Kikutani and "real estate follies"

Now, this is rich.

Given all the sobering things that have happened since the turn of the millennium — from the terrorist attacks of 9/11 to the war in Iraq to the Bush administration’s efforts to expand executive power and curtail civil liberties — the sex and real estate follies of the Clinton White House now feel as if they belong to an era long ago and far, far away. Indeed, Carl Bernstein’s new biography of Hillary Rodham Clinton often feels like a very long, very slow acid flashback to the 1990s, rehashing and reexamining, in minute detail, matters like Monica, Whitewater, bimbo eruptions and the state of the Clintons’ marriage.

Funny, no mention of her paper's role in dredging up the Clinton's real estate "follies."

Whitewater's cost to the Clinton presidency was enormous. But that's politics, and there are mechanisms in place for public players to try to combat attacks like that. In terms of journalism, though, the much greater significance was the damage Gerth's reporting did to the profession and the way his dishonest work helped shepherd in a new era of Beltway reporting in the 1990s. During those years, iconic press institutions such as The New York Times adopted with disturbing ease loose new standards under which innuendo was enough to sustain reports of serious ethical wrongdoing and the omission of exculpatory facts was deemed to be acceptable, if not preferable.

It's no exaggeration to suggest Gerth ushered in the new era on March 8, 1992, with his first, and now infamous, story purporting to break the Whitewater scandal. At the time, Whitewater centered on allegations that the Clintons' (money-losing) Arkansas real estate investment with James McDougal in the late 1970s led to an elusive yet labyrinthine web of conflicts of interest once Clinton became governor and McDougal became the owner of Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan, which later failed and required a government bailout. According to the Times -- both its news team and its opinion writers -- Whitewater was terribly important, disturbing, and revealing.

And for years, Gerth's inaugural Whitewater article, which tried to lay out the premise of the scandal, was referred to in hushed tones among Beltway media elites, who dubbed it a landmark piece of investigative journalism. (It did prove to be a landmark, although not in the way Gerth's fans first assumed.)

Eventually some mainstream media players did dare to question the story, noting its incomprehensible nature, as well as its factual errors. In 1994, CNN reporter John Camp, newly assigned to the Whitewater beat, said he counted no fewer than 19 factual errors or points of contention in Gerth's original article. Little Rock columnist Gene Lyons went one better and wrote an entire book detailing the inexhaustible ways the Times was messing up its Whitewater coverage: Fools for Scandal: How the Media Invented Whitewater (Franklin Square Press, 1996).