The great Whitewater snipe hunt - poor press coverage of the Whitewater Development Corp. scandal

Washington Monthly, April, 1994 by Gene Lyons

But just about the last thing that strikes the national press is the first thing that strikes the majority of Arkansans. To wit, how unlikely it seems that Bill and Hillary Clinton---the depths of whose mutual political ambition can scarcely be fathomed by ordinary mortals--would go in the tank for so little money. Whatever their character flaws, nothing known about either Clinton indicates they' d break the law for money, even conceding Hillary's apparent self-pity about Clinton's small gubernatorial salary and her clear desire--remember she chose to work for the lucrative Rose firm--to make a higher salary herself. That Clinton served six terms as Arkansas governor untouched by financial scandal seems to count for nothing. After all, what do we know?

Much Ado

Well, one thing some of us know is that Whitewater is old news to local journalists and voters. Clinton's Republican opponent, Sheffield Nelson, raised the issue during the 1990 gubernatorial campaign. A year later, McDougal himself was tried by a Reagan-appointed prosecutor and acquitted of bank fraud in a Little Rock federal court with much attendant publicity.

Until 1991, Little Rock had two statewide daily newspapers; a nasty, protracted circulation war spanned almost all of Clinton's time in public office. In the process, very few stones were left unturned. Clinton's political destruction, after all, has been the winning Democrat-Gazette's main agenda for about 15 years. Even minor financial corruption brings public wrath. During the newspaper war many scalps were taken, among them Attorney General Steve Clark's, a Clinton ally. Caught by the press padding his expense account for expensive dinner dates, Clark was tried, convicted, sentenced, and eventually sued for repayment.

So if there had been a Whitewater scandal, chances are the Little Rock papers would have found it long ago. Of course, it is always possible there is a smoking gun in the documents Fiske has subpoenaed, but most veteran journalists here think that when all is said and done, Whitewatergate will rum out to be a giant snipe hunt--a waste of time and energy. Nevertheless, the press loves a scandal, and just about every factual and logical error in the national press has run in a prosecutorial direction. A few telling examples:

* Although reports in March indicated the Clintons may owe more taxes on Whitewater than they have already paid, earlier this year, Whitewater stories centered on why, if the Clintons lost $69,000, they didn't deduct enough from their taxes. 'This may be the first time," writes Joel Achenbach in The Washington Post, "that a politician's decision not to take a tax write-off is perceived as suspicious." But the Clintons did deduct a good deal of their Whitewater investment, according to a story by Bill Simmons of the Little Rock AP. Simmons took out the couple's tax returns from 1980 to 1990, checked the itemized deductions, and there it was: $41,000 interest on Whitewater loan payments over several years. Why the Clintons didn't write off the entire $69,000--the sum which Hillary, at least until mid-March, maintained they lost in the deal---is unclear. But the $41,000 was there for any diligent reporter to find. (Of course, now that the potential scandal is that the Clintons may have written off too much and not too little, the press may leap on Simmons' story as evidence of the Clintons' duplicity--even though the charge was completely different just two months ago.)