by David Brock
In essence, Schweizer was charging that Hillary Clinton, who spent every waking moment of her tenure as secretary of state protecting U.S. security interests—and winning bipartisan praise for her efforts—had secretly sold our security down the river in exchange for some grants to the Clinton Foundation. The grants, of course, were going not to line the Clintons’ own pockets but to do things like fight the AIDS epidemic and bring relief to victims of natural disasters. If that scheme sounds far-fetched to you, apparently the editors of the New York Times thought otherwise.
Everything about Clinton Cash looked like a Republican oppo hit sandwiched between hard covers by HarperCollins, Rupert Murdoch’s publishing house. It was no surprise that Murdoch’s Fox News had struck an exclusive deal with the author for TV promotion. But when the Times, in its initial report on the book, disclosed it also had an exclusive deal with Schweizer, journalistic eyebrows were raised, including within the Times.
The effect of the Times’ dark deal with Schweizer, working alongside Fox News to market Clinton Cash, was obvious. First there was the substantial commercial benefit that news coverage of a book in the Times brings an author. Sources in the publishing world buzzed that such banner treatment for a book from the Times was worth more than a million dollars in free publicity, all accruing to the benefit of a journalistically discredited GOP hit man, whose work was already being bankrolled by right-wing billionaires, including money from a shadowy fund the Koch brothers use to hide their giving.
But such a deal also confers the Times imprimatur. “The book has credibility because the New York Times cut a deal with the author,” wrote Esquire’s Charles Pierce. The Times thought it was promoting Clinton Cash. But all it was doing was conferring its prized journalistic credibility on Koch Cash.
And why did the Times do it? “I will make the Toby Ziegler bet with Carolyn Ryan [the Times bureau chief] that her newspaper linked up with this character because her newspaper has had a hard-on for the Clintons from the time it botched the original Whitewater story right up until last Sunday, when its star political columnist [Maureen Dowd] went off her meds again.”
There it was, the old Whitewater vendetta surfacing again. But on the hypercompetitive Clinton beat, there was also always a commercial angle at work, one that in this case benefitted not only Schweizer but probably the Times as well. In a later interview with the paper’s public editor, Margaret Sullivan, about the impact of the Times political coverage, Ryan seemed to reveal that she was editing Times stories with an eye to creating online buzz. She “mentioned that commenters from Matt Drudge to Dylan Byers of Politico to Andrew Kaczynski of BuzzFeed have praised the coverage or aspects of it,” Sullivan wrote. Ryan was publishing Drudge-bait.
If Ryan saw nothing amiss in the Times’ active collaboration with anti-Clinton operatives, the deal gave the paper a black eye in journalism circles and with its readers, not to mention the consternation within the Times itself, where many in the newsroom considered it a terrible lapse in judgment. In addition to questions about the editorial decision to give the book prominent exposure—and thus legitimacy—many Times readers wanted to know more about the terms of the Schweizer deal itself.
Yet a newspaper that routinely demands a high degree of transparency from public officials appeared loath to meet those standards when it came to valid questions about its own conduct. What were the terms of the deal? Was money involved? Why did the Times, with its tremendous resources, need material from Schweizer’s book to pursue Clinton story lines? How was the arrangement “exclusive” if Fox also had an “exclusive” on the book? Who negotiated the deal?
On these and other questions, the Times was initially mum. In a quote to Politico, Ryan stonewalled, spinning the deal in one terse sentence as routine practice when it clearly wasn’t.
Ultimately, the Times public editor endeavored to get some answers for readers. Sullivan concluded that no money had changed hands—though she noted there would certainly be considerable financial benefit accruing to the author from exposure in the Times—and that the deal contained no unusual restrictions on how the Times would use or treat the material. However, Sullivan concluded, “The Times should have been much more clear with readers about the nature of this arrangement.” And despite Sullivan’s best efforts, the exact terms of the deal remained secret.
