American Politics Journal -- A Case History in the Culture of Lies: The Washington Post

Guest commentary
A Case History in the Culture of Lies: The Washington Post
By Charles Utwater II

April 26, 2002 -- Washington (APJP)

Lying Right Out in the Open

They lie to us. We know they're lying. They know we know. We know they know we know. So what is the problem with the American media? More specifically, what's the problem with The Washington Post?

It's easy to excuse the behavior of most of the media. American newspapers have been reduced to canned astrology columns, Little League scores and restaurant reviews. Television "news" is mostly salacious tales like Monica and Chandra.

But The New York Times and The Washington Post don't work that way. They employ bright, professionally-trained journalists. Then they set them to serve as trained seals to the powerful.

The reporters are the hired help. What about the captains of the newsroom?

With their towel-snapping, frat-boy-style gloating over the coup in Venezuela, the media made it clear why they regarded counting the votes in Florida in Election 2000 to be superfluous. Nations, they apparently believe, can only be led by people with The Right Sort of Ideas. After a quick genuflection to the notion of elections, The Washington Post, in a hallucinatory editorial, said that "the violation of democracy that led to the ouster of President Hugo Chavez Thursday night was initiated not by the army but by Mr. Chavez himself."[1].

As Ted Rall pointed out, by that standard, we should have removed Richard Nixon by coup for the shootings at Kent State [2]. Investors should note that the "Marxism" the Post's reportage and analysis ascribed to Chavez [see note 2a] is at this point a lot less expensive to them than Argentina's "free market" (a.k.a. crony capitalism). The cost of the coup in terms of lost trust and prestige throughout Latin America is incalculable.

All one can say in the Post's defense is that The New York Times was even more brazen in its support of totalitarian methods.

The Crooked Post

There was a day, long ago, when I thought of The Washington Post as the nation's best newspaper, not as deep on science and international affairs as The New York Times, but also not quite as entangled with the national security apparatus. The Post under Kay Graham seemed more open, more aware of the human foibles of politicians and the vagaries of partisan power.

I can't remember when I first became aware that something was seriously wrong at the paper. Perhaps it was when I learned a key witness against the Clintons, L. Jean Lewis, was caught on the witness stand in a series of lies in the Senate investigation of Whitewater. She collapsed into an incoherent heap in that august body, thereby casting in doubt any wrongdoing by the Clintons in the Madison Guaranty matter [3]. The Post, which had been so eager to report her accusations, didn't mention a word of their discrediting, thereby ensuring the continuation of the long national nightmare of investigations against the president.

At the time, it was easier to believe that this was an act of negligence or malice by reporter Susan Schmidt rather than an institutional problem. We know that newspapers bend the news to fit the prejudices of their advertisers and their managements, but who could imagine a newspaper systematically lying about events that were well known? And who could imagine that the Democrats, with the exception of staff counsel Julian Epstein, would stay silent? And yet subsequent events have proven that the Post systematically lies and the Democrats systematically stay silent.

A list of just the major examples of dishonesty by the Post would fill a book. "The Hunting of the President" by Conason and Lyons [3], to be precise.

That book documents how The Washington Post systematically lied about "Whitewater". The Pillsbury Madison Sutro report, commissioned from a Reagan-linked law firm, made it clear early on that the Clintons were not responsible for money lost in the Whitewater Development Corporation or Madison Guaranty, but the Post buried this information deep inside an unrelated article. (see footnote [3a]). A false report by Susan Schmidt of Republican accusations that White House Counsel Vincent Foster's had been "stripped" of evidence related to Whitewater was refuted, but never retracted by the Post. the Post headlined an article in a manner that accused Bill Clinton of pressuring municipal judge David Hale over a loan, but never published evidence that clearly refuted this and tended to show that Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr had suppressed evidence adverse to his case. The man they claimed made the accusation, traffic judge Bill Watt, gave the FBI evidence that cleared both Bill Clinton and his Democratic rival, Governor Jim Guy Tucker. The Post's Schmidt and sidekick Bob Woodward, in violation of every rule and ethic regarding evidence in a criminal case (not to mention basic decency and good taste), published a report that Kenneth Starr was dragging Arkansas for Bill Clinton's ex-girlfriends. The Post also portrayed a $20,000 check made out to Clinton as evidence of wrongdoing. The fact that it had never been cashed and had probably never been seen by the president was not deemed worthy of report.

The Post was also fast out of the box on discrediting journalist Gary Webb whose 1996 series on cocaine trafficking by CIA contractors made sense of the mechanics of Iran-Contra [4]. If guns were being flown down to Central America by smugglers, were the smugglers likely to want to fly an empty plane back to the United States? And who had the capacity to prevent the DEA and Customs from inquiring into the contents of the airplane if not someone connected to the military or the intelligence agencies?

