Jason Lethert runs HeroJournalism, a service which reports on the transfer of comic books to the big screen. He just sent me a question that has nothing to do with that…
In your post about the biased reviews of Sid Blumenthal's book, you mentioned the negative review by Joseph Lelyveld, and the subsequent correcting of Lelyveld's errors by Joe Conason. I was wondering if you read Lelyveld's response to Conason here.
Yes, I did. And the most telling part of the response is that he completely skipped over Conason's main point, which was that the 1995 report by the Resolution Trust Corporation had cleared the Clintons on Whitewater and stated that they had cooperated fully with the investigation.
One of the reasons I never gave more credence to those who claimed the Clintons were obvious, provable criminals was that the accusers never seemed willing to address that very exhaustive, exonerating report. A few claimed the report was biased, even though it was a case of a Republican law firm (Pillsbury, Madison and Sutro) being selected by Republicans to pore through the Clintons' financial history. A few claimed it was incomplete, even though the final report by the Independent Counsel issued more than five years later contained not one significant fact or conclusion not included in the R.T.C. report. Most of those who rode the Whitewater story either to journalistic benefit or partisan advantage just kind of pretended the report never existed and changed the subject. They didn't even want to ask why Ken Starr (and later, Robert Ray) took so many years and spent so much to investigate a case that the folks at the Pillsbury law office covered just as thoroughly in a matter of months.
And here once again, you have an example: Lelyveld and his colleagues told us for years in print that there was serious dirt in Whitewater; that the Clintons were heading for the ol' greybar hotel for their nefarious swindles. When that didn't come close to happening, the "spin" became that the Clintons had stonewalled and concealed the damning evidence. So what do you do when someone points out that a rather thorough investigation not only cleared them but said they'd turned over all relevant documents? You just change the subject. I'm less annoyed over this for what it did to the Clintons than for what it says about the news media in this country.