Salon is about to turn ten years old, and Gary Kamiya, who helped found the left-liberal online magazine and is now its "Vice President of Content/Executive Editor," has penned a look back. (Hat tip: Romenesko.)
Kamiya acknowledges that
[p]robably the most significant, certainly the most lurid, event in Salon's editorial history was the Henry Hyde story, in which we revealed that the esteemed and respected head of the House Judiciary Committee, who was standing in judgment on Bill Clinton, had had a longtime affair with a married woman. We thought long and hard about whether to run the story, but decided in the end that it was completely legitimate: We decided we had to reveal that the Clinton persecution was a hypocritical farce, driven by right-wing zealots and unopposed by a slack-jawed media.
But the Hyde piece was only the most spectacular of the magazine's pro-Clinton efforts during Lewinskygate. As Brent Bozell pointed out in a September 1998 column, Salon "frequently publishe[d] articles, columns, and editorials promoting the loony 'vast right-wing conspiracy' theory" and ran "another large group of stories which have sought to rationalize, even justify, Clinton's phallocentrism, while depicting his critics as bluenoses and wackos."
Kamiya remarks that in the more recent past, "Sept. 11, and Bush's response to it, was another signal event. As it became clear what sort of presidency we were dealing with, Salon was fired by a new editorial mission, one as old as Voltaire: to expose the infamy."
