The character assissination of Shirley Sherrod and its Whitewater media scandal roots

by: Paul Rosenberg

Fri Jul 30, 2010 at 14:30

The black political art of "working the refs" with constant and vociferous complaints of "liberal bias" in the media has a long and distinguished history. Few of its practitioners, however, have succeeded so frequently-and nakedly-as the ex-Drudge drudge and Arianna acolyte Andrew Breitbart. The estimable E.J. Dionne terms Breitbart to be the MSM's virtual "assignment editor" and, indeed, it's hard not to be impressed. Breitbart has already been exposed as a provocateur who cares not a whit for honesty or accuracy in his self-declared war on all things liberal. Yet reporters, editors and producers remain so frightened by his accusations that they continue to trumpet them as they search their souls to purge themselves of the bias that prevented them from seeing the world from a Tea Party point of view.

The failure is so blatant and obvious that no one can possibly believe that the press as it is today will ever cure itself of this terminal illness.  Nothing internal to the system will do.  It is the power structure that is at fault.  It's not a matter of writing or editing, or anything like that.  It's a matter of ownership, groupthink, and brainwashing.

Lyons' takes an interesting tack, going back to the media scandal he knows best--Whitewater--having covered it on the ground, as well as writing a book on it, Fools For Scandal: How the Media Invented Whitewater and co-writing a second, The Hunting of the President: The Ten-Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton with Joe Conason.  Lyon's writes:

I go back a long way on these politicized hoaxes. Courtesy of the Clinton administration, Arkansas journalists got an early introduction into the creepy methods of conservative political operatives and their ability to hoodwink the national press. The local version of the Shirley Sherrod story was an equally admirable public servant named Beverly Bassett Schaffer.

As long ago as 1992, Schaffer found herself implicitly accused of "Whitewater" corruption in the New York Times. Although she'd provided the reporter with documented evidence that she'd done everything in her power as Arkansas savings-and-loan regulator to close Jim McDougal's Madison Guaranty S&L years before federal regulators got around to it, once the Times committed its prestige to a bogus narrative there was no turning back. Schaffer soon found herself hounded through the streets of Fayetteville by "mainstream" TV crews with GOP oppo researchers openly riding shotgun.

Most surprising to me then was the national media's pack behavior. Even incontestable, dispositive facts could be ignored for years if it meant keeping the longest political shaggy-dog story in recent American history going. It wasn't that reporters were stupid, mainly cowardly and career-driven. Indeed, they always understood precisely which facts couldn't be admitted into the narrative if they wanted to keep feeding out of Kenneth Starr's hand. By the time Schaffer's vindication came, they'd lost interest in her.

While the parallel between Sherrod and Schaffer is compelling, what's even more informative is a wide-angled view of how the New York Times and the Washington Post basically created the "Whitewater" scandal.  Oh, of course, they didn't originate it--it originated with Clinton's rightwing enemies.  But those enemies could not have created the media scandal over a non-existent financial scandal, which in turn provided the scaffolding for Clinton's eventual impeachment--and, of course, the media's "revenge" on Al Gore for not playing along with them, which in turn brought us the unelected President G.W. Bush.  For that, they needed the Post and the Times to do their dirty work for them.  It takes a whole book for Lyon's to tell the story, but a key episode encapsulates the entire thing, so far as practical and moral lessons are concerned, and that is how the Post and the Times ignored the 1995 Pillsbury Report, clearing the Clintons of any wrongdoing.  The report was commissioned by the Resolution Trust Corporation, and by all rights it should have halted the Whitewater investigation dead in its tracks. But because it totally contradicted their own scandal-monger, the Post and the Times chose to bury the report--a key turn of events in condemning American to more than decade-long nightmare.

This book, like Lyons' Fools for Scandal, makes remarkable assertions about the mainstream press corps-assertions which are never mentioned, not one word, in the course of the Lewis review.

And some of these assertions involve Lewis' paper-its handling of the Pillsbury Report, let us say. L & C begin that discussion with an overview of the report:

CONASON AND LYONS (page 199): A moment of truth intruded in the midst of D'Amato's hearings on December 13, 1995 with the release of the second volume of the Resolution Trust Corporation's $3.6 million Pillsbury Report...[T]he San Francisco law firm of Pillsbury, Madison & Sutro was obligated to deliver its conclusions about the Clintons and Whitewater by December 31.

