In a January 27th TV interview, Hillary Clinton asserted that the current sex scandal charges against her husband were part of "a vast right-wing conspiracy" that has targeted Bill Clinton "since the day he announced for president." The remark was immediately picked up and replayed throughout the mainstream media, who love a sensational soundbite. However, the first lady was widely criticized--and crudely psychoanalyzed--for uttering the dreaded C word and aligning herself with "paranoid conspiracy theorists." John Whitehead, founder of the Rutherford Institute, the conservative foundation funding the civil suit of Paula Jones, challenged the claim, saying, in so many words, "Conspiracy? Where's the evidence?"
Of course, when it comes to gathering evidence, the first lady doesn't have a conservative foundation to finance her efforts. Indeed, it may be impossible to prove such a conspiracy beyond a reasonable doubt. But it doesn't take a special prosecutor with 30 million in taxpayer dollars to look at the public record and see that there are patterns of association among Clinton's opponents and big bucks behind them. An enormous number of allegations have been made about Clinton in the last few years. Many of these--e.g., weird, X-Files-like scenarios about murder and drug-running--seem absurd, have proven groundless and fit the classic pattern of the political smear. Moreover, such allegations have not arisen randomly or even casually; they have been injected into the media--often by dint of sheer repetition--time and again, by the same sources and publications. Both the sources and the publications inhabit the far rightward end of the political spectrum.
Special prosecutor Kenneth Starr has strong personal and professional connections, both to political enemies of the administration like the tobacco companies as well as to wealthy, ultraconservative Clinton-haters like Richard Mellon Scaife and Jerry Falwell. Scaife and Falwell have been hawking, for several years now, the sort of wild allegations concerning Clinton described above. Moreover, Starr is obviously close to the Rutherford Institute, the aforementioned conservative foundation that has taken over funding of the Paula Jones case. And John Whitehead, the aforementioned founder of Rutherford, has publicly endorsed the claims, hawked by Falwell, Scaife and company, that Clinton is a murderer and a drug-runner, etc.
It's a free country, of course, but it seems reasonable to consider the significance of such a chain of associations, particularly when we find, at their center, someone like a special prosecutor charged with investigating the president.
At any rate, it's clear that the people aligned most strenuously against Clinton share a good deal more than just a conservative political outlook. Whether that's a vast conspiracy or just American-politics-as-usual, you can decide. Described below are some of the key players and patterns of association.
Few seem to know or remember it, but Kenneth Starr is the second independent counsel to work on Whitewater. The first, Robert Fiske, was also a Republican (though a moderate where Starr is an arch-conservative) and he was appointed by Attorney General Janet Reno. Ordinarily, such a prosecutor would be selected by a special three-judge federal panel, but at the time of Fiske's appointment, Congress had allowed the statute governing independent counsels to lapse. In 1994, Fiske concluded that the death of Clinton aide Vince Foster had been a suicide, much to the chagrin of Clinton scndalmongers, who still insist that Foster's is a "mysterious death." Fiske was proceeding with his work when, about six months into the job, the independent counsel statute was reinstated. At this point, the three-judge panel intervened to remove Fiske and appoint a second special prosecutor, namely, Starr. The head of the panel, Judge David Sentelle, cited potential conflicts of interest involving Fiske, conflicts supposedly relating to Fiske's appointment by Reno, an employee of the administration under investigation.
In addition to being head of the panel that appoints special counsels, Sentelle is a judge in the US Court of Appeals. He is often described as a "protege" of Senator Jesse Helms, the powerful, ultraconservative Republican senator from North Carolina. Shortly before removing Fiske and appointing Starr, Sentelle had lunch with Helms and his colleague Lauch Faircloth (junior senator from North Carolina and another conservative Republican). At the time, Sentelle was considering a petition from Faircloth to have Fiske removed because of the alleged conflicts of interest described above. Of course, Sentelle's own behavior here has the appearance of a conflict of interest. This, at least, was the view of five former heads of the American Bar Association, all of whom publicly criticized the actions and legal ethics of Sentelle.
