Joe Conason Rips NYT's Article about Scaife Backing off Hillary!

[KoKo]

Right-Wingers Repent, But Not The Times

By: Joe Conason
Date: 2/26/2007

But so did The Times, which more than any other news organization bears responsibility for the phony Whitewater scandal and the runaway independent-counsel probe that led to President Clinton’s impeachment. And now, on its front page, in a single sentence, the paper of record effectively disowned hundreds and perhaps thousands of articles, editorials and columns that once framed the trivial, unprofitable and long-dead Whitewater investment as a matter of immediate public concern.

In The Times, their guilty involvement was treated as something established, not “supposed.” Eight years and tens of millions of dollars later, the independent counsel grudgingly conceded that its investigators and lawyers had found no criminal wrongdoing in Whitewater by the Clintons. That was the same conclusion reached years earlier in a truly nonpartisan investigation undertaken by the Resolution Trust Corporation (to which The Times gave scant attention).

With the assistance of The Times’ editors, not to mention their equally zealous counterparts at The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, the right-wing network financed by Mr. Scaife succeeded in crippling the Clinton White House for years and nearly bringing it down altogether.

-SNIP-

All this ancient history matters now because, like everyone else, America’s newspaper editors are prone to repeat the errors they forget. To read Newsmax.com, where former Clinton consultant Dick Morris holds forth incessantly on the grave peril posed by Hillary, is to understand that the right will attack her as vigorously as ever should she win the Democratic nomination next year. Already, Mr. Morris and assorted other characters from the old Clinton drama are preparing films and books to re-enact their vendetta, and Mr. Scaife and Mr. Ruddy can be relied upon to promote those efforts, as they have consistently done for the past several years. No doubt the “Swiftboaters” who so scurrilously and profitably smeared Senator John Kerry’s war record in 2004 will join the fun.

The question is whether America’s leading newspapers can overcome their aversion to being labeled liberal and expose smears from either side of the spectrum without amplifying them. With Senator Clinton leading the polls, an honest reassessment of mainstream journalism during the Clinton years is overdue.

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http://www.observer.com/printpage.asp?iid=14215&ic=Conason