Where does spin come from? Starting with a January 13 piece in the Chicago Tribune, a potent new spin-point began making its way through your hapless press corps. Was the Enron mess a Republican scandal? Utter nonsense, this new spin-point said. But here, we’ll let Fred Barnes recite it. He spoke on Special Report:
BRIT HUME (1/14/02): Question: Is the Enron collapse, financial collapse, a fading scandal or a blooming scandal? Let me start with you, Fred.
BARNES: Oh, it’s obviously fading, for a number of reasons…After all, it was— while Bush got a lot of campaign contributions, we know the favors that have been dealt out to Enron, were dealt out by the Clinton White House.
And Ken Lay not only played golf with Clinton, he spent a night in the Lincoln Bedroom…
The Tribune had run this same claim one day earlier. "Lay was no stranger to the Clinton White House," Stephen Hedges wrote, "playing golf with the president and staying overnight in the Lincoln Bedroom." This claim was, of course, Spin Magic. It tied an emerging GOP bogey-man, Lay, to an iconic Clinton "scandal," the Lincoln Bedroom. In the weeks that followed, the claim that Clinton hosted Lay in the Lincoln Bedroom was reported in an array of newspapers, and on a string of TV shows. It was being used as the perfect squelch to Democratic charges about Enron and Bush.
As you probably know, this charge was simply false. Ken Lay did not spend a night in the Lincoln Bedroom during the Clinton years. Gene Lyons first noted this fact in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette on February 13, and the Spinsanity gang furthered the reporting last Thursday in Salon. But where do potent spin-points like this come from? Spinsanity’s Brendan Nyhan missed one clue when he tracked the GOP’s new prize tale.
When the Tribune reported the Lincoln Bedroom canard, it cited no source for its claim. But two days later, the Washington Times’ Bill Sammon wrote this in the White House Weekly:
SAMMON (1/15/02): As cyberjournalist Matt Drudge recently pointed out, McLarty was later hired by Enron. Lay slept in the Lincoln Bedroom, played golf with Clinton and became an energy adviser to the Democratic administration, which helped Enron get a gas pipeline contract in Mozambique.
Uh-oh! Sammon seemed to trace the LB claim back to Drudge. And sure enough! On January 11, Drudge had put the bogus claim into play:
DRUDGE (1/11/02): McLarty was later hired by Enron. Lay also played golf with President Bill Clinton and slept in the Clinton White House. A master of political manipulation of both parties, Lay served as an adviser to the Clinton White House on energy issues.
Drudge didn’t say "Lincoln Bedroom," but soon the potent spin-point was being widely bruited all the same. Let’s review the initial chronology:
January 11: Matt Drudge
January 13: Stephen Hedges, Chicago Tribune
January 14: Judy Keen, USA Today; Fred Barnes, Special Report
January 15: Bill Sammon, White House Weekly
The potent new spin-point was on the march. According to a LEXIS search, no one had voiced the claim before Drudge. For the record, Drudge’s claim that Enron hired McLarty was also false. No matter—major papers printed that canard too, and have recently begun posting corrections. One final point: as Lyons made clear in his recent piece, it was perfectly easy to find out that Drudge’s claim was utterly false. Journalists who repeated his claim either didn’t try to do a simple check—or were deliberately lying.
So where does spin come from? Let’s spell it out nice and plain. Dissemblers in the Bush White House (or at the RNC) decided they wanted to deceive you. So they handed a piece of disinformation to Drudge, and he compliantly typed ’er on up. Mysteriously, the very same falsehood turned up two days later in a news report in the Chicago Tribune. Fred Barnes recited the claim the next day; dittoes for Judy Keen, in USA Today. ("Lay played golf with Clinton, was an overnight guest at Clinton’s White House and advised the Clinton administration on energy issues.") Soon we were off the races. Once again, your dysfunctional press corps assured the nation of something that was simply false.
The truth:
Teeing off with the enemy: What about Bill and Ken on the links? By all accounts, there was one such event, in August 1993. And yes, it sounds pretty sleazy. As usual, Bill was consorting with some real gangster types. Here’s the way the event was limned by the Washington Post’s NAMES & FACES:
Presidents Duel With Clubs!
President Clinton may have just squeaked his budget through Congress, but he has already returned to playing ball with the enemy.
Clinton began his vacation with a bipartisan golf match Saturday at the Country Club of the Rockies in Vail, Colo., teaming up with fellow Democrat (and golf pro) Jack Nicklaus to take on the Republican duo of former president Gerald Ford and Houston businessman Ken Lay.
During a photo op on the greens, Clinton was asked about the significance of a Democrat playing with a Republican. The eager putter responded: "It’s the way I’m going to try to run the rest of my administration. I don’t ever want the kind of polarization we had the last six months."
This is the only Clinton-Lay golf game found on LEXIS. The information is easy to find; due to the manifest dangers of playing golf with Ford, Clinton’s daring attempt at outreach was widely reported. (What was the Secret Service thinking?) But a number of scribes got clever this month, making Bill and Ken’s round of golf plural. So it goes when your Washington "press corps" tries to tell you the stories it likes.
http://www.dailyhowler.com/h022502_1.shtml
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