attempting to blame the media for the latest twist in Starrs investigation The president and the press have been dancing this tango for some time It was six years ago this month that candidate Clinton adamantly denied having an affair with Flowers despite her tapes of seemingly intimate phone conversations with him Now news reports say Clinton acknowledged the Flowers affair in his deposition in the Paula' The White House employed a similar strategy last summer when Newsweek 's Michael Isikoff was pursuing allegations that Clinton had made an unwanted sexual advance toward former White House aide Kathleen Willey near the Oval Office McCurry would not even confirm that Willey had once worked in the White House declaring that he would not let news organizations use some comment by him to sneak the story into print Clinton attorney Robert Bennett said the president had no specific recollection of meeting her in the Oval Office At a news conference soon afterward ABCs John Donvan said to the president: Even for those of us who dont have much appetite for this entire subject this particular answer in this particular category seems needlessly evasive Clinton replied: Well first of all I think the answer is probably known but I think that Mr Bennett and the person in questions lawyers gave the only relevant answers And there was a request to be left alone and not harassed non-sexu- al out the e fund-raiser- fund-raiser- graves in Arlington National that the exploding Cemetery grenades have become so much background noise At the same time the administration has been extraordinarily skillful at connecting with the public on matters ranging from college tax credits to mammosmoking It has grams to teen-ag- e become something of a West Wing mantra: People dont care about Washington scandals they care about the issues that touch their lives But Monica Lewinsky may change all that The White House press corps which has seemed docile at times is revved for action The sense of public revulsion for once may be in sync with the medias agenda No amount of skillful spin can make this one disappear Howard Kurtz is The Washington Posts media reporter "Spin his book about the ClinCycle ton White House and the press will be published soon J K56Flex Voice Fax Modem id other Products Technical Support ")4Hour I we Will Beat Any Advertised Major Credit Cards Accepted 3 Years Parts v and Labor 96 Days Sam as Cash 801-978-00- WWW EVERYTHING MUST GO f H&meMakprs IMPACT-COMPUTE- RS i 03 COM HURRY LAST CHANCE! ransu if tfjfsxsmBiinlMs I SALTUu wfzfeHZJXfis? (tffcuMiiifisi) - campaign-financ- investigation McCurry special counsel Lanny Davis and Clinton himself doggedly insisted that the famous White House coffees were s not After all donors were solicited before and after but not during the actual coffees They clung to this line even after internal documents showed that the coffees were budgeted to bring in as much as $500000 and that campaign strategists themselves referred to the schmooze s sessions as But polls suggest that most of the public tuned out the fundraising scandal as politics-as-usuIn fact the Clinton scandal beat which has become a permanent part of the journalistic subculture has made remarkably little headway in terms of public opinion This is in part because Clinton has been under attack for so long on so many fronts even falsely accused of selling tfjaf for Prices on Upgrades NO x&vsf and were just trying to honor it I dont really have anything to say to add to what Mr Bennett already said about it The story quickly faded only to be revived last week by reports that Willey had told Jones lawyers that there had been an unwanted presidential advance This pattern of semantic hairsplitting has been evident on matters as well Through- ami t tfimMctiR) I DVD IVl Y: 0 |