Front row at the scandal parade

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Oct 12, 1998 | by Tiffany Danitz

For the White House press corps, there is no escape from President Clinton's seamy sex scandals. On the front line, disgust and feelings of betrayal are common.

Reading the Starr report on President Clinton's misconduct with former White House intern Monica S. Lewinsky makes even experienced journalists blush. Some who cover the White House are pausing to take stock.

Scott Pelley, a former crime reporter who now covers the White House for CBS, describes his reaction to the report upon its release. "I am exhausted and sad. When I walked off the White House grounds the other night, I turned to look at the house that George Washington had commissioned and I thought about the history of the place -- this is certainly among its lowest moments."

Editorial pages urging Clinton's resignation reach from the Atlanta Journal and Constitution to the Des Moines Register, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the San Jose Mercury News, the Detroit Free Press and USA Today. The resounding chorus is bipartisan, including liberal columnists such as Lars-Erik Nelson of the New York Daily News and Clarence Page of the Chicago Tribune.

The Washington press corps has spent the last eight months grilling the administration about the Lewinsky scandal only to be told by the president's people that they are ignoring the "real" news. Again and again journalists were told: There is no dress. There has been no parsing of the president's statements. There is only a vast rightwing conspiracy.

Then, with the report, came a sigh of vindication. "We all sort of in our heart of hearts knew why the president wasn't answering our questions. In retrospect, it [the report] makes a lot of things clear and answers a lot of questions -- which is great for any reporter on the beat. Now we have sort of a narrative of the life we have been living for the last six months," Pelley adds.

Fox News White House correspondent Jim Angle does not think vindication is the proper word because, he says, the press wasn't arguing that one thing or the other was the truth. The function of the press is to find the truth. "There was a sense that finally you had the facts when the president testified and acknowledged he had lied. And facts are what we should be dealing in."

Angle says, "All White Houses are the same in one respect: They don't like criticism and they accuse you of being part of the problem instead of part of the solution."

Books have been written on the proficiency of this administration's spin machine. Its well-greased tactics, say critics, have transferred public distrust and disgruntlement back and forth between Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr and the media. As a result, the polls show many have come to view the Lewinsky saga as a tawdry sex story cooked up by political enemies of the president and greedy publishers. The polls also suggest the public is confused about why the press continues to be so dogged, splattering dirty language in morning papers and blabbing on and on during news broadcasts about perverse behavior.

Again and again the president's spokesmen have wondered aloud from every platform why the press didn't attack the extramarital affairs of former presidents including John 12. Kennedy, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Angle responds: "None of those people [past presidents] were deposed in a legal setting so the opportunity never presented itself to us. That is the difference."

Clinton's trips to the courts also have undermined the presidency, says Pelley. Clinton's repeated pushing of the legal envelope -- fighting technicalities in the Supreme Court and losing prerogative after prerogative w has stripped the office of many of its legal protections, including compromising the Secret Service detail by forcing a precedent that requires agents to testify when called upon to do so.

Pelley has been roundly criticized for his views. He has been accused of covering the White House like a crime beat, to which he responds, "It is a crime beat. Certainly there are many important issues that impinge on the White House that need to be covered and have been covered, but there is no more important story than this. And the White House tries to minimize it as a sideshow while we see it as the core of a drama involving the executive office of the president."

Pelley is among the top journalists who, "if the Starr report is to be believed, and the White House does not dispute the facts in the Starr report," is extremely disappointed in Clinton. "The thing that worries me the most is the ease with which he told these lies -- in the Roosevelt Room and on TV. The ease with which these lies ... were maintained is most disturbing. You can't ever trust what he says again ... you must always question if he is telling the truth. And that is not something you want in a president."

Angle asks "Who doesn't have second thoughts about a president who looks into the camera and, with what appears to be rock-solid certainty, assures you that nothing happened? Then it turns out that something did happen."