Sentelle was appointed head of the three-judge panel in 1992 by Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist. Rehnquist removed Judge George MacKinnon, a moderate Republican who had headed the panel for several years previous. It was MacKinnon, for instance, who appointed Lawrence Walsh, the special prosecutor who investigated the Reagan administration's Iran-Contra scandal. This case involved a Republican special prosecutor investigating a Republican administration. Sentelle brought a different philosophy to the process, claiming that, if an independent counsel were to be truly independent, he must be, in effect, an ideological opponent of the administration under investigation.
Enter Kenneth Starr. Starr, former Solicitor General in the Bush administration, first came to prominence in the Reagan Justice Department, where he worked closely with Alfred Regnery (see below), among others. Starr has a strongly Republican resume and is affiliated with conservative organizations like the Federalist Society (as is George Conway, a lawyer for Paula Jones, and Sentelle himself). Starr has also done work for the conservative Landmark Legal Foundation, with which Linda Tripp's lawyer, James Moody, is affiliated. Both groups have received large amounts of funding from Richard Mellon Scaife.
In the background of much of this is Richard Mellon Scaife, multimillion-dollar heir to the Mellon banking fortune and a man who might be described as the ultraconservative's ultraconservative. He owns numerous newspapers and is a major funder of conservative foundations and causes, including the aforementioned Landmark Legal and Rutherford outfits, as well as the American Spectator magazine, which has featured attack pieces on Bill and Hilary Clinton since before the 1992 election. In her autobiography, Washington Post owner/publisher Katharine Graham writes that, during Watergate, Richard Nixon suggested that Scaife buy up the Post.
Many of the crazier-sounding allegations against Clinton (e.g., the various Vince Foster Murder scenarios, which even Ken Starr has dismissed) have been retailed in the Scaife-owned Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. Scaife's Western Journalism Center produced the Clinton Chronicles--a video which purports to detail the various murders and Illuminati-like conspiracies with which the Monster Clinton has allegedly been involved. This video has for several years been promoted and sold by conservative televangelist Jerry Falwell on his Old Time Gospel Hour. Scaife also bankrolls the Free Congress Foundation, which last fall ran a $260,000 TV ad campaign asking women if they had been sexually harrased by the president and encouraging any interested parties to phone in to a "sexual harrasment hotline". From 1973 to 1975, Scaife ran Forum World Features, a foreign news service which was in fact a front used to disseminate CIA propaganda around the world.
In addition to all this, Scaife funds a special Chair in Legal Studies at Pepperdine University. Recall the time last year when, for a couple of days, Starr was going to junk Whitewater and take a job as dean of a law school. The law school in question was Pepperdine and the deanship in question was the Scaife chair. Starr is now expected to assume the position at Pepperdine when he completes his work as special prosecutor.
Falwell's Christian Heritage Foundation was going out of business a couple of years ago when suddenly, at the last minute, it became the recipient of a large infusion of funds. The money came from the Women's Federation for World Peace, one of the myriad fronts for the Rev. Sung Myung Moon. Moon, of course, is much more than a religious cult leader. He's a billionaire and a fanatical anticommunist who for decades has had extremely close ties to the Korean CIA (which in turn has very close ties to the American CIA). Since the early 1980s, Moon has pumped enormous sums into American political circles; numerous right-wing groups and Republican campaigns have benefitted from his largesse.
Moon's extensive holdings include two highly influential right-wing publications in the US, Insight magazine and the Washington Times newspaper. These publications have also been in the forefront of Clinton scandalmongering. It was Insight, for instance, that created the firestorm last fall over allegedly questionable burials in Arlington cemetery, with an article that raised the "possibility" of such practices while naming no sources and providing no evidence. Paul Rodriguez, editor of Insight, has acknowledged that the story was only "allegations and suggestions." The General Accounting Office just completed an investigation of the allegations, concluding that there had been no trading of burial plots for political favors.
Former White House secretary Linda Tripp is of course the person who (secretly and illegally) taped Monica Lewinsky discussing her alleged affair with President Clinton. Tripp was a holdover from the Bush administration; since she had Civil Service employee status (and so was difficult to fire) she was kept on by the Clinton team, who received much encouragement to do so from various Bush administration officials. Before coming to the White House, Tripp worked for the Department of Defense, where she had a Military Intelligence security clearance.