The RTC had commissioned the firm to investigate and report on the Whitewater matter. The authors describe the report's contents:

CONASON AND LYONS (page 199): The firm's findings could hardly have been more favorable to the White House. Based on the Clintons' sworn interrogatories, interviews with forty-five other witnesses, and some two hundred thousand documents, the report concluded that the president and first lady had told the truth about their Whitewater investment: The Clintons were passive investors who were misled about the actual status of the project by Jim McDougal from the start. The report failed to challenge their account on a single substantive point.

The writers quote from the text of the report:

CONASON AND LYONS (page 199): The Pillsbury Report found no evidence that Whitewater's losses had been subsidized by taxpayers in the savings and loan bailout. But even if they were, it concluded, the Clintons were not at fault: "There is no basis to assert that the Clintons knew anything of substance about the McDougals' advances to Whitewater, the source of the funds used to make those advances, or the sources of the funds used to make payments on the bank debt..."

The recitation of the report's text continued. The Clintons had no primary, secondary or derivative liability for misdeeds in the case, the report said. "There is evidence that the McDougals and others may have engaged in intentional misconduct."  But "on the evidentiary record," the Pillsbury Report said, there was no sign that the Clintons were liable for that conduct.

Most American adults have never heard of the Pillsbury Report; have no idea what it pertained to or said; and would surely be surprised, more than four years later, to learn of its detailed findings. Lyons and Conason explain why the report is unknown; the press corps buried the info. Are Lyons and Conason mixed-up  or delusional? If not, they have quite a story. Here is what their book says:

CONASON AND LYONS (page 200): On December 18, the Wall Street Journal ran a straight, clear summary of [the report's] findings, written by Viveca Novak and Ellen Joan Pollock. But other newspapers with a substantial investment in Whitewater virtually buried news of its contents. The Washington Post stuck a brief mention of the report's existence into a story devoted to the battle over William Kennedy's notes. The New York Times waited until Christmas Eve, then hid Stephen Labaton's perfunctory summary on page 12.

And what did Labaton say in his summary? Conason and Lyons
limn it:

CONASON AND LYONS (page 200): Judging by [Labaton's] dismissive tone, no reader could imagine that the Pillsbury Report answered every one of the accusatory rhetorical questions the Times had urged the president and first lady to come clean about for years. Labaton's story ignored the passages pointedly exonerating the ClintonsFor the great majority of the Washington press corps, and thus for their national audience, the Pillsbury Report and the facts and conclusions its authors had painstakingly assembled didn't exist.

Are Lyons and Conason deranged? Incompetent? If not, this is just one of the astonishing episodes contained in The Hunting of the President. (The episode takes up just two pages of a 373-page book.) For the record, this may be one of those familiar-old-stories about which the recumbent Peter Jay bitterly complained, because the burying of the Pillsbury Report also was described in Fools for Scandal, in substantial detail-in 1996! And how did the New York Times explain its odd coverage of the Pillsbury Report, back when Fools for Scandal first described it? What has the press corps come to believe about the report since that time? The answers: The Times didn't explain its conduct at all, and the press corps sent the Pillsbury Report down the memory hole, and never came to any conclusions about a report which it never discussed. In 1996, the Washington Post didn't review Fools for Scandal-didn't acknowledge the book at all-and the Times review scolded Lyons for his rude ideas, without citing a single example, not one, of errors in the books' actual presentations (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 9/1/99). Along with everything else in Fools for Scandal, Lyons' remarkable
account of the Pillsbury Report was completely ignored by the press-swept aside. So it goes when the national discourse is in the hands of a group like our press corps.

I quote this at length because it shows how deeply embedded and invested in the rightwing worldview both the Times and the Post were all the way back in 1995, before there even was such a thing as Fox News.  That is to say, there is nothing new about the character assassination of Shirley Sherrod, or the hegemonic structures involved in representing her as her own exact opposite.

The only thing new here is the growing power that you and I and millions others like us have in supporting her in fighting back.