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Fools for Scandal: How The Media Invented Whitewater
Before he created, with Joe Conason, The Hunting of the President, the critically acclaimed documentary film about Whitewater, Gene Lyons published his research into the Whitewater scandal in Harper's. That research later became a book - Fools for Scandal, which scathingly debunks the received wisdom that was handed down to the national media with the Whitewater scandal. Lyons shows the reader a media (especially The New York Times) that was driven to pin something - anything-on the Clintons, and that, in its impassioned quest for scandal, found itself making strange bedfellows with right-wing organizations such as Citizens United, and leading Republicans Al D'Amato and Lauch Faircloth. For anyone curious to understand how the printing press becomes a political machine, Fools for Scandal is illuminating, engaging, and revealing.
224 pages, Paperback
First published July 1, 1996
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
December 6, 2011
This is an enlargement of an article Lyons wrote for Harper's in 1994. If you found Whitewater confusing and murky (and who didn't), if you wondered what Hillary meant by "vast right wing conspiracy" (and there was one, so I never understood what all the mockery was about), you need to read this book. If you are still uncertain that the media makes shit up, and would like to have it demonstrated to you, please read this.
Not just any media, but the gold standard: the New York Times reporter Jeff Gerth, who concocted the original Whitewater story, and wrote three follow-ups. Stephen Labaton, who took over Gerth's Whitewater beat at the Times. Washington Post reporter Susan Schmidt. L.J. Davis at The New Republic. Newsweek's Michael Isikoff gets some of the blame, as does Jeff Greenfield of ABC. Gerth's original 1992 story was a masterpiece of deception, misleading chronology, and ignoring the evidence. And the media operates under a herd mentality: if the Times is reporting it, everyone else does too.
There certainly was a right wing conspiracy to smear the Clintons. It was born among Arkansas Republicans (Floyd Brown of Citizens United, the felonious judge David Hale, Clinton's gubernatorial rival Sheffield Nelson, and two Arkansas state troopers constantly worked to spread lies). The Clintons' one-time friend and Whitewater fellow shareholder, Jim McDougal, then spread misinformation to the media. Whenever there was exculpatory information, it was ignored by Gerth, Labaton, and Schmidt. The Wall Street Journal (the front page, not the editorial page) was one of the few media outlets to get Whitewater right. (One of its Whitewater reporters, Viveca Novak, would resurface later in the Scooter Libby case but that time would not cover herself in glory.)
Contrary to conventional wisdom, Whitewater (a small real estate company formed to sell rural plots in the Ozarks) was not a "sweetheart deal" for the Clintons. Jim McDougal ran the company into the ground. The Clintons ended up losing $42k on it. Two separate investigations, the Pillsbury Report and special prosecutor Robert Fiske's report, concluded that there were no improprieties on the Clintons' part. The House hearings and the Senate hearings heard hours and hours of fruitless testimony, none of it leading to the discovery of Clinton wrongdoing.
One of the points Lyons drives home effectively is that however confused and murky the articles in the national press were, the Arkansas locals knew the score. Arkansas reporters and state officials knew there was nothing substantive to Whitewater. Coastal media outlets - okay, I'll just say it - the elite liberal media - didn't understand Arkansas, that vast hillbilly backwoods. Margaret Carlson of Time wrote that Bill Clinton was "one of the first from the area to go to college," apparently unaware of Fulbright scholarships, and Senator J. William Fulbright's Rhodes Scholarship. In a colloquium reprinted in the Appendix, Lyons says, "there's a certain amount of patronizing stuff that's driven by the media. I have had the experience of living in New England in the early 1970s with a wife from Arkansas, who was treated like a combination of Eva Braun and Daisy Mae Yokum. And we decided to come back South where people laughed at stuff."
Frankly, Gerth (and those like him) remains a mystery to me. Lyons does an excellent job explaining Whitewater and where Gerth went wrong, but naturally Gerth's motives, if he had any, remain utterly opaque. And if he didn't have any, what happened? Gerth would go on to write some of the Wen Ho Lee stories in 1999. Wen Ho Lee was the Taiwanese American scientist unjustly accused of stealing U.S. nuclear secrets; after his nine months in solitary confinement, a federal judge apologized profusely to Lee and Bill Clinton issued a public apology. Gerth now writes for the progressive, respected investigative online journal ProPublica. Is he reformed? Who can say? Was it just human error? Why did Gerth's editors condone his methods? Occasionally the New York Times is forced, by its grotesque misreporting or outright journalistic frauds, to do public soul searching. This happened most memorably with Jayson Blair, who fabricated entire stories. After the Blair fiasco, the Times spent a bajillion words "Correcting the Record." There was no soul searching with Whitewater; it was left to Lyons, a reporter for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, to perform the postmortem.