Tripp has been in the forefront of several of the "scandals" surrounding Clinton. She is the source for the report that the office of her boss, Clinton aide Vince Foster, was emptied, in a suspicious fashion, shortly after Foster's death. This claim was received with great enthusiasm by Republican Senator Alphonse D'Amato's Senate Whitewater Committee and generated much heat but no light. Margaret Carlson of Time has speculated that Tripp may have been the source of the mysterious leaks about which Foster loudly complained shortly before his death. (For what it's worth, three official investigations--including one by Starr--have now ruled Foster's death a suicide.) Tripp was also the source for the disputed claim that White House employee Kathleen Willey was fondled by Clinton.
Shortly before the current scandal broke, Tripp appears to have been in close touch with lawyers in both the Jones case and Ken Starr's office. While working in the Clinton White House, Tripp became friendly with FBI agent Gary Aldrich who, after leaving the White House detail, wrote a book (see below) retailing scurrilous, discredited rumors about Clinton's sex life. Like Aldrich, Tripp has worked closely with Lucianne Goldberg, a literary agent with right-wing and intelligence community ties, ostensibly on writing a tell-all book about the Clinton White House.
It was Goldberg, a New York literary agent who works with conservative authors, who encouraged Linda Tripp to illegally tape her conversations with Monica Lewinsky. Goldberg then turned the tapes over to Starr. She was quoted on CNN saying that she felt such tapes were necessary to her, well, project: "If you're going to strike at the king, you have to go ahead and kill him." Goldberg is no stranger to political dirty tricks. During the 1972 presidential election, she posed as a reporter in order to spy on Democratic candidate George McGovern for the Nixon campaign. According to Goldberg's own account, she was looking for "dirty stuff," i.e., information on sexual practices, etc., which could be used to smear or blackmail Democrats. She is reported to have been paid $1,000 per week by the Nixon campaign. During her stint as a spy for Nixon, Goldberg's cover was working for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), an organization that has since been shown to have been a CIA front.
Goldberg has worked with several authors who have been published by Alfred Regnery, an avowedly rightist publisher. Among the books recently published by Regnery are two which attack Clinton: Unlimited Access, by former FBI agent (and friend of Linda Tripp) Gary Aldrich, and The Secret Life of Bill Clinton, by British Tory journalist (and advisor to Paula Jones) Ambrose Evans-Pritchard (more on both below). The Aldrich book trafficks in discredited rumors about Clinton's sexual behavior. Evans-Pritchard recycles the by now familiar tales about murder and drug-running. Regnery is a close friend of Kenneth Starr and, like Starr, was a lawyer in the Reagan Justice Department.
Starr's elite Washington law firm, Kirkland and Ellis, represents the tobacco companies in the litigations brought against big tobacco by the Clinton administration. Starr worked as a lead lawyer on these cases before being made special counsel and continued working on tobacco cases long after being appointed special counsel, i.e., well into last year. This is highly unusual, as special prosecutors typically drop everything else so as to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest. Starr has conspicuously failed to do this. Starr is, however, sensitive to such charges and, in response, has appointed former Watergate committee counsel Sam Dash as his "ethics counsellor."
The FDA, under the Clinton administration, has shown that the tobacco companies have been engaged for decades in a conspiracy to defraud the public. It's not just that they market something that hurts people. What the Clinton FDA has shown is that they've known for years that the stuff was a) addictive and b) linked to cancer and yet they've consistently lied about such knowledge. Not only that, but they actively moved to increase the addictive elements in cigarettes and consciously marketed the stuff to kids. They are, one might say, drug lords, whose deceit has gotten a lot of people killed. (Meanwhile, recall that Ken Starr claims to be deeply disturbed that someone might lie under oath. Also, note the state--North Carolina--that Senators Helms and Faircloth represent and the industry that dominates its economy.) The tobacco companies are also among the largest contributors to the Republican party.