By now you may be wondering why the New York Times is figuring so prominently in a book about “the right-wing plot to derail Hillary.”
And you’d be right to wonder. Isn’t the New York Times the nation’s newspaper of record? Wasn’t it once the home of giants of journalism like James Reston and Tom Wicker and Anthony Lewis? Isn’t its motto “Without Fear or Favor”? Didn’t you grow up believing what you read in the Times? Doesn’t it still publish thousands of column inches of quality reporting each year? And by the way, doesn’t the Times follow a liberal editorial line?
To all of those questions, of course, the answer is yes. And that’s precisely the point.
Conservative politicos may appear on Fox News and right-wing talk radio to throw red meat to the conservative base of the GOP, but when they want to package something as real news, leak it to the press, and get it into the bloodstream of mainstream conversation to mislead the public at large, they turn not to Fox but to the New York Times.
How did this happen?
For at least twenty years now—back to the time I was doing it myself—clever Republican operatives have known that they can do maximum political damage to their Democratic and progressive opponents only by manipulating the elite media, which sets the news agenda for most of the country. Speaking to the converted through Fox News and talk radio serves as an important rallying point, but only when story lines spill over, say from Fox to CNN, is the full political effect of the operation achieved.
And in pursuing this strategy of infecting the media at large with their viruses of misinformation, the right correctly sees the New York Times as the chief host body. If information is the coin of the realm in Washington, the Times is the number one target to exploit. After all, even in a time of radical changes in the way people consume their news, the Times can still affect a news cycle like no other media outlet in the country.
Its liberal reputation makes it all that much more valuable as a counterintuitive megaphone for conservative propaganda. And in modern campaigns—with their emphasis on turning out base voters, as true swing voters have become a rare breed—coopting the Times is an ingenious linchpin in the GOP strategy to foster doubt and dissension among Democrats about their own candidates—Hillary especially.
After all, who would believe the “liberal” New York Times was in cahoots with GOP spinmeisters?
Unfortunately, at various times since the Clintons first came on the national political scene in 1992, that demonstrably has been the case.
Consider the 1990s.
Remember Jeff Gerth, the former New York Times reporter who is perhaps best known for breaking the Whitewater story, which suggested the Clintons gave improper favors to their investment partner in the land deal? Published at the height of the 1992 presidential campaign, his error-strewn report, instigated by the Clinton’s GOP political foes in Arkansas, showed no wrongdoing by the Clintons—if the Times thought it finally could match the Washington Post with its very own Watergate, the story was a big flop.
A later analysis of the original Gerth story by CNN correspondent John Camp identified nineteen errors of fact in it. But its false insinuations of impropriety implanted in the paper an institutional anti-Clinton bias that continues to afflict the newsroom today.
Analyzing the Whitewater affair, Tom Fiedler, the executive editor of the Miami Herald, later wrote: “The first reporter to fall for the [Whitewater] tale was the New York Times’ Jeff Gerth, an investigative reporter. He produced an almost incomprehensible report on the Clintons’ Whitewater land investments in early 1992. But incomprehensible or not, the fact that it appeared in so prestigious a paper as the New Y
ork Times insinuated that something must have been wrong.”
In the years that followed, the Gerth story and his many others that reiterated his false assertions eventually spawned the highly politicized $70 million federal investigation of the Clintons led by Starr. Official Washington was engulfed in a miasma of scandal for years, and a number of Times men (and women) would stay stubbornly attached to a skewed view of the Clintons as charlatans, if not criminals, despite all evidence to the contrary.
Two years after his botched Whitewater piece, Gerth was back with a Times report alleging that during Bill Clinton’s tenure as governor of Arkansas, Tyson Foods Inc. “benefitted from a variety of state actions, including $9 million in government loans, the placement of company executives on important state boards and favorable decisions on environmental issues.” The lengthy article suggested that Tyson might have been the beneficiary of these purported state actions because a top lawyer for the company had advised Hillary Clinton on lucrative investments.
