The Young Person's Guide To 
Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy
by Stucco Holmes

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.

Who Appointed Kenneth Starr?
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.

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.

Jerry Falwell and the Rev. Sung Myung Moon
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.

Linda Tripp
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.

Lucianne Goldberg and Regnery Publishing
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.

The Tobacco Companies and Kirkland & Ellis
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 Rutherford Institute
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 Right Wing in Britain
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 Tabloidization of News
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.

Tabloid Politics
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.

The Murdoch Method
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.

Media Foodchain
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.

The Nixon Legacy
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.


Steamshovel!