According to the Chicago Tribune, Kirkland and Ellis is currently conducting an internal inquiry into the possibility that a partner in the firm has been providing "unapproved assistance" to Paula Jones and her lawyers. The partner in question, Richard Porter, was formerly a senior aide in the Bush administration. During the 1992 presidential race, Porter handled "opposition research" for the Bush/Quayle reelection campaign. Opposition research, or "oppo," as they call it in Washington, is a polite term for dirt-digging. The oppo specialist is charged with finding material that can be used to embarrass, undermine or smear an opponent. Clinton's lawyer, Robert Bennett, has alleged that personnel at Kirkland and Ellis may have done secret, undisclosed work for Jones and her lawyers regarding their sexual harrassment suit against the president. As partners in the firm, both Porter and Starr are legally responsible for each other's work.
The Paula Jones case is now being funded by the Rutherford Institute, an ultra-right legal foundation that typically handles cases involving fundamentalists who want to reinstate prayer in school, etc. It is based in Charlottesville, VA, in the heart of Falwell country and is reported to have received its share of funding from the apparently ubiquitous Richard Mellon Scaife. In 1995, its founder, John Whitehead, published an editorial endorsing the anti-Clinton allegations--of murder and drug-running--promoted in Falwell's Clinton Chronicles video.
Whitehead is a protege of R. J. Rushdoony, head of the Chalcedon Foundation (based in Vallecito, CA) and the founder of Christian Reconstructionism, a movement dedicated to replacing secular law with "Biblical law" and secular states with "theocratic republics." Whitehead's 1977 book, The Separation Illusion, contains an introduction by Rushdoony. The book employs a Manichaean-sounding rhetoric emphasizing spiritual warfare between "the sons of God" and "the sons of darkness."
Though the Institute enjoys tax-exempt status, the Rutherford folk have recently blanketed the country with letters asking for money to help them fight for Jones' supposedly maligned rights. Their letter explains that funds may go to other, unspecified causes which the Institute supports. (No doubt the sons of God need new uniforms.)
The Rutherford bunch took over after Jones' previous lawyers, Gil Davis and Joseph Cammarata, quit, saying that Jones (and her conservative "advisor," platinum spokesmodel Susan Carpenter-McMillan) had gone against their advice and turned down a very generous settlement offer. The lawyers said that they could not proceed without violating ethical procedures, suggesting that their client had some agenda other than simply bringing a lawsuit. According to Davis and Cammarata, "The client persists in a course of conduct involving the lawyer's services that the lawyer reasonably believes is illegal or unjust."
Starr has now more or less hijacked the Jones case, a civil proceeding, and turned it into a federal criminal case. This, however, was not Starr's first interaction with the Jones case. Before Starr became Whitewater independent counsel, he offered to advise Jones' original legal team free of charge.
The American Spectator
The Jones story, and many of the other allegations (e.g., "Troopergate") about the sex lives of both Bill and Hillary, originated (at least in the US press) in a series of attack pieces that appeared in the American Spectator by David Brocke. The Spectator has received millions in recent years from Richard Mellon Scaife. Brocke was the lead hatchet man in the Get-Clinton publicity campaign of Clinton's first term. Brocke has since given up that post and claims to regret some of what he did. Brocke now says that he lost favor with his right-wing employers when he drew the line, in an unauthorized biography of Hillary Clinton, at absolute character assassination. Instead, Brocke settled for a simple smear: According to Brocke, his Clinton-hating superiors wanted him to call Hillary a lesbian; instead, he wrote that unidentified sources from Hillary's past had reported rumors and suspicions that Hillary might be gay. Brocke was also the source for the most sensational claim in Gary Aldrich's Unlimited Access. (Aldrich was a an FBI agent assigned to the White House; like Linda Tripp, with whom he is friendly, Aldrich was a holdover from the Bush administration. Aldrich has worked with literary agent Lucianne Goldberg and his book was published by Regnery.) The claim, attributed to an informed but unidentified insider, was that Bill Clinton regularly snuck out of the White House in the middle of the night for trysts at local Washington motels. The sensational claim was widely reported and dominated the Sunday chat shows for a couple of weeks in the summer of '96. Then Brocke spoke up to say that Aldrich had actually heard the story from himself and that Aldrich had gotten it wrong: The story, Brocke claimed, was just a rumor Brocke had come across which had no substance. Of course, by this time, the story had been repeated everywhere.