A month later, the Times posted a belated correction, asserting that the article “misstated benefits that the Tyson Foods company received from the state of Arkansas,” and noting that “Tyson did not receive $9 million in loans from the state.”
In an American Journalism Review article on Gerth’s late 1990s reporting on Wen Ho Lee, a Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist accused of stealing U.S. nuclear secrets and passing them to China, journalist Lucinda Fleeson reported, “The major points outlined in the Times’ first blockbuster story were found to have little resemblance to what eventually became clear was the truth… By late summer 1999, many of its key points had been knocked down. But by then too much erroneous and speculative information was in play, and the story of the country’s secrets stolen from Los Alamos had become fuel for another assault on President Clinton by Capitol Hill Republicans.” Once again, Gerth was a hit-and-run offender.
During Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential run, Gerth was back with a nasty book about her, written with his Times colleague Don Van Natta, entitled Her Way. The news in the book consisted of persistent claims and insinuations of criminal or unethical conduct on Hillary Clinton’s part by former investigators who had worked for the failed Starr Whitewater inquiry and who had been unable to prove any of it despite spending years and tens of millions trying to do so. Character assassination between hard covers, the book was excerpted in the New York Times Magazine, dutifully presented as objective reporting. Her Way was really “His Way”—perhaps Gerth’s way to get back at Hillary when his earlier Whitewater reporting had failed.
During Clinton’s presidency and beyond, until his retirement from the paper in 2005, William Safire, who had been appointed a Times op-ed columnist after serving as a PR flak and speechwriter for Richard Nixon, enjoyed enormous influence in the Times Washington bureau, setting the tone for much of its Clinton coverage, and mentoring and protecting favored reporters like Gerth. Safire sat on the Pulitzer jury that awarded Gerth a prize in 1999 for a story that suggested Bernard Schwartz, the CEO of Loral Space and Communications, and a campaign contributor to the Clinton-Gore campaign, had gained a U.S. waiver for a commercial satellite launched by the Chinese in exchange for his donations. Safire promoted Gerth’s hot exposé in his column as “the sellout of American security,” and pushed it for the Pulitzer. There was only one thing wrong with Gerth’s Loral story. Just like his Whitewater and Wen Ho Lee reporting, it was significantly flawed. The federal investigation a year after Gerth was awarded his Safire-inspired Pulitzer Prize concluded that there was “not a scintilla of evidence—or information—that the president was corruptly influenced by Bernard Schwartz” and that the matter “did not merit any investigation.”
Early in Safire’s tenure, the Times had been warned by one of its most revered former reporters, David Halberstam, that Safire would indelibly tarnish the paper’s reputation if he were kept on. In a letter to publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, who’d hired Safire, Halberstam wrote, “Safire… is a paid manipulator. He is not a man of ideas or politics but rather a man of tricks… It’s a lousy column and it’s a dishonest one. So close it. Or you end up just as shabby as Safire.”
Halberstam’s letter was nothing if not prescient. Writing for Salon in March 2000, Joe Conason recounted the numerous false accusations Safire leveled against the Clintons over the years, including Safire’s January 1996 headline-making column that called Hillary Clinton a “congenital liar.” Conason wrote:
Again and again over the past several years, Safire has charged the Clintons and their associates with such offenses as fraud, conspiracy, perjury, witness tampering and obstruction of justice. Using the jargon of Watergate to emphasize their culpability, he has written about the so-called Clinton scandals as if even the most minimal professional scruples and cautions did not apply to him—let alone the standards of fairness that are held sacred at the newspaper of record and in all reputable news organizations… But a newspaper as uniquely powerful as the New York Times carries unique responsibilities. When one of its most prominent writers recklessly damages the reputations of people who turn out to be innocent of the offenses he has alleged, a reckoning is in order.
The reckoning never came (at least while Safire was alive).
