In the Philadelphia Bulletin, long-time Philly TV consumer reporter Herb Denenberg reviewed our book Whitewash, and easily found how its thesis of paving Hillary's path to the presdiency applied to the here and now. Hillary Clinton is being favored by the liberals at CNN during the current campaign:
I happened to be reading the book when the CNN debate with the Democrat presidential candidates was aired on Nov. 15 and realized that this is another chapter, one of an endless series, proving Mr. Limbaugh and Mr. Bozell's thesis. After Hillary's celebrated meltdown over the question of whether or not she favored driver's licenses for illegal immigrants, that question had to be the number one issue in this debate. But what did Wolf Blitzer, the CNN moderator, do with the question?
He asked Hillary if she favored licenses for illegals and then accepted her one-word answer of "no" without a follow-up question. It is inconceivable that, on a nationally televised debate with over 4 million people watching, Mr. Blitzer would not follow up that answer with further questions on her multiple, ever-changing flip-flopping positions on licensing illegals.
Dick Morris has pointed out that this was only one of a series of CNN moves to put Hillary in the best possible light and protect her from tough questions or an exposé of her political phoniness, with doubletalk and gobbledygook flowing freely from both sides of her mouth. For example, during the debate Hillary stuck to her pious platitudes about the need for safe toys for our children, a reference to the dangerous imports from China. The CNN reporters did not bother to ask Hillary about her chief strategist, Mark Penn, who is the CEO of Burson-Marstellar, the PR company that represents Aqua Dots, the very company that made the imported Chinese bead toys with an adhesive coating that turns into the date rape drug when children suck on them. Mr. Penn and Burson-Marstellar are paid a percentage of the profits from the sale of these dangerous toys by Aqua Dots, which is an important contributor to the company's bottom line. Mr. Morris pointed out that neither Mr. Blitzer nor the other Democrat candidates were smart enough to call Hillary on this classic piece of hypocrisy.
The debate was marked by CNN using staged questions - a student asking Hillary if she prefers diamonds or pearls. Of course, CNN, Mr. Blitzer and company had time for that trivial nonsense but didn't bother to ask Hillary about her planting of pre-arranged questions in the previous debate. The student, Maria Luisa Parra-Sandoval, said she had prepared more serious questions but was told to ask her trivial question. Well, that suggests that CNN at least knows the difference between the serious and the trivial.
To further demonstrate its dishonest, biased and fraudulent journalism, CNN used James Carville - a close friend of the Clintons, a contributor to her campaign and a longtime consultant to previous Clinton campaigns - as a member of the post-debate roundtable. Needless to say, CNN did not make full disclosure of the Clinton-Carville connection to its viewers. Even the president of CNN, Jonathan Klein, had to admit that the failure to make full disclosure was a serious blunder. He said, in a published report, "He's not on the Hillary payroll but he's on the Hillary bandwagon, and that should be disclosed as much as possible. I wasn't comfortable with it myself as I watched it. He has disclosed all of this previously and repeatedly on our air. He happened not to last night, and it's an unfortunate omission." An unidentified CNN executive was quoted as admitting there should have been disclosure and that CNN was discussing how to handle such situations in the future.
You would think such basic journalistic issues would have been figured out long ago, but observers of CNN have learned not to expect much journalistic integrity from it. After all, it was CNN that admitted it did not criticize Saddam Hussein when he was in power in Iraq, because it did not want to lose its right to broadcast from there. If CNN can sell out to Saddam Hussein, it is clear it is totally sold out. And it was this same CNN, in a recent special that found moral equivalence between Islamo-fascist terrorism and violence of other leading religions. Does CNN have no conscience or no sense, or perhaps neither of the above?
Now you know why CNN is often called the Clinton News Network, and that's why it has commentators like Mr. Carville and Paul Begala, both close friends and confidants of the Clintons.