The American Spectator is published by longtime conservative flack R. Emmet "Bob" Tyrell. Tyrell and the magazine's editorial staff have close ties to the right wing in Britain, in particular to the Hollinger Corporation's Telegraph, a major daily in England (where it's sometimes called the "Torygraph"). The Telegraph employs Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, who, up until last year, functioned as the paper's Washington bureau chief. Evans-Pritchard has written numerous articles and even a book about Clinton (published by Regnery), all of which traffic in lurid rumors and outrageous allegations. He claims to have been a close advisor to Paula Jones and her lawyers. Along with Lord William Rees-Mogg, former editor of the (Murdoch-owned) London Times and another big Tory, Evans-Pritchard has been in the forefront of the journalistic attack on Clinton. Many of the smear allegations which have surfaced in the American Spectator and the Washington Times first appeared in British stories by Evans-Pritchard and Rees-Mogg. Rees also publishes the widely read Strategic Investment newsletter, which for years has been full of the same mix of lurid rumor and wild allegation about Clinton.
The preceding list describes a complex network of associations among right-wing players with common interests. However, such groups and individuals have been aided in their efforts by certain economic structures and social trends, particularly as these affect the mass media. And even these long-term trends track back to the political right; not to a literal conspiracy, but rather to the radically laissez faire economic policies of the Reagan administration.
Key to moving the smear-Clinton campaign to the center of the national agenda has been the tabloid trend in mass media. In the early 80s, the Reagan administration deregulated the broadcast industry and inaugurated a frenzy of corporate buyouts and mergers which has yet to end. A new regime of owners took control of the networks and their news departments, a regime which took a one-dimensional view of such holdings, seeing them as profit centers and nothing more. Ever since, journalism has been increasingly handled as simply a bottom-line business. This has resulted in the utter tabloidization of all the media, even of those sectors that were once considered serious and hard news-oriented. Journalists may be relucatant to admit it, but they're now, all of them, in the entertainment business. Corporate bosses interested only in profits expect the news to produce good ratings in the same way they expect Melrose Place to do so. Consequently, the news is organized not to inform citizens, but to hook and titillate viewers, and tabloid formulas emphasizing sex, violence, celebrities and scandal have proven the most cost-effective means of marketing "the news."
And this was not always the case. Before Reaganomic deregulation, the major networks ran their news departments at a loss; the prevailing view was that such corporations were obligated to give a little something back to the society that gave them these (broadcast) licenses to print money. That attitude is long gone now. Economic incentives, set in motion by deregulation, have at last turned almost all forms of mass media journalism into infotainment. And the simplest, most profitable and time-tested model for infotainment is the tabloid model.
The tabloid trend has real political effects, most of them reactionary. Its motto is "If it bleeds, it leads," and this emphasis on sensationalism not only coarsens the sensibilities of viewers; it also keeps all sorts of serious but "unsexy" topics utterly outside the frame.
Consider that staple of tabloid journalism, the crime-in-the-streets story: Typically it's dramatic, violent, personalized and easily framed in terms of good guys and bad guys, conflict and resolution. Moreover, the crime story is easily made to sound like a piece of serious, socially committed reporting: the reporter mentions public safety and gets a quote from a cop. The crime story, in other words, virtually writes itself and is a dependable ratings-getter.
Built around crude sensationalism and familiar stereotypes, the crime story tends to ignore the sorts of crime--i.e., nonviolent, white-collar--often committed by the upper classes and emphasizes violence in the streets, associating this implicitly with the poor and nonwhite. And though all such stories are, in this formal sense, the same, the crime story typically presents an isolated incident: background or context are utterly absent. There is zero discussion of crime as related to economic factors like poverty, social institutions like racism or political issues like the bias of the justice system in favor of the white and well-to-do. Instead, the airwaves are full of exotic-sounding, contextless accounts of mayhem in the streets.