One central thesis of Webb's work has been officially confirmed by CIA Inspector Frederick Hitz. CIA contractors did import large amounts of cocaine into the United States. It was sold in African-American communities. Senior officials condoned the operation. But Hitz said that responsibility for this did not quite lead inside the door of the intelligence agencies. We are left to wonder how aircraft could buzz undetected across our southern borders. In that era, small flying objects could as easily have been cruise missiles courtesy of the Soviet Union. One would have thought the military would have some minor interest in the phenomenon. But rather than investigate questions like that, the Post (and The New York Times and Los Angeles Times) focused on destroying Webb. Webb remarks that "Never before had the three biggest papers devoted such energy to kicking the hell out a story by another newspaper. It just wasn't done." But in this case, it was. Why?

More recently, Bob Somerby's Daily Howler, birthed as a response to the smears against Al Gore, has evolved into a massive archive on press dishonesty. Examples of outright lies from just one author, Ceci Connolly, include Connolly's statement in the Post (1/14/00) that candidate Gore had promised to forego soft money; false claims that Gore had "mistakenly claimed to have inspired the movie ‘Love Story'", "invented" the Internet and that he "found a little place in New York called Love Canal" (12/2/99); a false claim that Gore had stated "that the number of atheists in America is rising" (12/18/99). In addition, Connolly dared to characterize Gore's concern for people without health insurance as "moaning" [5]. Since a number of Connolly's lies were corrected in mid-June of 2000 in the London Guardian [6], there was absolutely no excuse for the Post to have failed to retract and apologize.

Had press mistakes also damaged candidate Bush, one could argue that Connolly had been merely sloppy. In fact, Post "mistakes" went one direction. The Post suppressed almost all news adverse to candidate Bush, including the fact that he deserted from the Texas National Guard. That appeared in the Boston Globe and a handful of other outlets, but appeared in the Post only at the last minute as the result of a dramatic protest by war heroes Senators Bob Kerrey and Daniel Inouye. These, the Post characterized as "high-profile surrogates for Vice President Gore, in an 11th-hour attempt to exploit a dormant issue" [7]. To paraphrase the old movie, "Yeah -- so who dormanted it?"

As will be found in an appendix below, the Post also engaged employees of the incandescently right-wing and flagrantly dishonest American Spectator to perform hatchet jobs on books that debunked the Post's reporting on Whitewater. The lead author of the Post's Whitewater lies, Susan Schmidt, reportedly attempted to get two disgruntled readers fired for writing abrasive letters to her. The rougher of the two letters to her reads in its entirety,

You sicken me. One last article filled with lies, distortions and blatant right-wing propaganda. You are a disgrace to your profession. You are supposed to be a journalist not a stenographer printing every spurious allegation and despicable piece of innuendo you are fed like some monkey at a zoo. [8]

It is difficult to believe that something this tame could prompt as vindictive a response as it did.

An aside on Whitewater and the First Amendment

I still get chills when I read the Constitution, especially the Bill of Rights. Whatever the failings of the men who wrote it, the document resonates of eternity. The principles enunciated under the Constitution are ones that a people can always claim with pride. Even should a nation be reduced to poverty or servitude, it need never be ashamed of the Bill of Rights.

Consider what the Bill of Rights says. In part, it says, that people should be free to speak their minds. They should not be coerced to worship nor should their right to worship what and how they wish be taken away. They have a collective right to self-defense. They have a right to privacy: they should not be searched, nor should their homes or their possessions, unless there is good reason to believe that they have committed a specific crime. They can't be held indefinitely. If they are tried, it should be by fair people, people who are willing to listen to evidence that may exonerate the accused. These are principles that are so true that they apply to everyone within our borders -- even to non-citizens, and even to terrorists! But then, great principles are great because they don't have exceptions.

And so it does not go down well that the corporate press has redefined the First Amendment to mean the "right" of newspapers to be freed of local competition, the "right" of the broadcast networks to use the public airwaves for the benefit of the few, the "right" of cable companies to monopoly, and most centrally, the "right" of all the media to make great profits without fear of lawsuits or oversight. But worse, the powerful of this country have taken the First Amendment as a shield against the truth, as a legal protection racket that allows them to smear people without fear of consequences.

The cavalier attitude the Post, and especially reporter Susan Schmidt, took toward the rights of people accused in criminal matters attendant to the investigations by Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr should anger every patriot. It is not just illegal to leak from Grand Jury proceedings or the deliberations of the Independent Counsel, it is un-American -- it is something out of the USSR! Leaking prejudicial information destroys the foundation of the justice system. The Grand Jury deals with unsubstantiated, un-crossexamined testimony. It is not the sort of stuff to use as seasoning for an otherwise dull story!

The person in the dock could be any of us. As many of us have learned from the story of Julie Hiatt Steele, once the justice system wrongfully targets a person, it grinds on relentlessly. Lives are destroyed, and not only that of the target. Minor children can be used as pawns to pressure the target. Associates and neighbors -- now, if a recent case is upheld-- perhaps even defense attorneys-- may be made substitute targets for a prosecutor's rage. Why is the Post so deaf to a concern central to being an American?

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1 | 2 | 3 | Footnotes | SPJ | McKinney