Not just any media, but the gold standard: the New York Times reporter Jeff Gerth, who concocted the original Whitewater story, and wrote three follow-ups. Stephen Labaton, who took over Gerth's Whitewater beat at the Times. Washington Post reporter Susan Schmidt. L.J. Davis at The New Republic. Newsweek's Michael Isikoff gets some of the blame, as does Jeff Greenfield of ABC. Gerth's original 1992 story was a masterpiece of deception, misleading chronology, and ignoring the evidence. And the media operates under a herd mentality: if the Times is reporting it, everyone else does too.
There certainly was a right wing conspiracy to smear the Clintons. It was born among Arkansas Republicans (Floyd Brown of Citizens United, the felonious judge David Hale, Clinton's gubernatorial rival Sheffield Nelson, and two Arkansas state troopers constantly worked to spread lies). The Clintons' one-time friend and Whitewater fellow shareholder, Jim McDougal, then spread misinformation to the media. Whenever there was exculpatory information, it was ignored by Gerth, Labaton, and Schmidt. The Wall Street Journal (the front page, not the editorial page) was one of the few media outlets to get Whitewater right. (One of its Whitewater reporters, Viveca Novak, would resurface later in the Scooter Libby case but that time would not cover herself in glory.)
Contrary to conventional wisdom, Whitewater (a small real estate company formed to sell rural plots in the Ozarks) was not a "sweetheart deal" for the Clintons. Jim McDougal ran the company into the ground. The Clintons ended up losing $42k on it. Two separate investigations, the Pillsbury Report and special prosecutor Robert Fiske's report, concluded that there were no improprieties on the Clintons' part. The House hearings and the Senate hearings heard hours and hours of fruitless testimony, none of it leading to the discovery of Clinton wrongdoing.
One of the points Lyons drives home effectively is that however confused and murky the articles in the national press were, the Arkansas locals knew the score. Arkansas reporters and state officials knew there was nothing substantive to Whitewater. Coastal media outlets - okay, I'll just say it - the elite liberal media - didn't understand Arkansas, that vast hillbilly backwoods. Margaret Carlson of Time wrote that Bill Clinton was "one of the first from the area to go to college," apparently unaware of Fulbright scholarships, and Senator J. William Fulbright's Rhodes Scholarship. In a colloquium reprinted in the Appendix, Lyons says, "there's a certain amount of patronizing stuff that's driven by the media. I have had the experience of living in New England in the early 1970s with a wife from Arkansas, who was treated like a combination of Eva Braun and Daisy Mae Yokum. And we decided to come back South where people laughed at stuff."
Frankly, Gerth (and those like him) remains a mystery to me. Lyons does an excellent job explaining Whitewater and where Gerth went wrong, but naturally Gerth's motives, if he had any, remain utterly opaque. And if he didn't have any, what happened? Gerth would go on to write some of the Wen Ho Lee stories in 1999. Wen Ho Lee was the Taiwanese American scientist unjustly accused of stealing U.S. nuclear secrets; after his nine months in solitary confinement, a federal judge apologized profusely to Lee and Bill Clinton issued a public apology. Gerth now writes for the progressive, respected investigative online journal ProPublica. Is he reformed? Who can say? Was it just human error? Why did Gerth's editors condone his methods? Occasionally the New York Times is forced, by its grotesque misreporting or outright journalistic frauds, to do public soul searching. This happened most memorably with Jayson Blair, who fabricated entire stories. After the Blair fiasco, the Times spent a bajillion words "Correcting the Record." There was no soul searching with Whitewater; it was left to Lyons, a reporter for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, to perform the postmortem.
February 22, 2012
didn't finish it.....fairly repetitive.
July 15, 2013
Very effective at making me skeptical of The Grey Lady.
June 9, 2014
wow. swiftboated, avant la lettre. crazy.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews