How the Democrat press reports on Democrats, and how the Democrat press reports on Republicans:
Tom Brokaw is not the only journalist or outlet to demonstrate a double standards and some hypocrisy in jumping on the allegations about Arnold Schwarzenegger’s inappropriate sexual advances when those same journalists and outlets delayed or downplayed the more serious Juanita Broaddrick charge that Bill Clinton raped her and, in late 1993, the Arkansas troopers’ claims about procuring women for Bill Clinton -- stories which both broke no where near election time and, therefore, the media should have been less reticent to report than a charge raised days before balloting.
It was the Los Angeles Times, in fact, which in December 1993 was the first mainstream media outlet to report the recollections of the troopers, but the networks didn’t find that anywhere near as newsworthy as this week’s LA Times story on Schwarzenegger.
Brit Hume recalled the LA Times’ hypocrisy, reporting in the “Grapevine” segment of his October 2 Special Report with Brit Hume on FNC: “The LA Times today ran a front page article, accompanied by two pages inside, on the accusations now lodged against Arnold Schwarzenegger for making unwanted advances years ago. Not until the tenth paragraph of that story do readers get a response from the Schwarzenegger camp. But, four years ago when then-President Clinton was being accused by Juanita Broaddrick -- remember her? -- of a brutal sexual assault 20 years earlier the LA Times buried that story on page 13 under a headline that read quote, 'Clinton Camp Denies Alleged Sex Assault.' And he article began with a denial from Mr. Clinton's lawyer.
“And when syndicated columnist George Will later wrote that quote, 'it is reasonable to believe that Clinton was a rapist 15 years before becoming President,' the Times cut that line out of the column.”
Tim Graham, the MRC’s Director of Media Analysis, passed along this summary of past media resistance to touching initial allegations against Bill Clinton:
While the Los Angeles Times laid out its investigation of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s alleged sexual harassment, the Times isn’t always interested in running last-minute exposes that have the potential to derail a political campaign. In 1999, the New York Times recalled allegations that Gov. Bill Clinton may have raped Juanita Broaddrick: “The allegation was passed on to reporters for the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times in the waning days of the 1992 presidential campaign. Regarding it as the kind of toxic waste traditionally dumped just before Election Day, both newspapers passed on the story.”
For more on that story see the February 24, 1999 CyberAlert.
For its part, the Times also dismissed the Broaddrick story in 1999 with a media navel-gazer by Josh Getlin and Elizabeth Jensen, with the subheadline "Whether a woman’s allegation of sexual assault by Clinton in 1978 is true is secondary to competitive pressure." In the story, Times national editor Scott Kraft sniffed Broaddrick can "almost certainly not be proved or disproved today."
For more on how outlets who leapt to cover Anita Hill’s unproven allegations vs. [how it cover] Juanita Broaddrick’s, see this MediaWatch article.
As for the networks’ receptivity to Los Angeles Times investigations of sexual impropriety, recall that in 1993, Times reporters William Rempel and Douglas Frantz reported on the allegations of Arkansas state troopers that then Gov. Bill Clinton used them to set up meetings with women. See how other media outlets shrunk from that investigation, as recounted in MRC’s MediaWatch newsletter.
Posted by Greg Ransom
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