Casting My Bread Upon the Waters:
Will The Washington Post Respond?
by Tamara Baker

May 21, 2001 -- Saint Paul, MN (APJP) -- You remember, of course, the huge, huge, HUGE hue and cry that erupted in both the print and broadcast media over the alleged vandalism committed by Those Evil Clinton White House Staffers. This was Page One material -- and Top TV News Story material -- literally for weeks. (That is, when the press wasn't bashing Clinton over pardoning people who, compared to the ones pardoned by his predecessor, George Herbert Walker Bush, looked like altar boys.)

Now, thanks to a story by the brave David Goldstein in the Kansas City Star, in which it was stated that "The condition of the real property was consistent with what we would expect to encounter when tenants vacate office space after an extended occupancy," according to a GSA statement," even the Bush-servile Washington Post has been forced to admit what we all knew for months now: that the whole Clintons-trashed-the-White-House story was a big, fat lie, planted by political enemies of the Democrats in general and of the Clintons in particular.

I've already written a letter to Mr. Goldstein of the Kansas City Star, thanking him for breaking a political story well ahead of the Washington Post, the self-alleged Queen of Beltway Political Journalism.

Now I'm going to share with you a letter I wrote to Charles Babington, the author of the Washington Post's belated reaction to the Kansas City Star's scoop. (CCs went to the WP's ombudsman, as well as to Howard Kurtz, the GOP's favorite guy on the Washington Post staff.) I hope you enjoy it!

Dear Mr. Babington:

Thank you, thank you, thank you, THANK YOU for going out of your way to debunk the most vile -- and obviously planted -- story I've seen since Ronnie Reagan's press corps spoonfed the Beltway scribes (or since Kenny Starr did his highly illegal -- and often flat-out untrue -- "on background" de facto press releases to his eager stenographers Isikoff, Schmidt and Weiskopf).

Now, my question is:

Will the Washington Post's parent company encourage all of its various media companies, print and broadcast, to devote as much time to the debunking of this heinous lie (and to exposing the liars who leaked it) as they did to taking that lie as fact and spreading it around the globe eleventy-five billion times in the first place?

This is not merely snideness on my part. As journalists, you all know that, unless the debunking is louder -- and usually by a factor of at least two times louder -- than the ruckus caused by the original lie, the lie will forever be enshrined, unchallenged, as truth, both in the public's mind and in the minds of even the most industrious journalists. (Heck, to this day some folks still take it on faith that the Clintons did something wrong in the whole Whitewater mess, even after three separate investigations found the Clintons innocent of all but losing their shirts in a bad land deal. That's because the media focused on the accusations, but never on the exculpatory data. Ever.)

I trust you will immediately get cracking on clearing the Clintons' names, with full and fair apologies for allowing your news entities to spread the lie, unchecked and unchallenged, in a manner that you would never consider had its subject been George W. Bush. It is, after all, the right thing to do.

Sincerely,

Tamara Baker

So, there you have it. Think my letter will have any effect? Want to join your shoulders to mine, to see if together we can budge the big ol' WP elephant?

What the hey: If we fail, we will at least have confirmation of their pro-Shrub bias.

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