WASHINGTON — Around 4:30 p.m. Wednesday, one of President Clinton's top economic advisers, Gene Sperling, stuck his head into White House Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers' office with some rare good news about the media.
NBC was going to lead its telecast that night with the President's new job training bill. Terrific, everyone thought. "They want to show they can do other things besides Whitewater," Myers said.
It didn't happen. Not only was the jobs bill not the lead story, it wasn't broadcast--and Whitewater was.
That's the way it has been going lately in this city. Another possible scandal is afoot, with all the familiar artifacts of disillusionment--a special prosecutor, a grand jury, even the shredding of documents.
In the last week, the seven largest newspapers in the country have published 92 stories about the Whitewater land deal. The three major networks have aired 179.
Is the press coverage out of control? What are the chances that hyperventilated coverage ofWhitewater could seriously harm the President only to have it discovered later that there was no criminal wrongdoing?
Many journalists and critics agree that given the facts now known, the coverage is excessive, particularly the comparisons to Watergate leveled by Republicans and some media pundits. But even critics of the coverage believe that an aggressive press provides strong protection against real wrongdoing.
History suggests that intense coverage of Whitewater could damage Clinton temporarily, sapping his power in Washington as his public approval rating drops and attention is diverted to defending against the accusations.
Yet the evidence suggests that if there is no serious wrongdoing, the public will forgive Clinton in the long run. The worst victims could be the critics who pushed Whitewater as a scandal and the media that purveyed it.
"The public is scandal-trained and they discount the hype," said Larry Sabato, a University of Virginia professor and media critic who coined the phrase "feeding frenzy" as a description of overly aggressive coverage. "Like the video generation knows how to interpret television, the scandal generation knows how to interpret events like this."
Several conditions lend such stories to excess. First, there is the nature of television.
"The pictures can't help but blow this up beyond what the contents suggest: People to grand juries. Special prosecutors. Subpoenas in the White House. Shredded documents," says Jack Germond, the longtime political reporter for the Baltimore Sun.
Unlike in Watergate and Iran-Contra, where people who testified before the grand jury were brought in and out in private, here witnesses who may be guilty of nothing run the gantlet of cameras in public.
Network officials worry that even if their organizations try to give the story context and nuance, such tales eventually get reduced to the shorthand of a TV graphic labeled "Scandal" as they cascade through the echo chamber from newspapers to a three-minute network story to a 45-second summary on local news.
Another factor is that some Republicans are engaged in score settling. As Rep. Henry J. Hyde (R-Ill.) acknowledged this week, Republicans remember "where we were investigated, sometimes frivolously." Given that history, for Republicans to act with restraint now would require "a saintliness that is superhuman, supernatural . . . "
Suzanne Garment, the author of "Scandal: The Culture of Mistrust in American Politics," notes that in the 20 years since Watergate, dozens of new procedural requirements and ethics rules have been added to government. Each new rule--about who can meet with whom, what one must disclose and who has oversight power--creates "more occasions where someone can be guilty of something, however technical, in the course of a scandal."
Also lending to the drumbeat is the journalistic form, wherein each time there is a new fact the press can write a story that recounts all the allegations, says Stephen Hess, who studies the media for the Brookings Institution in Washington.
And sometimes the facts end up being meaningless. Not long ago the Washington Post published a mysterious note found in the office of Vincent Foster, the deputy White House counsel who apparently committed suicide, and speculated that it may have linked Foster to Whitewater and a possible slush fund. It now appears it was simply a list of dates the Clintons deposited money in a school account for their daughter, Chelsea.
Jim Doyle, the journalist and author of "Not Above the Law," argues that rumors are published more freely now than before. This week, for instance, newspapers drew attention to a rumor that Foster actually died in a private apartment in Virginia and his body was moved to the park where it was discovered. The papers published on the pretext that the wholly unsubstantiated rumor affected the stock market after investors learned of it through an economic and political newsletter.