At the same time that crime is flooding news broadcasts, it's declining in our neighborhoods. For several years now, FBI statistics have shown the national crime rate going down in all significant categories. However, polls of the electorate consistently show that people believe that the crime rate is higher than ever and that crime is peoples' main concern. Coincident with all this is a national trend that favors draconian, "tough-on-crime" politicians and which has made prison-building the country's number one growth industry. Clearly there's a disconnect between the facts about crime and peoples' perception of it. It seems safe to say that the tabloid fetishization of crime isn't helping to correct this situation.
The tabloid trend also means that there is now an enormous market for infotainment-style "news"--a ravenous beast that has to be fed 24 hours a day. Sexual allegations about, say, a president (particularly one with an already tabloidized "history" in such an area), are almost guaranteed to go to the top of such an agenda, where they will quickly take on a life of their own. As the line between entertainment and news disappears, such stories become the media's very definition of "great TV," of profitable, cheaply produced programming.
As for investigative reporting on such a matter, consider that as journalism has become more and more profit-driven and profit-conscious, real investigative reporting has virtually disappeared. That kind of thing, after all, costs money, takes time and may never pan out; in financial terms, it's a risky investment that fewer and fewer press shops are willing to underwrite in any serious fashion.
At the same time though, we have, particularly in broadcast news, a cadre of prominent, highly-paid reporters who like to drape themselves in the mantle of Woodward and Bernstein. These are yuppies who spend most of their time toadying to corporate power, but they pretend to be intrepid watchdogs of the public interest in order to justify their salaries and maintain their self-image. They love a sex scandal of this type not only because it's great for ratings, but also because they can pose as hard-hitting investigators. No matter that they do little more than report rumors or leaks from Ken Starr's office; no matter that a sex scandal is trivial compared to assaults on the entire political system like Watergate or Iran-Contra; Sam Donaldson is working on behalf of you and me to get vital answers to that burning question: did the president get a blowjob? Enquiring minds want to know. The people behind the various Get-Clinton smears understand such mechanisms and dynamics. One suspects that they've tailored their leaks, allegations and smear campaigns to fit the tabloidized format of contemporary mass media.
Among the darkest stars in today's media firmament is Rupert Murdoch, the billionaire magnate behind Fox TV and films, Newscorp, the Harper-Collins publishing empire, TV Guide and 132 newspapers, nationally and worldwide. Murdoch made his money in tabloid publishing in Australia and England, where his instinct for the lowest common denominator never failed him. (It was Murdoch who institutionalized the "page three girl" feature in British tabloids, a staple of the industry today. This stroke of sales genius consists of featuring a topless woman on page three of every issue. Meanwhile, Murdoch editors talk a lot about traditional family values.) Combining sleazy content with ruthless business tactics, Murdoch has, in the last few decades, completely taken over the newspaper business in both Australia and England. In the 70s and 80s he moved into America, buying up newspapers, movie studios, TV networks and publishing firms.
More than a businessman, Murdoch is a right-wing ideologue and he has cast himself, again and again, as a kingmaker in Australian and English elections. Murdoch has consistently favored conservative candidates and boasts openly of the power he wields over elections through his control of the press. The Murdoch method of political control in these foreign elections has been crude but effective; it typically revolves around tabloid scandals targeted against politicians of whom Murdoch doesn't approve.
Murdoch hasn't been so heavyhanded in America thus far, though he did use Harper publishing leverage to offer Newt Gingrich a bribe, in the form of a $5 miilion book deal, right after the Republican sweep of 1994. However, the classic Murdoch style--and, sometimes, Murdoch media--have figured in the campaigns against Clinton. The current scandal over alleged sex with an intern was broken on ABC's Brinkley Show by conservative pundit William Kristol, who edits the Murdoch-owned Weekly Standard. (The fact that Kristol has zero experience as a journalist didn't deter Murdoch from making him editor of this widely read conservative weekly. Apparently other aspects of Kristol's resume, like his stint as the brain trust for Dan Quayle, or the fact that he is the son of an influential neoconservative intellectual, were more impressive. In other words, Kristol might not be a journalist, but he certainly knows the conservative party line.)
