Reply #26: Uh... Don Van Atta?! At it again Whitewater. "Her Way"

[Yossariant]

What happens to an investigative reporter best known for his role "breaking" three "scandals," each of which fell apart upon government investigation?

If he's Jeff Gerth, and the Clintons are the subjects of one of those stories, he gets to share a million-dollar book deal to recycle his own flawed reporting and rehash ages-old anecdotes.

And what did Jeff Gerth produce in exchange for his newfound riches? In Her Way*, GERTH and his co-author, DON VAN ATTA, compiled a laundry list of previously reported anecdotes -- some true, some almost certainly false, some "preposterous" -- and repackaged them for sale for $29.99...
http://mediamatters.org/items/200705260003

...Much of the criticism of Gerth's (and the Times') Whitewater reporting focused on a pattern of over-hyping innocuous facts. It is important to note that this criticism has come not only from those close to the Clintons, but from working journalists as well...

The first reporter to fall for the 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 York Times insinuated that something must have been wrong. And that meant that every other baying hound in the pack had to give chase. ..

The tale of the resulting journalistic feeding frenzy is artfully told in a new book titled Fools for Scandal, by Gene Lyons...

Lyons begins by showing how Gerth was duped by Clinton's GOP enemies and how Gerth's original stories were so error-filled, intentionally or otherwise, that one of the key figures, former Arkansas state securities director Lee Thalheimer, called them "unmitigated horseshit."
http://mediamatters.org/items/200705250001

Lots more at links --- caps mine.