If Safire represented one type of Clinton crazy at the paper, the vengeful Nixonian out for payback, Howell Raines, a liberal Southerner, represented another. First as editorial page editor and then as executive editor of the paper, Raines was one of the Clintons’ most vocal journalistic opponents during the entire Clinton presidency. Unlike Safire, Raines was not grinding a political axe, but rather one based in class difference and personal style.
Early on in his presidency, the Times editorial page, then edited by Raines, “published a contemptuous, unsigned piece mocking the Clintons’ decision to vacation on Martha’s Vineyard. The put-down column came complete with condescending references—‘Lake of the Ozarks,’ and ‘Li’l Abner’—to Clinton’s modest upbringing. To Raines, Clinton was little more than white trash,” Eric Boehlert wrote for Media Matters.
Referring to Gerth, Safire, Raines, and the rest of the anti-Clinton muckraking crew at the Times in the 1990s, Boehlert summed up, “They were among the reporters, editors and columnists who were genuinely obsessed, in a weirdly personal way, with bringing down the Democratic president, acting as conveyor belts for the GOP and its vast army of Clinton-hating minions who were eager to peddle trash under the guise of news. For years, the Times was more than happy to oblige and to set the Beltway’s anti-Clinton tenor.”
Now, we have the troubling figure of Carolyn Ryan. She is installed at the helm of the Times Washington bureau and is said to have her eye on getting the paper’s top job one day—but is regarded by a number of her colleagues as a bantamweight in comparison with the many esteemed editors who have held the prestigious and powerful position over the years. Ryan has astonished colleagues in the bureau by wrongly claiming credit for the good work of others in a crass effort to impress the paper’s owners, they say.
Rather than following her well-regarded predecessors’ example, Ryan’s ticket to the top seems predicated on following in the footsteps of William Safire and Jeff Gerth, whose lamentable records did nothing but bring disrepute on the newspaper. Another story on the Clinton Foundation, commissioned on Ryan’s watch, long before the Schweizer deal was inked, set the tone.
The August 2013 front-page hit on the Clinton Foundation falsely described typical and lawful accounting and revenue-booking protocols for nonprofits as financial irregularities. In fact, there were no such irregularities, as Foundation officials tried to explain to the paper prior to publication—all to no avail. The paper, suggesting mismanagement, reported that the Foundation ran in the red three years.
The right wing squealed with delight that the Times had been enlisted in its anti-Clinton crusade. Rush Limbaugh applauded the paper’s “injurious” work on the former first family.
In a long open letter, p
osted on the Foundation’s website after the Times story appeared, President Clinton explained how nonprofit accounting works: “For any foundation with a substantial number of multi-year commitments, the 990s [tax forms] will often indicate that we have more or less money than is actually in our accounts.” For example, Clinton cited the fact that in 2005 and 2006, as a result of multiyear commitments, the Foundation recorded a more than $100 million surplus, “though we collected nowhere near that. In later years, as the money came in to cover our budgets, we were required to report the spending but not the cash inflow.” Clinton also reported that in two years, 2007 and 2008, when the Clinton Foundation, like many charities, was hit by the economic showdown, it dipped into cash reserves to cover vital programs, like HIV/AIDS and malaria. This was a management decision, not mismanagement. In another year, 2012, the Times just got it wrong, as the Foundation actually ran a surplus.
One of the two reporters on the story later told someone in the Foundation’s orbit that the story got facts wrong, but despite Clinton’s public statement pointing this out, the paper arrogantly refused to run a correction. Rather than deal honestly with the situation, the paper ran a short news article, under the headline BILL CLINTON DEFENDS FAMILY’S CHARITY, and never mentioned that the 2012 deficit allegation was false, leaving intact the false impression of lingering financial problems.
Editors, of course, are paid to make news judgments, but they should do so with the kind of impartiality that Ryan, according to some of her colleagues in the paper, seems incapable of, at least when it comes to the Clintons. Experienced journalists in the Times Washington bureau, I’ve been told, are appalled at Ryan’s unprofessionalism on the Clinton beat.