Fools for Scandal: How the Media Invented Whitewater

My rating:

add to my books

Fools for Scandal: How the Media Invented Whitewater

by Gene Lyons

4.20 · rating details · 5 ratings · 1 review

Before he created, with Joe Conason, The Hunting of the President, the critically acclaimed documentary film about Whitewater, Gene Lyons published his research into the Whitewater scandal in Harper's. That research later became a book - Fools for Scandal, which scathingly debunks the "received wisdom" that was handed down to the national media with the Whitewate...more

Paperback, 224 pages

Published July 28th 1996 by Franklin Square Press (first published July 1996)

more details... edit details

Get a copy:

More…

There is a good chance some of your friends read this book. Sign in to see!

Friend Reviews

To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up.

Lists with This Book

All the President's Men by Carl Bernstein

The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam

Books by Journalists

87th out of 218 books — 21 voters

Declarations of Independence by Howard Zinn

Unknown Book 12960263 by Unknown Author 264

American Politics

13th out of 30 books — 5 voters

More lists with this book...

Community Reviews

(showing 1-11 of 11)

filter | sort: default (?) | rating details

Dec 05, 2011

Lobstergirl rated it

Recommends it for: Jeff Greenfield

Shelves: own, american-history

This is an enlargement of an article Lyons wrote for Harper's in 1994. If you found Whitewater confusing and murky (and who didn't), if you wondered what Hillary meant by "vast right wing conspiracy" (and there was one, so I never understood what all the mockery was about), you need to read this book. If you are still uncertain that the media makes shit up, and would like to have it demonstrated to you, please read this.

Not just any media, but the gold standard: the New...moreThis is an enlargement of an article Lyons wrote for Harper's in 1994. If you found Whitewater confusing and murky (and who didn't), if you wondered what Hillary meant by "vast right wing conspiracy" (and there was one, so I never understood what all the mockery was about), you need to read this book. If you are still uncertain that the media makes shit up, and would like to have it demonstrated to you, please read this.

Not just any media, but the gold standard: the New York Times reporter Jeff Gerth, who concocted the original Whitewater story, and wrote three follow-ups. Stephen Labaton, who took over Gerth's Whitewater beat at the Times. Washington Post reporter Susan Schmidt. L.J. Davis at The New Republic. Newsweek's Michael Isikoff gets some of the blame, as does Jeff Greenfield of ABC. Gerth's original 1992 story was a masterpiece of deception, misleading chronology, and ignoring the evidence. And the media operates under a herd mentality: if the Times is reporting it, everyone else does too.

There certainly was a right wing conspiracy to smear the Clintons. It was born among Arkansas Republicans (Floyd Brown of Citizens United, the felonious judge David Hale, Clinton's gubernatorial rival Sheffield Nelson, and two Arkansas state troopers constantly worked to spread lies). The Clintons' one-time friend and Whitewater fellow shareholder, Jim McDougal, then spread misinformation to the media. Whenever there was exculpatory information, it was ignored by Gerth, Labaton, and Schmidt. The Wall Street Journal (the front page, not the editorial page) was one of the few media outlets to get Whitewater right. (One of its Whitewater reporters, Viveca Novak, would resurface later in the Scooter Libby case but that time would not cover herself in glory.)

Contrary to conventional wisdom, Whitewater (a small real estate company formed to sell rural plots in the Ozarks) was not a "sweetheart deal" for the Clintons. Jim McDougal ran the company into the ground. The Clintons ended up losing $42k on it. Two separate investigations, the Pillsbury Report and special prosecutor Robert Fiske's report, concluded that there were no improprieties on the Clintons' part. The House hearings and the Senate hearings heard hours and hours of fruitless testimony, none of it leading to the discovery of Clinton wrongdoing.

One of the points Lyons drives home effectively is that however confused and murky the articles in the national press were, the Arkansas locals knew the score. Arkansas reporters and state officials knew there was nothing substantive to Whitewater. Coastal media outlets - okay, I'll just say it - the elite liberal media - didn't understand Arkansas, that vast hillbilly backwoods. Margaret Carlson of Time wrote that Bill Clinton was "one of the first from the area to go to college," apparently unaware of Fulbright scholarships, and Senator J. William Fulbright's Rhodes Scholarship. In a colloquium reprinted in the Appendix, Lyons says, "there's a certain amount of patronizing stuff that's driven by the media. I have had the experience of living in New England in the early 1970s with a wife from Arkansas, who was treated like a combination of Eva Braun and Daisy Mae Yokum. And we decided to come back South where people laughed at stuff."

Frankly, Gerth (and those like him) remains a mystery to me. Lyons does an excellent job explaining Whitewater and where Gerth went wrong, but naturally Gerth's motives, if he had any, remain utterly opaque. And if he didn't have any, what happened? Gerth would go on to write some of the Wen Ho Lee stories in 1999. Wen Ho Lee was the Taiwanese American scientist unjustly accused of stealing U.S. nuclear secrets; after his nine months in solitary confinement, a federal judge apologized profusely to Lee and Bill Clinton issued a public apology. Gerth now writes for the progressive, respected investigative online journal ProPublica. Is he reformed? Who can say? Was it just human error? Why did Gerth's editors condone his methods? Occasionally the New York Times is forced, by its grotesque misreporting or outright journalistic frauds, to do public soul searching. This happened most memorably with Jayson Blair, who fabricated entire stories. After the Blair fiasco, the Times spent a bajillion words "Correcting the Record." There was no soul searching with Whitewater; it was left to Lyons, a reporter for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, to perform the postmortem.(less)

like 5 likes

· see review

Jan 31, 2012

Erika marked it as to-read

Jan 06, 2012

Kate545 added it

Dec 09, 2011

Spicedhamcatcher marked it as to-read

Shelves: to-read-nonfiction, nonfiction

Dec 05, 2011

Megan marked it as to-read

Jun 30, 2011

Joe rated it

Jan 19, 2010

Ryan added it

Aug 06, 2009

Erin Robertson rated it

Apr 08, 2009

Chase added it

Mar 01, 2008

Geoffery rated it

Shelves: american-history, arkansas

Dec 26, 2007

Amy rated it

new topic
Discuss This Book

There are no discussion topics on this book yet. Be the first to start one »

Recommend it | Stats | Recent status updates

Genres

History > American History

2 users

See top shelves...

Books by Gene Lyons

Widow's Web (The Scandalous Story of Sex and Murder That Rocked Arkansas from Top to Bottom)

The Higher Illiteracy: Essays On Bureaucracy, Propaganda, And Self Delusion

The Hunting of the President: The Ten-Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton

More…

Share This Book

Facebook Twitter Your website

Pin It

Trivia About Fools for Scandal...

1 trivia question

More quizzes & trivia...

title link	preview: Fools for Scandal: How the Media Invented Whitewater
avg rating	preview: Fools for Scandal: How the Media Invented Whitewater Goodreads rating: 4.20 (5 ratings)
small image	preview: click here [close]
med image	preview: click here [close]
BBCode	[url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/843900.Fools_for_Scandal?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book][img]http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1223634972m/843900.jpg[/img][/url] [url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/843900.Fools_for_Scandal?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book]Fools for Scandal: How the Media Invented Whitewater by Gene Lyons[/url]