Similarly, it was classic Murdoch when the New York Post broke the Dick Morris-with-a-call-girl story in August 1996. The story had been circulating in the tabloids for a while but had been ignored by mainstream media as too sleazy. Then the Post, a mainstream paper owned by Murdoch, went with the story. This move legitimized the story for all sectors of the media, including the supposedly more serious ones, and the predictable feeding frenzy ensued. On the day the story broke, Morris's boss, Bill Clinton, was being nominated for president by his party. If that was a coincidence, it's one that Rupert Murdoch relished. For what it's worth, the current scandal coincides with another Big Moment for Clinton--the State of the Union message--and threatens similar embarrassment.
In the above instance we see what a 1996 White House memo called a "media foodchain," in which rumors, allegations and sex stories begin on the fringes of the mainstream media and gradually make their way in toward the center. Often the mass media pick up such stories while trying to insulate themselves, using a sort of "second order" story model in which the focus of the mainstream story is not the sleazy-sounding rumor itself, but rather the fact that "lots of people are talking about the sleazy-sounding rumor." Technically speaking, this inoculates the mainstream story against irresponsible sleazemongering; but of course it also repeats the rumor or smear, amplifying it in the much larger and more resonant chamber of the mainstream media.
Many of the smear-Clinton stories have worked in a similar fashion, starting out on the fringes of the mainstream, in obscure right-wing journals and conservative propaganda; they then move into what we might call the para-media realms of talk radio and the Internet. Once they've stirred up enough interest in these realms, they often become legitimate topics for the "serious" sectors of the media, who can treat them according to the second-order story model described above.
A related media dynamic concerns the sheer volume of smear material. If enough smear material comes out and keeps coming out, this can have the effect of legitimizing at least some of it. Common sense tells people not to believe everything they read or hear, but if virtually everything they read or hear is negative, then they'll tend to assume that there must be something wrong somewhere. They may not have a problem with Clinton themselves, but they figure there must some sort of problem, otherwise there wouldn't be so much talk about problems. There's so much smoke, there must be fire.
This is the sort of approach the Nixon administration used in 1973 when it was engaged in overthrowing the democratically elected socialist government of Salvador Allende in Chile. The CIA waged a massive propaganda campaign in Chilean media, using rumor and innuendo to flood the airwaves with manufactured doubts about Allende's ability to govern. It's one of the standard techniques employed by such organizations to destabilize governments. In intelligence circles this sort of thing is called a "psy op," (psychological operation) or "black propaganda" campaign.
Regarding Nixon: his name comes up a lot these days, usually in strained comparisons with Clinton. But the real legacy of Nixon to the Clinton scandals does not concern presidential corruption so much as the scandalmongering itself. The true Nixon legacy is the conservative propaganda network described throughout this article. Nixon and many other conservatives believed (wrongly, many would argue) that the Vietnam war had been lost by the (supposedly liberal) press and that Nixon had been deposed by the (supposedly liberal) press. Nixon's message to conservatives was, "Never again." Since then, the right has poured massive amounts of money, time and energy into media work, creating a powerful and influential network of think tanks, foundations, university chairs, political action committees, opposition research orgs, media flak outfits, news outlets and broadcasting personalities. They've been aided in this by trends in media ownership: The giant corporations who own the mainstream media are inherently conservative to begin with, as big money almost always is; and deregulatory trends have produced a mainstream news profession driven strictly by profits and tabloid sensationalism and which is easily manipulated by savvy smear-meisters.
Combine this propaganda infrastructure with a tabloidized mass media and a conservative takeover of the independent counsel mechanism, and voila: White House crisis. Many of the people who seem most "out to get" Bill Clinton, including Kenneth Starr, come out of this milieu. It may not be a literal conspiracy, but it's certainly vast, and it's definitely right-wing.
Sources for information in the above include The Nation, the Chicago Tribune, the New York Times, Extra! (published by FAIR, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting), In These Times, Executive Intelligence Review, Esquire, Time, Fools for Scandal: How the Media Invented Whitewater by Gene Lyons, and the distinguised investigative reporting of Robert Parry in his online Media Consortium and I.F. magazine.