But CNN is more the rule than the exception when it comes to its fawning coverage of Hillary and her campaign. That's why Mr. Bozell said it was important to review Hillary's public record from the beginning. He said this was not to "rehash old news" but to "expose the flaws, failures, and scandals for which the press corps have never held Hillary accountable. As you'll see, even on the campaign trail for Bill Clinton in 1991, she was the same scandal-plagued, domineering, and, yes, deceitful figure we recognize today. The ugly character traits, as well as the radical ideology and poor political judgment, have been there, from the beginning. But a servile press corps will never tell you that. We wrote this book to document that reality as well. We will name names, telling you who in the national 'news' media are advancing Hillary's candidacy, how they are whitewashing her record, and why."
A perfect example of how the media whitewashed Hillary scandals involved her conflicts of interest while practicing at the Rose law firm in Arkansas when her husband was the governor. Mr. Bozell writes, "The issue at hand was not Hillary's well-paying job as a senior partner at the Rose law firm in Little Rock. It was that Hillary's practice represented clients doing business before state agencies in Arkansas as well as representing the state government itself, at a time when the state government was headed by none other than her husband."
Here is a more specific example of conflict of interest that pervaded Hillary's law practice. The Clinton's had a partnership with S&L tycoon Jim McDougal in what came to be known as Whitewater Development. The Clintons put less money into the partnership than Mr. McDougal. That happens when the partner putting less money in has something else to contribute. What was that something else? Are you kidding?
Then partner Mr. McDougal's S&L, Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan, had financial problems that endangered the whole Whitewater deal. To keep Whitewater and the S&L afloat, a plan was devised that had to be approved by the banking regulator in Arkansas, just appointed by Gov. Bill Clinton. What lawyer do you suppose represented Mr. McDougal and his failing S&L in front of the banking regulator just appointed by Bill Clinton? Hillary, herself. Mr. Bozell writes that the banking regulator rubber-stamped approval of the plan, with a letter that stated, "Dear Hillary." When Madison Guaranty was shut down 18 months later, it cost the government $73 million.
The conflicts of interest are so wide and deep here you could smell them all the way from Arkansas, but the media virtually ignored this story when it broke.
Of course, this was only a small piece of the conflict problems of Hillary and Bill and the Rose law firm. The state government of Arkansas gave the firm juicy non-bid contracts. And Mr. Bozell writes that the firm also offered the "full range of representation before the government [of Arkansas], from getting environmental approvals from the state Pollution Control and Ecology Commission, to lobbying to protect the poultry industry from strict regulation on animal waste, to writing the rules by which companies treat their shareholders."
Even though these scandals broke in The New York Times and The Washington Post, two liberal media icons, the media by and large ignored the stories. For example, the record shows the scandal barely made TV and was almost ignored by the news magazines. Mr. Bozell observes the double standard of the media: "Scandal stories about the finances of the Republican president's sons [George H.W. Bush's eldest son and his ties to a troubled Texas firm] were still newsworthy, but scandals about the presumptive Democratic nominee and his wife were not."
Mr. Bozell gives one example after another of how the media coddled rather than questioned Hillary on her conflicts of interest and other scandals. For example, Jane Pauley of NBC interviewed Hillary when the Madison Guaranty matter was hot - but didn't ask one question about it. "And then there was the softball that deserves its plaque in Cooperstown: 'Before Gov. Clinton declared for the presidency, you prepared Chelsea. Bad things may be said about Daddy. Was Chelsea at all prepared for bad things being said about Mommy?' Hillary smacked the softball over the fence, replying that she told Chelsea their opponents were so desperate that they might start attacking Chelsea, or 'maybe go after our cat.'"
You don't have to worry, Hillary. I won't criticize the cat. After reading Mr. Bozell and some of the other excellent Hillary books, I long ago decided that the cat has more character than Hillary and Bill combined. And I urge my readers to take a look at one or more of the important books on Hillary (see the box accompanying this column), which may be the only things that can save the U.S. from disaster. As Mr. Bozell writes, "If it were up to Hillary's cheerleaders in the national media, the nation wouldn't have this debate. It's up to others to reveal the truth the media won't tell Americans."
