MEDIA MISSED STORY ON CLINTON COVER-UP

By: Nat Hentoff Columnist Says Journalists Didn't Do Their Jobs





By contrast with the era of Fred Friendly and Edward R. Murrow, TV has increasingly, with few exceptions, abandoned long-range investigative reporting to the print press. One of those exceptions is Ted Koppel's "Nightline."



Koppel, for example, has gone inside maximum-security prisons, actually staying there for days, as well as reporting a series on women's prisons, and a searching multipart focus on juvenile justice, in and out of the courts.



But on the most important story affecting the U.S. Constitution since Watergate, Koppel - like the rest of the media, including newspapers - blew it. In his new book, "Off Camera: Private Thoughts Made Public" (Knopf), excerpted in the October Brill's Content, Koppel discloses what he was writing in his journal during the impeachment of the president.



Jan. 6: "Members of the Establishment (the Senate, the chief justice, the White House, the media) are trundling along, with no option but to treat all of this as though it were really important, while the public at large couldn't be more apathetic."



Jan. 22: "Now the media have done their job, the public does know, and the news is being dismissed as essentially irrelevant."



But, as I pointed out in "How the press saved Clinton's presidency" (E&P, Nov. 27, 1999, p. 22), the public had only the dimmest notion of how the White House's orchestrated cover-up was skillfully deflecting attention from such precise presidential violations of the Constitution as obstruction of justice, including tampering with witnesses; serial perjury; and abuse of power.



Nor did the press, in any of its forms, reveal how the Republican leadership in the Senate - alarmed by the president's continued popularity in the polls - sabotaged the trial conducted by the Republican House of Representatives managers.



This information has now been vividly detailed in "Sellout" (Regnery) by David Schippers, appointed by Henry Hyde, R-Ill., chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, as the committee's chief investigative counsel during the impeachment process. The co-author is Alan P. Henry.



Schippers, a lifelong Democrat - who led the U.S. Justice Department's Organized Crime and Racketeering Unit under Attorney General Robert Kennedy - voted twice for Clinton. In "Sellout," he describes, naming his sources, how the Senate Republican leaders blocked any chance of a real trial on the impeachment charges.



The House managers were forbidden to call live witnesses and were allowed to present only a small percentage of the evidence that Schippers - and his team of investigators with extensive experience in federal and state police work - had gathered.



At one point, during a conference before the trial began, Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska, a key member of the Republican leadership, told Hyde: "Henry, I don't care if you prove he [the president] raped a woman and then stood up and shot her dead - you are not going to get 67 votes," the number needed to convict Clinton.



Another indication in "Sellout" that the outcome of the Senate trial was predetermined is that Schippers had set up a secure evidence room - with reports by his investigators, tapes, videos, and transcripts. But "not one senator" of either party "took the time to review the evidence my staff had gathered."



In an interview with Schippers, I checked his account with my own sources, and he got it right. Interestingly, none of the Republican Senate leaders has denied any of the quotes from them in "Sellout." Part of the story of the Republican surrender - that should have been known at the time of the Senate trial - is in Washington Post reporter David Baker's new book, "The Breach: Inside the Impeachment and Trial of William Jefferson Clinton" (Scribner). A large section was excerpted in The Washington Post Sept. 19.



But while the rigged trial was going on, the public knew nothing of this. And the president, his popularity still robust, was able to say often that in his fight to protect the Constitution "and its principles, the American people were very good to stand with me." And later, at a dinner of radio and TV correspondents, the president said, with a chuckle: "Don't you newspeople ever learn? It isn't the mistake that kills you. It's the cover-up."



Although "Sellout" has largely been ignored by the mainstream media, it has appeared on The New York Times bestseller list. Some of the public is discovering at last that it was bamboozled not only by Clinton but also by the press. Koppel could present an unusually riveting "Nightline" by bringing on Schippers and the Republican Senate leaders whose cover-up Schippers reports, by name, in his book.







Nat Hentoff is a writer for The Village Voice. His "Getting It Right" column appears monthly in E&P.







Copyright 2000, Editor & Publisher.